Dave Ryan's Morning Dish

Dave considers the subjects he picks to be much more important than the timbre of his voice. After graduating from a two-year technical school in his hometown of Colorado Springs, Colorado, one of his first radio jobs was at a Top 40 station. It was explained to him early on how a Top 40 station’s bread is buttered. “My first program director told me not to think about women at large,” he says. “Instead, think about one specific woman. Put a picture of her on your table—say, a 28-year-old woman—and talk to her.” Just before I can envision Dave talking to a blow-up doll in a Rocky Mountain studio, he interjects, “I don’t know if I ever did that, but the message is pretty clear.”

Unlike Barnard’s KQ Morning Show, which consists of comic skits and impressions blended with racy topical conversation on sports and news, Dave Ryan in the Morning Show takes a much more feminine approach. It has gone away from what Dave calls the “underwear on the head morning zoo” format to a more touchy-feely concept. The three major chemical compounds comprising the Dave Ryan formula seem to be (1) celebrity gossip of the Perez Hilton/Superficial.com ilk, contained in a segment called Dave’s Dirt; (2) sentimental empowerment delivered in segments like the aforementioned Christmas Wish, or another called Group Therapy (which is exactly what it sounds like—callers getting into heavy stuff, such as relationship talk, family issues, and eating disorders); and perhaps most potently, (3) a reality television-esque celebration of feminine victimhood. Along with War of the Roses, there is a segment called Cheater’s Club, where a boyfriend’s infidelity is exposed in detail via a number of extraneous lovers who call in to out the cheater.

Dave points out that Lena, as the lone female voice in the studio, might have the most important role on the show. Each of his past female sidekicks brought a specific point of view to the program—Lee Valsvik was the grown-up woman, Angie Taylor the party girl, Corey Foley one of the guys. Lena is the neurotic younger sister. “And sometimes I have to play mom,” she says. Dave and Steve-O constantly tease her for not being able to hold onto a man and for being dependent on her anxiety meds (she suffered a nervous breakdown three years ago and has talked about her anxiety openly on the air). They even joke about how surprised they are that she made it through her first year. For a while there, it really was unclear whether she would make it—the female listeners hated her.

The listeners’ emotional connection to the show can cut both ways, and the female listeners missed Corey. “Women are loyal,” Lena says. “And they can be mean.” The Morning Show had a hard time replacing Corey—Cassie, their first attempt, flamed out after a month, forcing management to expand their search to women with little or no radio experience. Lena sent in a homemade reel and Dave decided to take a chance on her. But in the first few months, she was inundated with nasty calls and e-mails. “They would say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ” Lena tried to keep it together by calling her mom and her sisters when things got particularly nasty, and she even put together a “happy folder,” filled with only the positive feedback, but the bile still got to her.

“On radio, you’re putting your own personality out there, so when somebody attacks you—says you’re not talented or stupid—it is personal. And it hurts.” Lena says she’s in a better place now—her writing talent has been recognized to the point where she now has her own recurring segment, Lena’s Diary, during which she talks about train-wreck dates and her mouse-infested Uptown apartment. She even says that she understands how the haters feel. “Look, I had a hard time with the transition from Angie to Corey,” she says. “And women want somebody to make them look good and feel like they’re represented, especially on a show that’s all men. Women are smart and they want to be represented by somebody who’s smart.”