The best new radio show in Seattle is on KIRO?
Unbelievably, it is.
It’s called Too Beautiful to Live, and I write about the show’s odd universe, its relatively small but highly-devoted fan base, and its host, Luke Burbank, in this week’s Stranger.
Here’s the piece. And here, if you’ve ever wondered just how far Slog gets inside the heads of Stranger writers, is a section that I wrote with Slog’s abstinence-only obsession in mind:
It’s safe to say that Burbank did not spend many of his earlier years aspiring to work in the dingy offices of a commercial-radio station on Eastlake Avenue and hold cast meetings in the bar of a nearby Azteca. He was born in 1976 near Eureka, California, and raised on a religious commune called The Lighthouse Ranch. “You know, Jesus Camp, healing, speaking in tongues—that was totally my life,” he told me on a recent afternoon over drinks. At Azteca.
Nights on the commune, fearful of falling asleep with unconfessed sins in his soul that would damn him to hell were he to die during slumber, the young Burbank stayed up listening to the radio. Simulcasts of Larry King Live. Radio replays of Sally Jesse Raphael. Financial advice for the elderly. In the early 1980s, his parents moved the family up to Seattle to help start a satellite branch of the church. “Like most things like that, it was pretty poorly conceived,” he told me. Meaning, the new church was being built by the fallen-and-supposedly-redeemed for the fallen-but-not-yet-redeemed. “Who would come join an operation like that? It’s not the best and brightest, generally.”
For high school, he was sent to North Seattle Christian, now defunct, where he met Jen Andrews, who would become a lifelong friend and, in some ways, a career guardian angel. While there, he also, to his lasting chagrin and joy, became a poster boy for the failures of abstinence-only education.
“Ironically, we had an all-school debate contest that year,” Burbank explained. “And the topic was ‘Should there be birth control provided in this school?’ And, because I thought it would be more challenging, I took the ‘Yes, there should be birth control provided in this school’ position, purely as a sort of rhetorical, or I guess forensic, challenge… I wore suspenders. It was kind of a bad Clarence Darrow kind of thing. And, um, like about a month later I got my girlfriend pregnant, which I think was the ultimate commitment to winning that debate.”
I laughed and imagined out-loud the young Luke Burbank saying, “For my final point….”
“Yes, exactly,” he said, smiling and humping the table while intoning: “And in closing….”
He sat down and continued, explaining that he was not alone in upping Seattle’s teenage pregnancy rate. “Really, they just need to take that school, do a major study of it, and just present that as the final, irrefutable proof that abstinence education does not work.“
Don’t say I never think of you!
There’s already a running comment thread about this piece, so I’m going to send y’all over there to do your thing.
