Yes, I do get up at 4 a.m. and no, my underwear is not always clean

It's the first thing people have asked me in the last three weeks: WHAT TIME DO YOU GET UP? On March 12, I started a new gig as a morning radio host on K-Rock 105.7 with Darryl Kornicky, Tony Orr on news and banter and Coach on fashion. Joking. Sports.
We start broadcasting somewhere around 5:37 a.m. and end at 10. I'm at the station at 5 a.m. prepping for that day's broadcast and working ahead on upcoming shows.

I'm lucky: If I hit just green lights, the station is exactly four and a half minutes from my home. But it doesn't help a lot.

I have to get up at 4 a.m. so that I can shower, get dressed, do my hair and makeup, eat some breakfast, kiss my son goodbye and get to work feeling normal. Everyone asks me why I just don't go in sweats with bedhead. Because I'd feel disgusting, that's why. And starting at around 8:30 real people are coming to the station so I can't really be greeting guests and advertisers and coworkers in sweats, now can I? Plus, my own ego won't let me do it. When the mic comes on, we have to be on. If I felt gross, I wouldn't feel like myself.

Trying to be helpful, my husband pointed out an article in this month's Women's Health magazine. Love the mag, rolled my eyes at the story. It's on Today cohost Natalie Morates, who also gets up at 4 a.m. to do on-air work with Matt Lauer. These are the types of stories that give women complexes. This woman is freakin' gorgeous - I don't look anything like her. She has a baby and a five-year-old. She goes to the gym five days a week. She starts off her day with multigrain toast and natural peanut butter. During the day, she nibbles on veggies. She exfoliates twice a week.

Oh, shut up already.

The pictures in the piece tell a different story: She has a person to do her hair. She has a person to do her makeup. She has a woman to roll the lint off her clothes. And if she's on the Today Show, she's making good money, so she can afford to have a good nanny to take care of her children so she can exfoliate and exercise.

Here in all its disgusting glory, is the real way a real person gets up and ready at 4 a.m. for a morning show:

- I lay all my clothes out like a five year old the night before and put them on the top of the toilet in order that I'm going to put them on: Underwear first. Then socks. Then pants and then shirt.

- The truth of the matter is one night, I forgot to put underwear out. That morning, I tiptoed back into the dark bedroom to try and quietly get some underwear without waking my husband, who also sorta gets up when the alarm goes off at 3:55 a.m. and then has to go back to sleep. I couldn't find anything but my massive pregnancy panties from three years ago. I can't stand those things. They go all the way up to my boobs. So, I had no choice. I had to do something drastic. I wore the same pair two days in a row. Sorry. Don't judge me. It was an emergency.

- I try and eat a little bowl of cereal before I leave, but doing morning radio has totally screwed up my body. I've lost six pounds in less than a month. Here's why: If I eat breakfast at 4 a.m., my body wants lunch at 10 a.m. - that is, after all, six hours later. But at 10 a.m., we're still busy working and I don't have time to make lunch at 4 a.m., so usually I eat a banana. By the time I get home, it's usually around 1 p.m. - eight hours after I've had cereal. (For a normal person, that would be like eating breakfast at 8 a.m. and then not eating lunch until 4.) I have something small and then try and eat some dinner. By night, I'm so tired, I don't snack. Too.... tired ... to .... eat.

- Here's my extensive makeup routine: Eyeliner. Mascara. Check I don't have crap in my teeth. Exfoliate? Sure, yeah, right.

- Sleep? Right now I'm sleeping from about 11 or 11:30 p.m. to 4 a.m. and then crashing hard on the weekend, but three times this week, I fell asleep while I was doing something. Once, I was eating lunch - a cucumber sandwich. Forty minutes later, I woke up cuddling the plate. The sandwich was on the floor. I'd apparently just conked out without any warning. I did it again this weekend while watching a movie with my son. One minute we were talking, the next, I was drooling.

- My nanny. I have a different name for her: My husband. I don't know how a single mother could be a morning radio host. My husband has done all of our laundry in the last month and taken care of our son every morning. (Even with all this help, I don't have time to exfoliate.)

- "Get the F**(&^ up!!!": The other morning, I was so exhausted, I couldn't get out of bed. My alarm went off at 3:55, 4:10, 4:20, 4:30. Finally, my husband basically took his legs and kicked me out of the bed. "Get up!!!" he yelled. There was no cereal that morning. Thank god, I'd remembered my underwear.

- Before anyone sees me each morning at work, I run to the studio's kitchen and look at a little mirror on the fridge to make sure I don't have gunk in my eyes, cereal in my teeth, a booger, a clump of mascara. Anything. If I'm looking alive, I head into work. Then my personal assistant takes the lint brush to me. Yes, her name is Darryl Kornicky, my cohost. We don't have lint-brush people.

It's glamorous being a morning cohost, I tell you.

Natalie Morales? Eat your heart out.

Just keeping it real for my real mommies.

There might be more(or not)

Join morning radio, do hard news?

My first six years at The Whig-Standard, I worked as a writer and reporter. I was a music columnist and a news reporter who covered everything from Ryan Malcolm's meteoric rise on the first season of Canadian Idol, to country pie sales, to the Sept. 11 attacks, to the Juno Awards, to breaking crime stories like bikers in the city and standoffs in suburbia. I did some investigative work and wrote humour columns.

Then, I wanted a break and I became an editor.

At first, I loved my new gig. I came up with story ideas for other reporters and supervised the production of The Whig's entertainment magazine. I took part in editors' story meetings. I got to represent the paper at community events, like high school career days. And then, I began to see how much stuff that wasn't "journalism" that I had to do: I sorted mail. I laid out the paper's three crosswords, paginating each tiny clue into perfect columns.**** I typed into our computer system community listings for charity walks and band shows. (Note: Listings are key to a local paper, though, so I was quite anal about getting them perfect). I answered a lot of voicemail. I answered a lot of e-mails. I spent hours on the phone trying to get publicists to send us hi-res jpegs.

I suspect it's like a teacher working her way up to becoming a principal in a school. Some days, you just want to teach. In my case, some days, I just wanted to write again.

So, it's funny that it took leaving newspapers and joining the K-Rock 105.7 Morning Krew to do news again. The morning show came up with the idea of doing the story of Queen's University professor Chris Mueller, who is a cancer researcher. He has a degenerative liver disease and is looking for a live liver donor. The family has basically exhausted their family and friends' potential and needed to look elsewhere, so we invited Mueller's wife, local artist Sally Milne, to our show to ask our "friends", our listeners, to think about becoming an organ donor. We also talked to Dr. Frank Markel of the Trillium Gift of Life Network about organ donation in Ontario and what it takes to become a donor.

By the end of our show on Wednesday, at 10 a.m., we already had listeners - one in New York state - calling and e-mailling us asking how they could help, or get more information about donating a portion of their liver (which, by the way, grows back).

Yes, we do silly stuff on the morning show. We baked Neil Young concert tickets into pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and we gave out lucky lottery tickets on St. Paddy's Day. But today? We did a story that really matters.

Playing reporter was rejuvenating. Loved it.

Read more on our K-Rock Morning Krew blog, including a statement by Sally Milne about her husband and how you can help Chris Mueller and other people waiting for an organ donation.

**** I mean absolutely no disrespect to hardcore crossword lovers like my mother. I appreciate the skill they take, just not the pain in my wrists from making those teeny tiny clues look so damn perfect each and every week.

It wasn't all serious this morning though. We did talk about panties. Just for a minute though. :)

There might be more(or not)

Why am I wearing Band-Aids on my teeth?

We'd all probably look a lot more sensible if clothing stores were run by two year olds. Two year olds say it like it is. I love going into shops and seeing girls and women (and boys and men) trying on ridiculous clothes (too tight, too small, too young, too skanky) and having the salesperson squawk "Oh my god! That's so, like, fabulous! We also have it in red."
You want to gently pull the customer aside and say: "Ah, no. You look like a pregnant elephant in a curtain." (And I can say that because I, too, have looked like pregnant elephant in a curtain.)
Only once in my entire existence has a salesperson told me I looked ludicrous. It was at Agent 99 downtown and I tried on something to slinky and it showed every lump, bump and chunk. I came out of the changeroom and a lovely girl said, "Huh. That doesn't work, does it?" It was a breath of fresh air.
Yesterday, I was prepping for my first day back at work this Thursday. For three months, I have been laid off, so I spent the better part of three months with unstyled hair and no makeup. And, I've lived in elastic-waist track pants. That look was fine for buying diapers at Wal-Mart, but it doesn't exactly say: "I'm a hot radio momma."
And, so, it's back to Sarah Crosbie, circa pre-Dec.16, 2008 - the Sarah who gave a damn.
I'm drinking buckets of water, exercising, pulling my jeans and dress pants out of hibernation and doing other girly things.
My son looked at me yesterday. He was staring at my teeth.
"Mommy? Did you hurt your teeth?"
I couldn't figure out why he thought my teeth were hurt - unless, that is, I'd chipped one of them a couple of days before my new job?!
"Mommy! Why are you wearing Band-Aids on your teeth?!"
That's right. An hour earlier I'd put whitestrips on my teeth so I have a nice, pearly white smile. I'd forgotten about them...
Alone, in the bathroom, it makes so much sense to put strips of jellied bleach on my teeth.
But here, with my son staring at my teeth, I did feel a little strange having Band-Aids on my teeth.
The things we do for beauty.
When you take a step back, it can all seem a little silly.
Still, in two days, I have to say so long to my elastic-waist pants.
Diapers also have elastic-waists ...so enough of that.


And here is the rest of it.

There might be more(or not)

Where's my f*&^%!!& delete key?!

K-Rock 105.7 morning host Darryl Kornicky looked at me and started howling.
Tony Orr was also smiling.
Apparently, I'd just unleashed a deep-hacking-try-and-shake-the-phlegm-out cough into the microphone. When it was on.
At 7 a.m.
For thousands to hear.
Who needs an alarm when you have Sarah Crosbie and her chest cold to get you up out of bed.
Oh, morning radio, how you scare me.
For nine years, I was a newspaper reporter and editor and there's this frickin' wonderful invention on a keyboard called a DELETE key. When you're writing a story and you make a mistake, you hit delete and it fabulously disappears from your screen.
For five mornings X 3.5 hours a morning, so 17.5 hours of my life, I've been doing morning radio and there is no delete key. Things just come flying out of my mouth and I hope they're OK, funny even. Smart, maybe. Interesting.
In one week, we talked about crusty toenails, Dorothy the Dinosaur, bad drivers, In the Night Garden, A-Rod and his drugs, the K-Rock Centre, Neil Young, animal food banks, The Tragically Hip's new song, the Academy Awards, Dweezil Zappa, Easter Seals kids, belly button fluff, Tony Orr's alleged manscaping, green box recycling, potholes, Jamaica, Pancake Tuesday, Willie Nelson, great hockey coaches, "thick" women, lottery tickets and how I am not actually Mrs. Crosbie, despite Darryl Kornicky's blog entry on the K-Rock website.
I've burned a hole through Kornicky's head staring at him this week. Partly I was staring because I was a little nutty. I had to get up at 4 a.m. Monday and Tuesday killed me and then by Wednesday I was OK. Up at 4, showered by 4:15, reading the papers, blogs, my e-mail and Twitter (my favourite new thing in life) by 4:30 so I knew everything going on in the world. But I mostly spent a good chunk of my week staring at him because, for the first time in a long, long time, I had someone in a professional capacity I could learn from. I absolutely loved my old job, putting out an entertainment magazine at The Kingston Whig-Standard, but I didn't have any mentors at the paper. They've either left and moved on, or taken jobs that meant I no longer interacted with them. This week, I had the thrill of being scared again, being on my toes. Instead of being the seasoned journalist, I was the green radio co-host. Terrified shitless and loving every single second of it.
So, I used this week as a crash course in radio. I listened very carefully every time Kornicky took a phone call with a listener to see how he interacted with them and I watched Tony Orr do the news. When he speaks, you listen to him. It's a great gift to have. So little things some people may not pay attention to – how my radio guys held the mics, how far they were from the mics, how they announced the call letters "K-Rock 1-0-5-7 – I obsessed over all week and maybe, possibly I practised in the shower at 4 a.m. when no one could hear me.
The coolest thing about K-Rock letting me crash the morning party was how much freakin' fun it was to make peoples' mornings great.
On Tuesday, I baked two Neil Young tickets into a pancake on Pancake Tuesday and held a drive-thru contest in the K-Rock parking lot. And this morning, we offered two Willie Nelson tickets to anyone who would go into a gas station in Kingston and sing a Willie song in honour of the fact he's an environmentalist and a biodiesel promoter. The winner made his wife's day. (She, in fact, ordered him to do it.)
This week also gave me a chance to play reporter again, getting Const. Mike Menor from the Kingston Police to tell us about bad drivers in the city - he once saw two people naked in a car who'd just come from skinny dipping in Portsmouth Olympic Harbour - and having Sandy Singers from the Partners in Mission Food Bank explain to us how needy families in this area can help feed their pets.
It was a fun week.
Sorry for the cough though, everyone. r
Yes, I see that "r". I'm going to leave it there. It's symbolic of the fact I no longer have a DELETE key in my professional life, heck, I don't have a professional life, but that's OK. You gotta go with the flow. A little lesson I learned from the K-Rock Morning Krew.

There might be more(or not)