Relationships and Radio

Fidelity lessons from Bill Clinton? Etiquette tips from Roseanne? Gun maintenance instruction from Michael Moore? Relationship advice from a divorced couple?

1) Whaddaya, nuts? 2) Is that gin on your breath? 3) When hell opens a ski lodge. 4) Yes ... because all this logic is a real buzz kill.

"You like to dance? Can you dance so I can talk to your friend?" says the goateed, stubble-headed biker, reeling off online pickup lines that set the petite blonde's eyes a-rollin' and face a-scrunchin'. "No?" the biker asks. "How about this: Can you help me get my lost puppy? He went into that cheap hotel room."

"That's awful!" the blonde bubbles in faux-horror.

We're in a strip mall behind a 7-Eleven. And we're on the air.

The biker and the blonde -- a former couple now un-coupled in life and re-coupled on radio -- open the phone lines to find the blonde's daughter on the other end, phoning in to wonder how smell figures into mutual attraction. "Some people need to take more showers than others," answers the biker, who's also the caller's ex-stepfather. Next, a male caller (no relation to the hosts) insists, contrary to sexual stereotypes, that some men want to become a woman's friend before turning into her lover. The blonde reprises the facial scrunch, this time yielding a yeah right! sigh.

What's this they're debating now? A waist-to-hip ratio that ladies apply to gauge a gentleman's sex appeal? "How old is that survey?" the biker scoffs. "Not that old!" the blonde says. "This was 2004."

"In 2004, I was getting rid of you," the biker reminds the blonde. "Or were you getting rid of me?"

Can a couple that couldn't share a marriage share a microphone? Exemplary exes Jim and Deb Freeman have managed to let radio pick up where romance left off in "Get Real with Jim and Deb." The show bowed last month with the divorced duo dispensing relationship advice, post-relationship, from 7 to 9 p.m. Wednesdays and Saturdays on KSHP-AM, 1400.

"Would you want a doctor with no experience operating on you?" Jim asks rhetorically by way of explaining why listeners should heed counsel on the mating instinct from people whose instinct is extinct -- at least vis-a-vis each other -- doling out dollops of feedback to callers on issues such as attraction and trust. "We learn by going to school, educating ourselves, but life is the best lesson. It isn't giving advice so much on this show as giving our perspective that might be something someone out there hasn't thought of."

Media exposure book-ended their marriage. The two were joined (her second go-round, his third) in 1997 on the Lifetime channel's "Weddings of a Lifetime," hitched with TV-bloated fanfare at The Mirage. "Ours was the megawedding to end all weddings in Las Vegas," says Jim, 49. The union yielded no children, though each has kids from previous marriages.

And it failed because?

"We met in 1995 and didn't have an argument for the first two years we were together," says Jim, who's writing a communication-between-the-sexes book about how to "translate testosterone into estrogen," a hormonal spin on "Men are from Mars, Women are From Venus."

"We were so complementary, but over the course of time, two people can not even do anything wrong but life's situations crop up, outside factors, that put a wedge in between two people. It was comfortable but it wasn't what we thought a relationship should be."

An amicable online divorce followed -- papers filled out and filed over the Internet, with no haggling over property or finances -- and the friendly former spouses split, she to a new relationship, he back to the single life. "When we first got divorced, our friends wondered, 'How do you guys get along so well?' " says Deb, 38, her chitchat streaked with a warm, guileless giggle.

"We said to each other, 'Maybe we should do a reality show.' We joked about it for two years and then I met my business manager and she mentioned she wanted to do a show like this. She met him and thought we would be great. We both have a way of taking the emotion out of it, even though I'm very emotional, and our friends come to us for advice because we're logical people."

And yet, watching them work on-air or gab off-air, a clear dynamic emerges: He dominates. She lets him. Animated and amiable -- and far from the gritty, grumbly hog-rider of pop-culture stereotypes -- Jim pounces on conversation like a buffet diner piling prime rib on his plate. Conversely, Deb picks at a vegetable platter.

"I know he talks louder than me, he always drowns you out -- I really have to keep him under control because he doesn't let me talk," she says, her soft, cheery tone unable to mask understandable irritation, even as her smile remains fit for a Crest commercial.

Listening to their lopsided banter -- oodles of him, a little noodling from her -- audiences can pick up on a relationship imbalance as instructive as any advice they offer.

"Deb told me she always dreamed of doing a show like this, and when she told me she had an ex-husband to do it with, that scared me a bit," says Michele Mosey, the show's producer and the Freemans' business manager. "I thought it was interesting with Deb, who is prim and proper, and then him the total opposite, wild and crazy with a great sense of humor. Neither of them had done radio before, so it was a risky venture, but I trusted my gut and they pulled it out."

Not all the way: The newbies have yet to find their mojo in this medium. A recent show kicked off entertainingly with Jim and Deb (largely Jim) kibitzing on and off the phone lines -- "Hey, women's eyes move left and right, just like a man's," Jim tells a caller about a mate's roving glances -- but a huge chunk of the remaining 90-plus minutes is soon ceded to their guest, spiritual adviser Sonali Rutledge, who shells out readings and predictions to callers via a deck of Sunset Station playing cards.

Pockets of dead air afflict the show as the hosts are overly solicitous of the psychic, largely sitting silently as Rutledge flips cards, a display that might generate visual tension on television as Rutledge interprets their meaning, but leaves a radio broadcast awkwardly quiet in spots, the duo at the helm reluctant to fill the gaps and guide the program.

And yet, given that these are fixable faults on a learn-as-you-go journey, there's a sweetness and affection between them to build on -- not to mention a peculiar premise that shreds logic -- that has already triggered some buzz.

"Our audience tends to skew more female with the radio shopping we do, and I've heard from women who tell me they listen to the show," says KSHP's general manager, Brett Grant. "The reaction's been great, as much as for any show we do, especially just out of the starting gate."

To paraphrase a wise adage: To err is marriage; to divorce, divine.

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256.