Vivian Vale
Co-host, and the genuine voice of WMRG
The co-host, and the one actually running the broadcast. She reads the commercials without cracking a smile.
Vivian Vale came to WMRG from a station so small it shared a building with a feed store, where she read the farm report, the school lunch menu, the obituaries and the weather, in that order, five days a week, and never once missed a beat. She was hired at WMRG to read the weather. She now reads the commercials, most of the station breaks, whatever Bing has forgotten, and the room, and she does all of it in a voice so level you could set a glass on it.
She and Bing have shared a microphone for years. Every Christmas Eve he introduces her as stunningly beautiful, fantastic, wonderful, and the genuine voice of the station. She has asked him not to. He has agreed not to. He does it anyway, and she has decided that the least she can do is give him a hard time about it on the air, since he plainly enjoys that too.
Vivian is the daughter of a telephone operator and a court stenographer. That accounts for both the diction and the patience. She grew up in a house where nobody raised their voice because nobody needed to. She reads three newspapers a day, does the crossword in ink, and once corrected a sponsor's copy live on the air, mid sentence. The sponsor sent flowers. She keeps a small notebook of things Bing has said that she intends to bring up later. It is on its fourth volume.
She is not a comedian and would like that understood. It is simply that when you read something ridiculous in a perfectly serious voice, people laugh, and she has never seen a reason to stop them.
Every production of Christmas on the Dial is cast from its own community, so the face changes from town to town. Your program has tonight's cast.
Meet the others: Bing Marlow, Chester, Maggie, The Kids, The Narrator, The Hi-Fi Five, WMRG.
