“Boys' Latin School graduate hosts satellite radio show for kids” |
| Boys' Latin School graduate hosts satellite radio show for kids Posted: 21 Sep 2010 07:08 PM PDT  (Enlarge) Kenny Curtis, a disc jockey for Serius XM and host of a show for children, talks on the phone at his Catonsville home while holding MaLia, 17 months, whom the Curtises are in the process of adopting. Looking on is his daughter Devin, 12. (Staff photo by Nicole Martyn) Curtis, 41, doesn't usually sleep on his 40-minute commute from Catonsville to his Washington studio, where he hosts the children's show "The Animal Farm." But this particular week was hectic, with five of his six kids starting school for the year. School is always a busy time for the Rodgers Forge native and his wife, Kim, 46. Adding soccer practices and games, and new fall programming at the station, to daily life doesn't leave much room for error, Curtis said. "When you get stacked up in your schedule, you've got to go from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next," he said during a family corn shucking party on his back deck. "You have to make sure you have everything scheduled out as evenly as you can." As the family began their evening, five tiny gray kittens played on the living room floor. Nearby, Rugby, a golden-haired border collie peered through a back window. "I used to say our life was like herding cats and now it really is herding cats," Curtis said. All but one of the kittens will go to new homes, but for now, Curtis jokes that the animals are close to outnumbering the humans in the household. Curtis' daughter, Jillian, 20, is in North Carolina for her junior year at Meredith College, in Raleigh. Morgan, 18, attends Western School of Technology and Environmental Science. Andrew, 13, is a freshman at Catonsville High School, and the twins, Molly and Devon, 12, are both seventh-graders at Arbutus Middle School. The newest addition to the family is MaLia, a 17-month-old the family has been fostering since she first came home from the hospital and now is in the process of adopting. Over the years, the family has fostered seven babies whose mothers had abused drugs. While the children are usually reunited with their biological parents or other family members, MaLia's mother has asked the family to adopt her. "My wife is a gifted and amazing woman when it comes to these babies," Curtis said. As Curtis developed his career in children's programming, he said his children often served as his own personal "focal group," allowing him to test out new music and serving as the inspiration for the characters he writes and portrays on his morning show. The show airs on Kids Place Live, one of several stations Curtis oversees at Sirius XM, from 7 a.m. to noon. The live, interactive, music-based show features independent children's recording artists and popular songs from television shows and movies. "There's also a talk-based element of the show that features characters on a farm," said Curtis, who makes up and does the voice acting for the characters. "I have talking chipmunks, polar bears, llamas. "Kids actually call up and talk to the characters sometimes, and we go through the stories of the characters and their different personality quirks." The Beaver Brothers, Glen and Bernie, speak with Baltimore accents and have arguments similar to the ones Curtis has heard Devon, Molly and Andrew have at home. Lorenzo Llama, an animal in a petting zoo who has been petted so many times that he no longer likes to be touched, is based on a real animal Curtis once saw with Jillian. There is also Dirk, the "fourth and forgotten chipmunk," who claims to be the original drummer for Alvin and the Chipmunks, then quit to pursue his own solo career and is now bitter about the band's success, Curtis said. Curtis' children are occasionally featured on the show. Before playing back children's phone calls, Curtis plays a short audio recording that says "somebody's on the phone," which Andrew recorded when he was 2 years old. "It was awesome," Devon said about growing up with her dad on the radio. While other kids would go to office buildings during Take Your Child to Work Day, Devon said she would get to be on the radio. However, she was disappointed the first time she realized that the characters on her dad's show weren't real. "I was so let down!" she said. After growing up in the Towson neighborhood of Rodgers Forge and graduating from Boys' Latin, Curtis was a theater major at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, when he met Kim. The couple worked on the play, "Spring Awakening," in which she played his mom, and found that what started out as a friendship grew into love. As a student at Catonsville High School, Kim had been friends with Curtis' cousin, Eileen Dickson, who was killed in a car accident at age 16. Though the couple didn't make the connection at first, they realized they had both known Dickson when Curtis' aunt attended the play. "We always felt like she had a hand in getting us together," Kim said about Dickson. In summer 1989, Curtis landed a role in the John Waters' movie, "Cry Baby," which was filmed in Baltimore. "Everywhere the bad guy went, I was over his shoulder, I was a henchman," Curtis said. "I got to lip sync and dance and drive cars and do fight scenes and get beat up. It was a great summer." Later that year, Curtis learned Kim was pregnant. He left school and got a job. A long-time host on WBFF-TV was retiring, and a college roommate suggested Curtis try out for the station. As the co-host of Fox 45 Club House, Curtis did cut-ins between cartoons. The money Kim earned by acting with the Maryland Stage Company at UMBC, as well as an off-Broadway production in New York, gave the couple a down payment on their first house in Catonsville. After several years in television, Curtis took a job at a then-new children's radio station, in Washington, called RadioZone. It was there that Curtis hosted the morning show and began to develop some of the characters that appear on "The Animal Farm" today. Before taking a job with XM radio 10 years ago, Curtis also worked at a local radio station for a year, a job he didn't like as much as working with children. "I think once you've done that and if that's really your calling, every other audience is very different," he said. "Kids are very honest with you, and they're the most rewarding audience to work with." Growing up, Curtis said he never planned on having a big family or a career working with kids. But after Jillian was born and he went into children's programming, it all "sort of made sense." 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