Here we are. Tomorrow, Wednesday, October 17th, from 1 to 3 p.m., we launch my new radio show, “Talking To Animals” on WBTN, a tiny, struggling community radio station in Bennington, Vt., 30 minutes from Bedlam Farm.

The broadcast is a call-in, you can live stream it at WBTNAM.org. You can call into the program toll-free: 866-406-9286 to ask any question you want, or you can e-mail me the questions at [email protected] and I’ll read them on the air.

I’d love to hear from you, a bunch of blog readers called last week. They had great questions.

I have a folder full of questions already, but call ins are the most fun for everyone. I’m starting each show by choosing one of the e-mailed questions to talk about.

If you like the idea of community radio – this is radical media for the people, there is nothing slick or well-funded about it, the equipment was installed during the Korean War- please consider a donation to the station. They have no lobbyists, lunch with no regulators or fatcats.

They need every single thing there is on the earth, form paper clips to an FM transmitter.

The mailing address is WBTN, Harwood Hill, Bennington, Vt., 05201, or you can make a contribution on the station website. I am not being paid for this broadcast, of course, working for free is one of my specialties.

I love everything about the place, especially its idiosyncratic Executive Director, Thomas Toscano, who is most often the only person in the station, day or might.

Thomas says he is single by choice, he considers not being married or having children a public service.

You don’t meet a lot of people like him. I like him a lot.

I could not have found a better place for me, the station is hanging on by a thread, but with live streaming, can be heard anywhere in the country. If you know much media history, Community Radio may seem familiar to you.

I have long fantasized about hosting a thoughtful and intelligent program about animals, WBTN is giving me the chance to do that, and in return, I hope to do what I can to support this community radio station and get them some badly needed help.

This idea of community radio is important to me.

When the early settlers to America created what we call media, it usually meant farmers and merchants – usually the most literate citizens – posting essays (op-ed pieces) on the fence posts of their stories and farms.

Anyone could be a columnist, everyone could be a reporter, everyone had a voice.

They could not have imagined corporate media, the nightmare behemoths who have taken over our politics and civics for profits and swallowed up smaller independent stations and newspapers and turned them into a destructive kind of money-worshipping mud wrestling.

We can all see what corporate control of media is  doing to our country.

No one worth listening to has access to this media, and individual voices have disappeared. Profit-centered corporations now control most, if not all of our media. They haven’t gotten to WBTN yet, there’s still time.

Politicians and media in Washington pretend to hate one another, they sleep together every day and night. Each makes the other possible and profitable.

Community radio is the same idea as the original one really, and perhaps the last redoubt where ordinary people can have a real voice in media. The corporate media has steadily eroded the values and principles of what we used to call journalism, no real people can get anywhere near it.

Community radio is a non-profit system created to service local communities, it has to fight every day against government regulators, corporate lobbyists and feckless public officials.  Some community radio stations are booming, some are hurting, many have fallen.

But the thing is that there is new promise:  new streaming technologies have made every radio station national.  We just have to keep them alive for a while.

So tomorrow, I join WBTN for my own national two-hour broadcast focused on an intelligent conversation about dogs, cats and other animals. Red is coming with me.

I love talking about animals, and I love listening to the stories people bring me.

It’s a call in show, I’m doing it with the help of Thomas, a computer and conductor and opera singer from Bronx and Brooklyn, his title is Executive Director,  but whose e-mail says Host/Producer/Technician.

Thomas is everything and all things for WBTN, I think he even vacuums the studio at night. His is the only car I have ever seen in the parking lots (along with a Fish Fry wagon).

I suggested an Amazon WBTN Wish List, and the station put one up. Both lists sold out quickly. You might want to bookmark it, though, it will be back.

I hope my broadcast works, and I hope WBTN hangs on, we need them more than ever.

Again, you can live stream the show, and you can call in free of charge: 866 406-9286. I haven’t seen equipment like this outside of museums, so it can get funky at times. But I’m told the streaming works very well, and we got a bunch of calls last week, from California to Virginia.

If this all works, I just might be the first person in radio to  host a thoughtful, non-sappy show on dogs and animals (are there others?) That would be awesome.

If not, this will be great and important fun. Life isn’t about winning, it’s about trying.