"Hello modern day futuristic listener on the run from the insane machinery of a post-industrial Hell gone mad, where you are presumably in your car out running a posse of squad cars while wearing your crime suit: cape and black tights with the mask of a fox. You yank the lever on your dashboard and one dozen enormous, deep-sea octopusses drop onto the road and engulf those police cars, and you are so cool you take your hands off the [steering] wheel to file your nails and smirk. Bad luck. Your car swerves off the road and onto a movie set, in which a realistic stagecoach filled with Supreme Court judges is being chased by giant fire-breathing spiders. [The stage coach] barrels over a cliff into a Dantean Hell scattered with bat-winged pitchfork people who just hate those Supreme Court judges and they torment them with visions of a crazy world where you can read any book you want. But all the books are written in Braille on the naked body of a king-size nun named Una. A world where if you got pregnant you could make the decision to join the Supreme Court and ban yourself The preceding message has been banned . . . I'm Mr. Mark, I'm just tellin' ya. "

 

-Typical story from "The Mr. Mark Show" on WMUH-FM in Allentown

 

Local disc jockey Mr. Mark knows that, like virtue, weirdness is its own reward And, if you ever tune into "The Mr. Mark Show," airing 8-11 p.m. Wednesdays on Muhlenberg College radio station WMUH-FM in Allentown, you know that Mr. Mark is a well rewarded man.

 

"I was born on Halloween, which I'm proud of, so when I grew up spooks and skeletons were associated with fun things like gifts and cake," says Mr. Mark, a.k.a. Mark Klee.

 

The 34-year-old Emmaus resident's weekly program is a Halloween-like blend of surreal stories, freaky sound effects tapes and cutting-edge music running the gamut from Captain Beefheart and The Mothers Of Invention to The Residents and My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. Imagine if Salva dor Dali worked with words and radio signals instead of giant ants and melting pocket watches. Imagine if Orson Welles hadn't abandoned radio after the mass hysteria following his "War of the Worlds" broadcast, or if M.C. Escher told stories.

 

On Wednesday nights, those who venture to the left of the radio dial and find themselves on WMUH's frequency, 91.7, are immersed in Mr. Mark's world-located halfway between Dr. Demento and Andre Breton-where logic is as hated as taxes, linear thought often falls through trap doors and absurdity is the drug of choice.

 

In person, Klee, a commercial and visual artist, has a Brian Eno-like bearing-this night he is attired in an abstract print shirt, round wire-rim glasses and a monk-like coiffure. You might expect him to show up on the "Saturday Night Live" skit "Sprockets."

 

In the studio, he sits behind the console and reads his surreal monologues from a ream of sin gle-space typed pages. His stories always begin with down-home greetings like "Howdy, folks" or "Hey, gang" and wind up some where out in the ozone. In between, everyone from Mayor Joe Daddona and City Councilwoman Emma Tropiano to U.S. Rep. Don Ritter and right-wing religious extremists get their noses politely tweaked with spacey humor and biting satire. "I have a solid audience of people that agree with those targets," says Klee. "I don't consider myself conservative or liberal-probably humanist-but if it seems like a case of abuse of power or an underdog getting a bad break from someone who should know better, then satire is called for."

 

Klee's considerable story telling prowess has earned him an eclectic and often unlikely cross section of listeners, many of whom call in regularly. During a recent broadcast, a dentist called to discuss Ross Perot's potential running mate and then requested a song by The Clash. Later, what sounded like a 60-year old woman called to request a song by L.A. glam-metal band Poison (a request that is po litely denied). "The entire kitchen staff at Widow Brown's calls and passes the phone around making obscure requests, like The Alex Harvey Band and King Crimson," says Klee, who describes his radio show as "part 'Rocky And Bullwinkle' and part Orson Welles."

 

Speaking of Welles, Klee has learned first-hand the sometimes ;unwieldy and overwhelming power of the broadcast medium, which he uses to blur the line between fact and fiction.

 

"I have a hard time believing this, but one time I said over the -air, 'Don't turn on your water faucets! Gasoline will come pouring out of them!' " Klee recalled. "A little old lady wouldn't take her heart pills because she believed that she couldn't draw water from the tap. Her son called in and lodged a complaint. It just goes to show that you have to be really outrageous so that people don't believe you and get hysterical."

 

Klee seems to draw weirdness like a lightning rod. During a recent broadcast, an Ehrlich exterminator entered the studio with the intent of eradicating the "enormous spiders" that have been seen crawling under the console. While the Burroughs-like irony of this situation is not lost on Klee, he insists that he has nothing to do with the hairy, oversized arachnids.

 

While Klee has been doing "The Mr. Mark Show" for the last seven years, he has recently been enjoying a growing local cult celebrity. "Once an entire carload of kids stopped me at an art-supply store and they claimed that the whole student body of Emmaus High School listens to 'The Mr. Mark Show,' " he says.

 

Shrewdly, Klee has begun merchandising his oddball appeal. With surprising success, he recently started pedaling Mr. Mark T shirts, bumper stickers and cassette tapes of his "unbearable parbles and unstable fables" at Toones record store in Allentown "I'm really surprised," says Gene Bartholomew, owner of Toones. "We've gone through 50 T-shirts and 50 cassettes in roughly four weeks."

 

Klee sees the growing listenership as the result of the discontent and restlessness associated with any sleepy small town. "This could be called a conservative, boring area and bored people are perfect candidates for the show," he says.

 

Klee also believes the show has simply gotten much better. "The other day I was looking back at some material from three years ago and some of the material just wasn't that strong," he says. "But now it's become much stronger and funnier, to the point where I can read a script and just chuckle. That was not always the case in the past."

 

Klee began honing his creative impulses by dabbling in art courses at Kutztown UniversitY and Temple University's Tyler School Of Art from 1975 to 1979. In 1983 he began doing community radio. Drawn by the countercultural allure of California, Klee moved to San Francisco later that year, but didn't stay long. "I went out there and put my feelers out to get work as an artist," he says. "I came back to Allentown in 1985 and never regretted it. It's a small pond, but there aren't 500 people standing in line ahead of you for every opportunity."

 

Klee returned to the airwaves in 1985, bringing "The Mr. Mark Show" back to WMUH It was during this time that he started developing the storytelling aspect of the show. "I didn't start writing until my mid-20s," he says. "I just started writing these paragraph-length stories to catch people off guard. I got a good reaction and kept going." Klee claims that he spends three to four hours a week writing material for each show, a task that is far from effortless. "Writing is a lot harder than visual art- at least it doesn't come easy for me."

 

Klee eventually would like to branch out into commercial radio assuming there is a commercial station willing to take a chance on something more radical than Howard Stern-style aural pornography or John DeBella's gonzo-Hawaiian shirt attitudinizing. In the interim he plans to approach the University of Pennsylvania's radio station, WXPN-FM (88.5) in Philadelphia, a highly successful alternative station that generates some programming for national syndication. Klee wants to offer the station sound bite-sized snippets of Mr. Mark stories. He would also like to publish his monologues in book form.

 

In the meantime, Klee con tinues to pursue his visual art and his interest in electronic music occasionally joining local avant-disco band Trap Door onstage and recording with his own band, Mr. Mark and The Seismatics. In August, he hopes to put on a one man show at Theater Outlet in Allentown that would include puppeteering and storytelling.

 

"I really admire a guy like Wil liam Burroughs who can get on stage, sit behind a desk and read from a stack of pages and enrapture people with limited attention spans, you know, like punk-rock types."

 

Jonathan Valania is a free-lance writer for The Morning Call.