Professor Bonaduce’s two cents

I HAD ALWAYS avoided Learning Annex classes. If I was going to take a class, it wasn’t going to be in some annex, but in the actual Learning Place, or, as I like to call it, “a school.”

But I’ve always wondered who does take these classes. The latest issue of the Learning Annex catalog has incredible range, from $50 classes with comedian Wayne Brady and documentarian R.J. Cutler to a $60 class called “How to Grow Hair in 12 Weeks.” I imagine the professor stresses the technique of not getting a haircut. This is the trap most people fall into about week eight.

Not many pages from “Learn Telepathic Communication with Animals” with Amelia Kinkade, author of “Straight From The Horse’s Mouth: How to Talk to Animals,” was a class on becoming a radio star, taught by Danny Bonaduce. I needed to meet people paying $49.99 to get life advice from a guy who slit his wrists on a VH1 reality show.

The class was made up of 20 other adults -- most older than Bonaduce -- sparsely populating a small conference room in the Holiday Inn by the airport. For the first time in anyone’s life, someone -- me, that is -- felt sorry for Bonaduce.

Though I don’t think he needed the microphone to reach the back of the room, it turns out Bonaduce is an awfully good teacher. He treated the students as equals by referring to radio as “our business” and not referring to them as “the freaks.”

When an older woman who wanted to do a call-in show about art raised her hand and shared a tip about how it’s effective to follow a program director home from work because “finding someone at a carwash is a lot easier than trying to get them on the phone,” professor Bonaduce gently mentioned how such a practice could backfire. Like with a restraining order.

People in Learning Annex classes, I quickly found out, aren’t so much about the learning as the talking-out-loud-in-front-of-a-group-ing. The few actual questions weren’t so much about radio as about Bonaduce’s self-destructive behavior. After questions about therapy, his marriage, his firings, his suicide attempt and Don Imus’ stock option plans, someone asked him how long he’d been sober. “How long I’ve been sober is less important than if I get out of here sober,” he said.

Basically, professor Bonaduce used his neo-Horatio Alger story (child actor-turned-junkie-turned-deejay-turned-junkie-turned-Learning Annex teacher) to preach perseverance, hard work and confidence. Being a disc jockey, he said, is about “putting in your two cents and thinking your two cents are worth a dollar.” An hour later, as if to prove his point about confidence, he talked about what an incredibly quotable line “putting in your two cents and thinking your two cents are worth a dollar” is.

Bonaduce made radio seem so exciting and easy that I thought I could get a radio show. Especially when he said the key to success was to get a portion of the audience to hate you. I had that audience built-in from my columns. After three hours, professor Bonaduce stuck around the room to talk to his students, all of whom told me they were thrilled with their master class. Still, I don’t think this was more than a pep talk, even if it was an interesting one.

I asked Bonaduce if he’d teach a second Learning Annex class. “I wouldn’t do it again. I know people think they got something out of this, but I don’t think they did,” he said. “That guy came up to me -- the one with the speech impediment -- and asked me if he should spend $5,000 on a school to get an internship. I said no.”

As I was leaving, Jessica Cox, who works for the Learning Annex, offered to let me teach a class. I told her I couldn’t because I didn’t think I had any information to impart, unless she wanted to expand on Bonaduce’s point and do an entire class about how to make a whole lot of people totally hate you.

But when I got home and looked through the book again, I saw that there was a class called “How to Make Big $$$ with Vending Machines: Make Money Even While You Sleep.” And I remembered that when my grandfather was dirt poor, he took a seminar that taught him how to start the vending business that employed my father, paid for my college and made kids want to come over to my snack-filled house after school. Maybe, thanks to the Learning Annex, someone is scraping together a hair-growing business that will do the same thing.