It's a very, very sad day for those of us who love local comedy/talk radio and the laughs which ease our sometimes stressful lives. Life has been cruelly stolen from a beautiful woman who anchored a family and one of DC's most successful radio duos -- Don and Mike.
Since I was a kid, I've been a big fan of the local comedy duo Don and Mike. I started listening to them in elementary school while my dad was stationed at the Pentagon in the mid-1980s. Don and Mike never, never failed to make me laugh.
When I came back to DC from Germany for college in 1993, I was delighted to find them on the radio dial at 106.7. In the years since, with adult life more complicated and stressful, I found the laughs they gave me more important than ever. One of the show's regular contributors was Don's wife, Freda. She and Don aired their lives publicly and often sparred for the benefit of listeners. As I grew older, they also served as something of a public role model. Don, whose real name was Mike Sorce, was an adopted kid born of drug-addled parents and raised by abusive family members -- and it was clear that he'd found in Freda and her family the kind of love and familial embrace he'd never before experienced. Despite the ups and downs that come for anyone with his family history, Freda stuck by "Don". They were married for 23 years, had one son, and any regular listener could discern beneath the veneer of radio pugilism the strong bond of love between them.
Sunday night, Don's wife, Freda, at the age of 50, was killed outside Ocean City, MD, when an SUV driver attempting to avoid a 10-car pileup swerved into oncoming traffic and struck her car head-on.
In an instant, one life was snuffed out, and others were altered, perhaps scarred, forever. For those of us who read this board who are in loving relationships -- married or no -- imagine: never holding her hand again; never hearing her laugh; never seeing her eyes sparkle; never smelling her perfume wafting on the wind; never feeling her touch. Imagine the hole left in your life. Think, and say a prayer of thanks for your good fortune, and a prayer of healing for the entire Sorce family.
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