A.J. Franklin (Courtesy University at Buffalo)
Three veteran burlesque performers put it best in a song from the musical "Gypsy":
"Kid, you gotta get a gimmick if you want to get ahead."
This truism applies in show business and in campus politics, as A.J. Franklin recently demonstrated.
Franklin, a senior psychology major, is better known around the University at Buffalo as "Boombox Guy."
As UBNow reported this week, Franklin, since his freshman year in 2019, has walked around the school playing music from a pair of wireless Bluetooth speakers, one held in each hand.
Franklin, also an assistant features editor at the Spectrum student publication and a marketing student assistant for Blackstone LaunchPad, told UBNow he selects the music from among 3,400 tracks in his collection based on his mood and the vibe he senses on campus.
Not everyone loves hearing the music. Some students ask him to pose for photos, or to DJ at parties, while others yell at him to turn off the tunes.
But his fame, or notoriety, is credited with helping him win the election as the 2022-23 student representative on the UB Council.
“I love this. I could be Boombox Guy for as long as I want to be,” Franklin said in the interview. “But this is not the end for me. There’s a whole lot more than Boombox Guy.”
UB Council meetings are about to have a much better soundtrack.
Who says attorneys can’t be funny?
Steve Ricca, the in-house counsel for Cedarland Development Group, had the uneviable task of following the Shea’s Performing Arts Center team at Monday’s Buffalo Planning Board meeting.
Shea’s was seeking approval for a proposed five-story addition to the historic theater, which – among other things – would increase the number of available restrooms at all levels. And the team laid out the specifics of the $26 million project in detail.
How much detail? Enough that it was like Pavlov’s dog for Ricca, who came on the WebEx conference call right after the Shea’s presentation was finished and approved.
“All this talk about restrooms is making me think about restrooms,” said Ricca, who was representing the company that built The Forge on Broadway, and was now pursuing an adaptive reuse of the former Eckardt’s Department Store building at 950 Broadway. “I’ll forge ahead and keep this brief.”
While the Buffalo Bills were beating the Baltimore Ravens in a nail-biting game on Oct. 2, Sue Seitz and Kathy Barber were sitting with several other Bills’ fans on a river cruise ship in Lyon, France, unable to access a radio or TV broadcast of the game.
Seitz’s friend, retired Buffalo school teacher Mary Hales, came to their rescue.
From her home in Amherst, Hales spent the game texting Seitz about almost every play, right down to the field goal that won the game in the final seconds. Her updates were well ahead of those provided on two sports apps that people on the boat were using to follow the game.
“I was happy to do it,” Hales said. “The only hard part was trying to text at the same time I was jumping out of my chair.”
Hales, a lifelong Bills fan who used to use game scores and statistics to teach young students about numbers, also provided updates about the Bills’ win over Pittsburgh while Seitz and her friends when they were on the same trip in Nice, France.
“Mary did a great job,” Seitz said. “She should be working for John Murphy on his Bills’ broadcasts.”
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I report on development, government, crime and schools in the northern Erie County suburbs. I grew up in the Town of Tonawanda and worked at the Post-Standard in Syracuse before joining The News in 2001. Email: swatson@buffnews.com
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I've been a business reporter at The Buffalo News since 2004, now covering residential and commercial real estate and development amid WNY's resurgence. I'm an upstate native, proud to call Buffalo my home, and committed to covering it thoroughly.
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UB officials said the stabbing "was a targeted act of violence" and said in a statement there is no ongoing danger to the university community.
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A.J. Franklin (Courtesy University at Buffalo)
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