"I'm probably the only born-again Christian with an interracial son and a tattoo," says Delilah Rene, the soft-voiced, soft-hearted chatelaine of the evenings at WMGK (FM/102.9) for the past three months.
A long-stemmed yellow rose snakes up one ankle, a souvenir from a giggly night last year when Delilah and three girlfriends went out and got tattoos. Now 32, she'd wanted one since high school.
"I got it in a place where if I wanted to hide it, it would be discreet," she explained.
But Delilah does not hide the tattoo or anything else about herself, on or off the air.
Between 7 p.m. and midnight, Sundays through Thursdays, when WMGK used to play love songs and croon about
romance, Delilah talks freely about her recovery from alcoholism and anorexia, about being beaten as a child and then abandoned by a hard-drinking husband. She takes calls from listeners battling inner demons or lonely for a spouse working the night shift.
Just before 9 each night, she calls her 8-year-old son Isaiah (Sonny, to his friends) to kiss him goodnight on the air.
Between calls, she plays requests - maybe Carly Simon's "Inky Dinky Spider" for a young mother with a cranky toddler; maybe Elton John's ''Someone Saved My Life Tonight" for a listener grateful that a friend yanked him back from some psychic ledge.
"People seem to open up to her," said WMGK/WPEN general manager Dean Tyler, who signed Delilah to a one-year contract and who has given her relatively free rein. "She's at least as vulnerable (as they), and maybe has gotten herself into situations far worse than theirs."
Steve Butler, editor of the Cherry Hill-based national trade publication Inside Radio, said Delilah's show is unique in Philadelphia, although stations in other markets have begun to mix heart-to-heart talk with their adult contemporary formats at night.
Delilah was one of the first to do it - first in Seattle, then in Boston, now here.
"The reason that I started doing the style of show I'm doing is because I kept getting in trouble for spending all night on the phone (with listeners)," she said, "so I just started using some of these tapes that I got, against my boss' wishes. See, I always break all the rules, and I either get a raise for it or get fired for it."
She once got the ax for collecting three moving violations in a company car while working as a traffic reporter. One station canned her for neglecting paperwork; another for refusing to allow beer and wine commercials on her show.
