Seattle Superheroes is a regular series on seattlemag.com wherein artists depict standout people in our community as superheroes. While we’ve taken some artistic license with the narratives, the sentiment behind them is very real.  

Don’t adjust your dials. What you’re experiencing is the ecstatic, elastic energy of the one and only Rachel Belle, the dynamo on KIRO 97.3 FM every weekday afternoon. While illuminating the best of Seattle on the airwaves, she’s able to leap boring topics in a single bound, think faster than a speeding bullet and tell a story more powerful than a locomotive. 

Born in Pleasanton, Calif., Belle grew up adoring her four cats (Snuffy, Piffy, Grayson and Booker) and performing TV commercial impersonations for her Jewish New Yorker Grandmother, whose accent she often adopts on air. She learned a lot from her hard working, entrepreneurial family, two of whom (true story) invented the bagel dog and the tube top. 

At the age of four, Belle was sleeping when, one night, a bolt of lightning shot through her window, striking her calm forehead. She leapt up in bed with a mind a hundred times more capable than before. Suddenly she was Lightning Rachel Belle, recording little radio programs while she sat on the living room carpet, singing the songs and acting as the DJ into a cassette player. 

To hide her psychic abilities throughout high school and keep her identity secret, she often dressed in Pantera t-shirts, wore baggy, thrift store corduroys with a chain wallet, smoked cigarettes in the lot across the street and got stoned in Taco Bell drive-throughs.  

This lifestyle brought her to Chico State University where she learned to harness her abilities for her college radio station, doing the show “Mostly Metal in the Mornings.” Her love of radio grew and despite the fact she made just above $13,000 a year working full time as a news reporter, news anchor, “’80s, ’90s and Today” DJ, and the occasional board operator on the Spanish station, she kept at it. She graduated to a Sacramento station, KFBK, and then to Seattle where she enlightens her audience of thousands about the history of Pho in Seattle, a Victorian-era obsessed Port Townsend couple, the benefits of breast milk to children, what Russell Wilson thinks about football-shaped breads and why the Seattle Zoo is cruel to animals. 

Her radio heroism lies in explicating Seattle’s food culture, it’s shortcomings when it comes to feminism and its often missing sense of play. Between telling her stories (some having to do with Mac and Cheese), you can find Belle in a yoga studio or in her turquoise and navy blue spandex walking her black cat Poppy on a leash, burrito in hand or travel Scrabble set under her arm – her tall, leggy body acting like a virtual cell tower, sending and receiving more information than any human brain can comprehend on its own. 

About the artist: Javier S. Ortega was born in Seville, Spain, where he attended Escuela de Artes Aplicadas and worked on the restoration of Plaza España de Sevilla, which gave him the opportunity to travel to Florence to continue his education in sculpture under the Leonardo Da Vinci Scholarship. Upon completion, his time was divided between the cities of Seville, Valencia and the island of Menorca as he began showing his work. He then moved to Seattle where he continues his career exhibiting his work in some of the cafés and galleries around town.