Bill told a second tale while he
and mj waited for Betty Ann to finish in the kitchen. ‘The
Mar-Tee-ni Club’
tale was unflattering, but this one made Fred a buffoon. Mj was not
ready to push against his storyteller without help from Betty
Ann, so the Great Golden Waring Fairy Tale, swimming in a
deep, murky lake like the Loch Ness Monster, waiting to get
caught and reeled in, had to wait a little longer.
As the second tale ended Betty Ann slid into her chair
barely noticed – at first – in young wifely simplicity with
her sewing and mascot Docka.
The men turned it into a grand entrance by the way they
stared.
Her outfit was a tabloid shocker
of an unusual kind. She had fixed her hair, put on makeup and
slipped into a dark blue corduroy jumper with puffy white
cotton blouse that demurely revealed her shape. Jumpers of any
kind, however, were passé in U.S. America in 1974,
especially in the entertainment industry. Only
Yet the idea fit the occasion in a way. The vibe was
innocent 50s school girl, simple and naïve, ripe for the
plucking, instead of mature glamour gal of the sexually open
sixties and seventies. And virgin school girl
was an important kind of vibe Fred knew everything about and
saw as a challenge. Maybe the men got over the anachronism
quick for that reason.
In any case, mj needed help from
Betty Ann, he felt, whether schoolgirl or glamour girl. Bill
was sick of his job with Fred. He'd enjoyed some negative
storytelling in her absence and gotten it out of his system,
hopefully. So the interviewer tried to steer things toward
what he'd come for.
"You've always said Fred had a
sense of humor," mj tried, then turned away from Betty Ann
toward Bill too late to realize the man was still staring at
his wife, entranced. Her understated grand entrance had filled
him with an array of emotions that played on his face even
still: affection; pride; and more, culminating with a broad,
relaxed and loving smile.
Finally he began an answer.
"I'll tell you," he said, sitting
back and relaxing again at last, yet looking Betty Ann’s way,
"and Fred tells this. He –; and what was the guy's name?" He
checked with Betty Ann: "Rube?"
"Goldberg?" she offered from her
chair, looking at him over granny glasses that sent a
complicated message. Was she Bill’s sweet little girlish wife,
then, who would flirt and side with her friend, mj, as he had
hoped? Or was she going to be Bill’s old lady, only remotely
affected by college-boyish mj? How could she be both? Where
would it leave the poor lost interviewer?
"Rube Goldberg," he turned to mj.
"You know who that is?"
"Mm hmm." Mj’s Mommy had covered
the subject as part of his little-American-boy education.
"Who usta have all these crazy
Rube Goldberg contraptions in the cartoons?"
Of course. Whenever Rev, mj’s
dad, had fixed a door knob with scotch tape, or ‘repaired’
something in an equally unconvincing way, Jo, his mom, had
mocked it as ‘a Rube
Goldberg contraption’.
from
"Whenever
Rev, mj’s dad, had fixed a door knob with scotch tape,
or ‘repaired’ something in an equally unconvincing way,
Jo, his mom, had mocked it as ‘a Rube Goldberg contraption’."
Bill sighed, filling his easy
chair as a man increasingly relaxed. "One of Rube Goldberg's things
from the comic strip gave Fred the idea, and he called Rube up
and said, 'Geez I'm
gonna do this.' So Rube came up to the Poconos for two weeks and
helped him em-bell-ish this
golf course hole thing.”
Fred became best friends with the
country’s big newspaper comic strip artists over the decades
partly because they held their annual conventions at his
Shawnee Inn and Golf Course. They decorated a room at the
“And Fred had a big golf tournament at
Shawnee each year," Bill laughed, relaxing and filling his
chair still more, moving his arm to show mj where things in
the story were placed. "When they got to the ninth hole this year, they had
to putt the ball through this thing and it
went up through this other
thing, down, and
rolled into this
thing, and it went to a toilet."
"Tuh huhm!" mj chuckled.
"And he said it cost him THOUsands to get it
perfected. He
worked for a month
on this thing."
Betty Ann smiled at dear old
Prankster-Fred the way Popeye’s girlfriend smiled at Popeye’s
biceps, pure mush, imagining a younger and sexier Fred.
"And when it rolled in there, there
was a trip and it
was a record player
with a guy sitting
there, and a flush
sound would come up."
Mj chuckled more.
"And it was a legitimate golf tournament on Fred's
course, Tony Lama[2]
and Art Wall[3],
the pros and
celebrities. And every time these guys would come to
this hole, and they'd say, 'What the hell is this?'
“And Fred says," Bill's eyebrows
lowered: "'If you can putt
you can putt!'
"And it was in all the columns and radio
news broadcasts: ‘Nobody’, they said, ‘ever took Rube
Goldberg's contraptions seriously
before. And Fred did’."
Betty Ann loved the joke. She
echoed the final twist with warmth: ‘Fred took Rube’s
contraptions seriously’,
she said with a sardonic, mocking bite. She cherished that
story about Fred, you could tell. And she especially liked the
way Bill told it.
tabletop
version of black and white cartoon shown above[4]
‘Nobody’, they said, ‘ever took Rube Goldberg's contraptions
seriously
before.
And Fred did’."
It was a Waring folktale and it
was good as gold.
Mj wanted more and his source knew it. Forget the mar-Tee-ni club. A playful
storytelling mood was what was needed. He would move things to
a point where he could ask them how they had dated while
working for Fred, and what had been Fred's reaction. That
would lead to their wedding in the living room of an American
Sunday-night-TV saint: Saint Moses leading God’s chosen
people, the lost Americans, back to the Truth, via Their Own
Music.[5]
Then mj would hear of a funny friend of Fred’s, the U.S.
President at the moment, unfortunately, Tricky Dicky Nixon;
and a White House Christmas Party that had been a romp, an
unforgettable one-night honeymoon for Bill and Betty Ann.
"Fred went through the china shop, I told
ya that!"
Mj looked puzzled on purpose. He
wanted it on tape!
"Did I tell ya about the bull in
the china shop?"
Mj shook his head ‘no’, though
his lovely and sweet, very smart Mommie had told him not to
lie: "Uh-uh."
Alright!!!
[1] Everyone seems agreed that Fred’s TV days began with a big bang in 1949. Exactly the reason for their ending so quickly we do not know, though perhaps it could be researched. Virginia Waring maintained in her biography of her husband, which he had a hand in writing, that his TV years ended with a thud in 1954 after leadership changes in the TV industry left him without backing from inside. See her Chapter 20, “Television.”
[2] Tony Lama, the son of Italian immigrants, was a famous maker of high-end cowboy boots.
[3] Art Wall was an
American professional golfer born in
[4] See 'a note regarding
the Waring Collection cartoons' for an explanation of
the cartoons that were laquered onto tabletops and given
Waring by cartoonist friends Goldberg and Devlin. This
particular cartoon would seem to be poking fun at
several things at once: (1) Fred's invention of machines
to do things, such as the Waring Blendor; (2) his
pranksterism, especially while hobnobbing with golfing
buddies; (3) perhaps some tendency he had to not keep
his head down while golfing; (4) maybe he was stung by a
bee while golfing. His close cartoonist friends sent
intimate joking messages to him in their cartoon gifts
to him, so it would be safe to assume that this
cartoon's jokes are not necessarily random, but had
happened to Fred and/or golfing buddies.
[5] As President Obama
said once at the time of a change of presidents, “We are showing the world
how one of the greatest things about our Democracy works:
the peaceful transition of power.” The Puritan belief,
famously documented in well preserved Puritan sermons and
diaries of the 1600s, that their American colonizing
settlements were, or could or would and should be,
‘a light unto the world’, something valuable to ‘show the
world’, is a parallel to Obama’s idea, and is in fact its
origin. America, according to the early Calvinist settlers
in New England, was the land of God’s NEW chosen
people, demonstrating
to the rest of the world (like a beacon, or
‘a [lit up] city upon a hill’, easily seen from afar)
how Christ’s eventual (but maybe soon-to-come) reign on
earth might look. The Calvinists (including Puritans and
most other Protestant groups and denominations) believed
that God’s original ‘
Dr. Lorenzo in later years would frequently remind a worldwide reading and conference audience that the U.S. American Weltanschauung or worldview was and continued to be essentially Calvinist, or ‘neo-Calvinist’, ‘quasi-Calvinist’, terms he apparently was the first to use; and that in order to deal properly and informedly with the USA, everyone in the world, and especially Americans themselves, would always need to comprehend and remember all that this historical fact implied about the ongoing and perennial character of the American people and government, even hundreds of years after the Puritans; in just the way that America, in order to have any understanding of or positive impact on the Middle East, would have to understand its extremely complex ideological underpinnings and permutations as found in the Muslim worldview, likewise constructed hundreds of years back.
The Moses metaphor used here reflects the Dr.’s belief, developed over decades of studying Fred Waring, that Fred, as he aged, gradually formulated a conscious mission for himself, that of presenting TV concerts and especially live concerts all over the country in such a way that they would show the too-liberal, lost, and darkness-enslaved American people where their true heart and right destiny lay: namely, in a combination of conservative Christian politics and religion, and a patriotic love of sacred America itself, sacred land of the sacred Chosen People, the Fundamentalist and Evangelical Calvinist Protestants, all of this as portrayed in America’s music of every kind, and played and sung by The Pennsylvanians.
At the same time, mj lorenzo’s notion that Waring was a kind of Moses became important to the mj lorenzo ‘Culture Hero Pundits’, for it suggested that Waring himself, as a kind of forerunner to mj lorenzo, may have assumed for himself a kind of culture-hero role too, thereby becoming a kind of savior figure who could show the lost American people the way back to the truth; and so, therefore, the mj lorenzo culture hero pundits at first theorized, and eventually even claimed, that mj as a little boy had learned not just artistry from Waring, but also, and much more importantly, how a would-be culture hero might go about trying to fulfill his proper function in a culture like America’s.
Dr. Lorenzo himself, however, at least in public, never bought in to the culture hero pundits’ insistence that he himself met the criteria for ‘culture hero’ and therefore was one. Instead, he forever spoke of it kiddingly in public as “That crazy megalomaniac notion of the ‘culture hero pundits’ that mj lorenzo is a ‘culture hero’.”
One of the primary sources of the ‘New Israel’ kind
of theology espoused by neo- and quasi-Calvinists of many
Protestant denominations may be found in the apostle Paul’s
letter to the Galatians, Chapter 3.