Tales of Waring: the last big thing Bill did for Fred

"I think I see the story line,” said mj. You're thinking of leaving Fred, and tension comes from that. That's the story for the book. We don't know how it will end up."

Years later, Dr. Lorenzo was horrified when he came across this line one day for the first time in years. How could he have said something that dumb? There was no way Bill was going to stay and work for Fred, but poor young Dr. mj could not accept that the Fred Waring fairy tale the four of them had been living and experiencing together might end in some form.

It was no wonder that Bill ignored so many things his friend said all night long. It was hard to respect someone who buried his head in the sand to this extent, right in front of everyone, without trying to hide it even. It was anything but heroic and probably came close to breaking Bill’s rules for how a man should behave.

But Bill complained not and handed mj a typical small-town newspaper review of a Waring concert from the 1973 summer Workshop. Its insights were corny and its language plain.

Chautauqua ended its l973 season with a bang on Monday night. Fred Waring, his orchestra and chorus were on hand to give everyone a nostalgic look at music as they performed medley after medley of old favorites. Mr. Waring conducted with a zest that never betrayed his 56 years of performing. The entire group was alive and full of the energy that makes an audience tap its feet, clap its hands, and sing along.

The article had nothing to do with the subject they were discussing furthermore.

Mr. Waring and the Young Pennsylvanians, practically none of whom are from Pennsylvania, were hosted by the Chautauqua County Boy Scouts as a fund-raising project in cooperation with the Jamestown Optimist Club.

"Tension is what makes a story," mj tried. We don’t know how things will end up. It’s the tension needed for the book.”

Bill pulled slowly and thoughtfully at the oars. "Well I definitely –." He stopped pulling.

There was a moment’s silence as the three adjusted emotionally to Betty Ann’s return from quieting Mark.

The evening cooled and the audience warmed to a variety of sounds the group had arranged. We were treated to male Glee Club renditions representing the beginnings of the Pennsylvanians in 1919. The girls came back on stage and the flapping Twenties were alive with the "Charleston."

The jealousy theme had slipped away from mj. Jealousy should have been the theme of his book, maybe, but he was still stuck in psychoanalytic father stuff that had come up two stories back. He had formulated a tentative theory that some part of Fred (maybe the adolescent part) should have wanted to keep Bill around as a kind of strong father, and the theory had kept pushing at him to make Bill recognize it. "You said once if you could impress Fred," mj remembered, "he might want you back. That's interesting!"

The orchestra and chorus proved their virtuosity again and again by performing works ranging from Cole Porter to Richard Strauss, and from The Carpenters to Handel for a "Hallelujah" ending. No matter what was being played or who was singing, an overall theme of friendship and love seemed to take precedence.

Mj was drifting and fighting it. "I thought you'd said that. What do you mean, 'Do anything for him'?

Before the last encore, Ronnie Destro, representing Chautauqua County Boy Scouts, presented Fred Waring with a plaque as an expression of gratitude for his aid to Scouting over the years.

Mj had to hold onto something, so he clung to his Bill-as-father theory, thrashing. "He used to, though, right?"

"Well," said Betty Ann, "let's say the last big thing that you did for Fred, where he was respectful of you, was the Frost Show."

"'Cause he was not respectful of you for the Bob Hope thing.[2] And the Frost thing came before we started goin' together."

"The Hope thing," she was very decided about this, enough so that mj should have gotten it, "came somewhere after we started goin' together!"

But the interviewer was flailing so much he missed the main point of the evening RIGHT HERE, a third inexcusable time: once Bill had started dating Betty Ann, that was when Fred had turned on him.

Reading the review helped mj forget his crazy inexcusable befuddlement. How could he become a psychiatrist if he could not hold on to such crucial and obvious information and make use of it? Fred had rejected Bill from the day Bill fell in love with Betty Ann. He had immediately started to treat Bill like he treated his other employees who never defended themselves. He had started to treat Bill like dirt from the day he began dating Betty Ann, and the damage was irreparable. There was no way Bill could work things out with a man who wanted to treat him like dirt for loving someone the way he loved Betty Ann. It was over. But poor mj lorenzo could not get it, maybe because he didn’t want to. And that was as good an argument as any for not psychoanalyzing friends and family, said the very professional psychiatric community about mj lorenzo’s crazy book, in lectures, psychiatric journals and letters to book divisions of big city newspapers globally.

Throughout the concert one never would have guessed that this was an inexperienced group made up of students from Fred Waring's summer workshop along with old professionals from his original group. Novices and professionals were delightfully indistinguishable from one another.

Oddly, Bill forgot the essential problem of the three-way relationship too, for the moment. He said, "But it would have to be phenomenal money. And the only way I would ever come back to this organization is as his manager, with certain stipulations, yes."

"Mj," Betty Ann addressed the interviewer, "I don't think that a thought even approached him, because this is really like a dead duck, this job. It's too late!"

Mj was disheartened all over again. The four of them had had the time of their lives laughing constantly at the Blackburns’ soap opera of a life with Fred during the last two years. They’d laughed in the boat, they’d split their hilarious sides in living rooms, before the wedding, after, everywhere, and all the time. It was sad to cling to a fairy tale and want it back. It was loony.

But that didn’t stop poor ol’ mj lorenzo, said his faithful and loving, but sometimes critical following.

"This crazy thing with you and Fred," mj said with irritation, "pushes my buttons. I'm sick of it."

They’d had what seemed a perfect four-way friendship, something probably four times as hard to find as a single good friend. Years later his clinging to a fairy tale looked crazy to Dr. Lorenzo; but back in ‘74 he had been convinced for some inscrutable, maybe equally loony reason, that their four-way friendship would suffer if neither Betty Ann nor Bill worked for Fred any more.

But how? Would they laugh together less? They would lose a father figure all four shared together, a crazy father figure, granted, maybe one worth getting rid of; but Fred was someone very special they had all shared, nonetheless; someone they were losing as a group of four friends. Wasn’t it something like feeling that their sense of sharing in the cup of life itself would be diminished? Wasn’t that it? Mj could not get a handle on what on earth he was feeling, a whole pile, maybe, of inchoate and irrational things all night long that had motivated this clinging to a fairy tale. It had to have been one of the more lost and confused periods of his post-Remaking life.

Over the years Dr. Lorenzo grew to resent increasingly, and complain about, the fact that so many aspects of U.S. American life conspired against friendship: rugged individualism; frequent moving to live somewhere else, often thousands of miles away, yet still in the same country; workaholism; competitiveness; selfishness; slight differences in ideology; the valuing of so many material things over and above friendship; loss of the art of practicing friendship; lack of knowledge, anywhere in America, about how to preserve friendship; even marriage was often allowed to wipe out friendships, and even when marriages were often not good friendships either; etc. etc. The de-valuing of friendship was one of the many, many items he could list when asked exactly what he meant when he constantly complained that U.S. American life was becoming increasingly ‘dehumanized’. It would be one of the reasons he’d say he liked Mexico better, in later years: the perpetual and endless possibility of really fun and caring friendships. Was this, then, what had bothered him all night long, a fear of losing Bill as a good, close friend? Probably: but why, exactly, would he lose him as a friend: just because Bill no longer worked for Fred? It didn’t seem rational. They could still be friends. And would be, as it turned out.

Even years later, after all the thought he had put into it, Dr. Lorenzo still could barely explain what in the world he had feared might happen if Bill quit working for Fred.[4]

[1] The ‘pick pick’ sound is partly caused by a pizzicato on the strings (string players plucking rather than bowing the strings). See previous chapter for footnote [4] explaining details regarding this song and Waring recording.

[2] This point would be proven in detail during the third night of interviewing when Bill told the story of the Bob Hope telethon. The tale became the centerpiece of Dr. Lorenzo’s third Waring book, Exactly How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert, specifically the chapter entitled “Mrs. Nixon’s Legs.”

[3] Newspaper clipping, August, l973, Jamestown, Chautauqua County (western New York State), entitled "Concert in Review", by Dan McCloud. Exact date and newspaper name unknown (probably The Post-Journal, during the last week of August). (Apologies for lack of exact source.) Copy of original clipping given to mj lorenzo in 1974 by Bill Blackburn, as part of Bill’s bag of Fred Waring public relations and promotional gimmicks; but stolen in Mexico, along with other priceless Waring mementos, so that name of newspaper and exact date were lost.

[4] Be that as it may, certain pundit devotees and followers of the great mj lorenzo were certain they had figured out what mj lorenzo feared would happen, if Bill Blackburn quit working for Fred Waring, whether mj himself had figured it out or not. First of all, they said, Dr. Lorenzo was just PRETENDING to not understand himself. Or, if they were wrong, nevertheless (with all due respect to him), while he might not consciously understand, his UN-conscious did understand, they said. A third generation of ‘Remaking pundits’, in league with a subgroup of the ‘culture hero pundits’, starting around 2010, began to maintain – and publish papers, articles, and even books on the notion – that mj lorenzo, whether consciously or unconsciously, understood ‘perfectly well’ in what direction the USA and Western world were headed when he published Tales of Waring in 1981. Some part of him knew that by the 2010s the USA would be so extremely politically and culturally polarized that families would refrain from talking while watching the evening political and cultural news on TV lest they scream at each other with hate; once-friendly neighbors would turn from once-friendly neighbors with disdain, refusing to even say hello, because the latter had voted for the wrong presidential candidate, causing a sick family member among the former to lose her medical insurance and die, in the richest country on the planet; and Congress would be polarized and bilaterally entrenched to the point of frozen immobility, requiring that the President and his Administration and Executive branch of government push their executive power in the direction of dictatorial rule, to get anything done and govern the country. And as always, since mj lorenzo, as ‘culture hero’, was a perspicacious prophet and an exact reflection of his culture, by definition, as they said, he had to have known and sensed and foreseen all of this on the night of the first Blackburn interview; and he would have had to continue to know and sense it throughout all of the years after; and he would have wanted during that night of the interview – and did want – to pull the two polarized sides (Bill and Fred) together into a unit, before the country broke apart. This was the pain he had experienced all night: Bill, perfectly correct, on one side, a voice of identity politics and ‘the Left’; and Fred Waring on the other, an old fashioned patriarchal boss-man functioning as in the tyrannical days before ‘political correctness’, with so much to contribute despite going about it in all the ‘wrong’ ways. It was sad. And mj’s job was to represent the pain of that awful hyperpolarization in writing, so that the world – and especially the Western world – could look at his writing and see itself reflected, as in a mirror, so as to understand itself better and find a way for the two sides to work together – quick – before the USA and Western civilization broke down and allowed outsiders to overrun and ruin them, just as the Romans had allowed the ‘barbarians’ to do. The group pushing this point soon earned the sobriquet of ‘Overrunners’, ostensibly for their comparing the USA’s possible fall with the overrunning of Rome by ‘barbarians’ and oriental religions, but more likely because their view soon began to overrun the mj lorenzo pundit world. Accordingly, and ever so fittingly, in 2017 the Overrunners received the highly-treasured annual MOISTR award for this very interpretation of Tales of Waring. (For a brief explanation of the MOISTR award see The Remaking, subsection #111.)