Tale 38

How Important Is Betty Ann?

“...it's hard not to respect her, the way she was.

Betty Ann would take her instrument after rehearsal,

when everybody went whoopee-do to the bars 'n stuff.

She was never one of those to go off to the Blue Note and Deer Head, I know.

I'm speakin' of Betty Ann not as my wife

but as a woman that was in the group and I didn't even like.

But she'd take her instrument to go off and rehearse parts,

or to get new sounds or a better sound than she already had for that part.

And she'd come in the next day and she'd have a whole new unique sound.

Well, she'd worked four or five hours on this, and he knew it.

That put her in a category way far above anybody else.”

“She was never one of those to go off to the Blue Note and Deer Head, I know.”

the Deer Head Inn

on Main Street (Route 611)

Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania

Each [Huron] tormenter patiently waited his turn, and showed no sign of anger or lack of self-control while he had the prisoner in his power. Frequently, they addressed him with mock benevolence.[1]

Everything deeply bass-sounding in the band hit triple forte and held, while the brass blared warning, and clarinets trilled nervously, and then a sorrowful violin redid the whole from a tender point of view. What should one expect from a piece of music that opened like this, with two opposite messages? Nothing comforting, certainly.

Bill passed mj a newspaper clipping.

It promised no more corroborating evidence than anything else he had handed him all night long to support the allegation that Fred’s treatment of him had been reprehensible. You had to believe Bill; or not believe; although Betty Ann had seemed to agree with everything he had said, when she was present, and had even outdone him with negativity at times.

Fred Waring Delights 1,800 at Charity Show

Fred Waring, who has been making it a habit in recent years to reach Scranton each Fall with a talented troupe of touring Pennsylvanians, brought another winning combination here, to delight a capacity crowd of 1,800 at the Masonic Temple Thursday night.

Mj excused himself suddenly and went to the bathroom with his Sears bag to shore himself up.

If Bill left Fred after all this, mj found himself thinking, Bill should remember Fred with some tolerance – for his own mental health – rather than carry the anger around forever. Which meant Fred needed an ounce of understanding for Bill’s sake, even if not for Fred’s; and for mj’s sake too, for that matter, because he needed to see a little tolerance for his mental health. And if Bill was too angry to comprehend all this and do something about it for everybody’s mental health, then mj lorenzo would have to settle the matter himself! He tried to give himself a pep talk before proceeding, in other words. He needed help to get through the thing with Bill that he sensed was coming, the intense ordeal of some kind which he now realized Bill had been building up to, all night long.

He had stayed pretty rational all night, he thought, on what he believed might have been three buttons, or even five peyote buttons, and all his rational analysis had gotten him nowhere with Bill; so this time he tried what he thought might be ten buttons of peyote. And the taste of the concoction, familiar by now, reminded him that Joey had prophesied that mj would find ‘ultimate peace’ while fishing for the Waring fairy tale. He laughed at that idiocy and the laugh echoed off the blue and yellow tile walls. He would have promised himself to chew Joey out the next day for that crazy prophecy too, at the same time he chewed him out about the concoction; except that he had forgiven him by now for the concoction. He had gotten a little more used to the music now, and the hellish movie spinning in his mind; and he had even begun to suspect it might fit, in some way, with what was going on in the living room; but there was no time to think it through, of course. Too much was happening. He’d have to figure it out later.

Returning from the bathroom, he entered a faintly fire-lit Huron longhouse. The arch arbiter sat at the far end. Mj hobbled toward the arena of ceremony with no new plan. It was boorish to insist Bill had served somehow as Fred's father. Nor was there any evidence that Bill had ever confused his own father with Fred. That notion had bombed worse than the first. No psychoanalytic interpretation had worked with Bill because, as mj would realize only gradually, months and years later, Bill did not think – or operate – in a contemporary Western world way.

Mj entered Fred’s torture pit, found his usual spot, sat, and sipped rancid brew as prescribed by their ritual. He frowned and said something without hearing it in his mind first, for a change. It popped out.

"OK! You've said things changed between you and Fred. Let me ask you this. How important is Betty Ann?"

Strings descended a scale Zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, Zoom.   Zoom.   Zoom.    Zoom!...

"Very," said Bill. "Very, because she was going with his son, for quite a long while; they were going to be married. Billy. And after I told Fred I was marryin' Betty Ann he'd say, 'You can't get any better. She's the greatest'." Bill’s Fred was curt, aggrieved, conceding a point with a feeling of regret and disgust. "Says, 'My damn fool son. Shoulda married 'er'."

The sound of a slow two-step could be heard. Three muted trombones wept smoothly, Dah dah-dah-dah-dah duuhh!... ('I love-you-much-too much!') step-boom-step-boom-step-...

"Ah –; Betty Ann: many, many ways she was important. That brought her into the family. She became very much like a daughter. Fred respects that. No woman –," Bill thought about it a minute. "No woman has ever been with Fred longer, in the group. I think it was fourteen or fifteen years."

"Hmmm:" mj’s mind worked over especially the words, ‘very much like a daughter', because it sounded Freudian. Fred might have been treating Bill badly because he felt Bill had stolen from him someone who had always felt like a daughter to him, Betty Ann.

But the big winner was the Little Sisters of the Poor, who will be able to swell their Building Fund with about $10,000 in proceeds from the sponsoring Scranton Kiwanis Club. In a happy twist, the young, on whom Waring places such emphasis in this fast-paced 135-minute show, help make it possible for the Little Sisters to aid the old.

"So right there that says something: longer than any woman. And Betty Ann is the kind of personality that can get along with almost anybody, even Fred.

"Y'know. And she's a mystery in a lot of ways to Fred Waring. Betty Ann was a mystery to me. She was a mystery to everybody. She did not stay over to Rehearsal Hall, she stayed over at McClintocks’, over Poley’s garage. And she showed up in time for rehearsal and all, y'know.

"And when she went on the Road, she had her own room, and she was friendly and warm and played games on the bus 'n stuff like this, and was very –."

Ntah ntah-ntah-ntah-ntah-ntuuhhn!... Muted trumpets confessed harshly the same wordless line.

"But, she'd go out two weeks and come in two weeks, go out two weeks –."

"That was different from the others, too," mj appreciated. He sifted every line of this passion play portraying Fred’s sad end, looking for some key to grasping it.

"Nobody ever does that with Fred,” Bill agreed. “So consequently she was a –."

"A special figure!" offered mj, feeling they might be getting closer to something.

As the prisoner's strength failed him... it became necessary to carry him through the longhouse. At this point, the headmen ordered the people to stop torturing him, so that he would not die before sunrise. The prisoner was then placed on a mat and allowed to rest, while many people left for a breath of fresh air.[2]

"And then ah, well Fred sat down at the concert the other night, the last concert of the Tour year,[3] and it was Poley and Yvette's 50th Wedding Anniversary too. He said I was there, and I was this and that. He went down this whole list of people and mentioned what they did, and how he wanted to thank everybody for their efforts this year.

"And Fred finally said: ‘In this audience we have a lady... who’,” Bill was emphatic, “‘introduced the Cordovox to the world! An electronic organ in the form of an accordion’! And he said, 'An ex-Pennsylvanian and we hold very dear’, and blah-blah. He really gave her the biggest buildup of all, said, 'Betty Ann McCall’! And he had a pile of chicks sittin' up on that stage, y'know. I think –."

Zah zah-zah-zah-zah-zuuuhh!... A solo violin echoed dolefully.

Mj meant to spotlight Fred, not Betty Ann, when he said, "He must have respected Betty Ann!"

"Oh, great deal."

"I mean," said mj, "the way he wouldn't respect other women."

"Oh, very definitely."

The big crowd scarcely had settled in its seats before it was apparent that it was to witness a new order of things. Waring, who usually saves his patriotic medley for a big finish, tied it to his "America, I Hear You Singing" theme and used the medley as his opener. Then the wide variety of music in his repertoire – ranging through opera, boogie-woogie, spirituals, folk, rock and standards – brought the familiar strains of the catchy "Ain't She Sweet?" before a spiritual, "I Wonder as I Wander."

"Somehow, when I hear the descriptions of the way he relates to women, I don't get respect as one of the things –."

"Oh yeh, it's hard not to respect her, the way she was. Betty Ann would take her instrument after rehearsal, when everybody went whoopee-do to the bars 'n stuff. She was never one of those to go off to the Blue Note and Deer Head, I know. I'm speakin' of Betty Ann not as my wife but as a woman that was in the group and I didn't even like. But she'd take her instrument to go off and rehearse parts, or to get new sounds or a better sound than she already had for that part. And she'd come in the next day and she'd have a whole new unique sound. Well, she'd worked four or five hours on this, and he knew it. That put her in a category way far above anybody else."

the Deer Head sits across 611 (Main St. in Water Gap) from the old Castle Inn

The verse repeated, with more diverse coloring this time.

"And another thing he didn't mess with her for is, she's a fine musician, y'know."

This kicked off a procession of talented youngsters, used collectively as "The Young Pennsylvanians." Waves of applause greeted "September Song" and "Lover" before Waring and frog-voiced Poley McClintock joined in for a spirited "Bibbidy Bobbidy Boo" presentation.

When the prisoner began to revive, he was forced to sing again and his torture was resumed.[4]

The woodwinds took off now with a dance beat, Big-Band fashion, and expanded it at the end into a nineteen thirties movie fanfare announcing that someone important in the movie was about to try to prevail. The solo violin returned plaintively:

Dah dah dah dah dah daah!...             (I love you much too much!!!...)

"Well, there's another aspect to this thing. Betty Ann was a crutch for him. Everyone said it. She was a crutch for him; he...," Bill thought about how he wanted to say this: "Betty Ann was the one he could sit down and talk with 'n stuff. Ah, there are things that she hasn't brought out, and I don't feel at liberty to bring out, but, the things like ah, he had a girlfriend on the road, y'know. It was a real big thing, I mean, he was flippy-floppy over this girl, and he usta sit down with Betty Ann and discuss this with her. And she was the only person in the world that he did this with.

"As I said, she became a member of the family. She was the one that he wouldn't have to be on stage with: Betty Ann. He could sit down and really open himself, beyond –. I don't know if you've ever had a relationship with a woman like that."

Mj nodded.

The chorus began with a rhapsodic violin recitative, Hungarian-rhapsodically:

Dah da-da-da-da-DAH!...

"But I have, where really, it goes beyond. I knew girls in New York like that where, I didn't really have any desire for them sexually like that, but it was... Plutonic."

"Platonic."

"Plutonic yeah and y'see, it couldn't get to that stage I s’pose because she had known his great romances and all this. And she was very tight with his daughter; she still is: Dixie. They're very friendly."

Mj frowned. "Maternal," he said to Bill, "more than Platonic." He was incubating a Mother Theory now, not surprisingly, and would warn psychotherapist supervisees for years after this experience that they might go through a whole list of family roles sometimes before finding the one that helped most to explain the origin of their patient’s problem.

The band built, jota-style, faster, faster: Da, dadadada, dum!...

Bill was oblivious to mj’s ‘maternal’. He just kept plodding toward his mysterious destination: "Betty Ann never hung around here, that's another thing, the first couple of years she was in the group when she was young. She was married and went off! As a matter of fact, even at one point she would drive in from New York, do one night, and go back. She never was really," Bill sighed, "anything...," he sighed again, as if tired of taking everything so darn seriously, so many hours now without letup.

A Gershwin medley was highlighted by the dual talent of... [... ] ...singing at the piano to make "They Can't Take That Away from Me" memorable; and by a startlingly new arrangement of "Rhapsody in Blue" featuring... [Betty Ann McCall]... on the Cordovox....

‘Tired’, or whatever Bill might have been feeling, though, he did not flag in the least at his protracted, systematic effort to explain to his friend, mj, his objection to Fred’s behavior. He struggled, trying to think: "This Cordovox thing: she really –. Somehow it was some kind of a wild crutch. I've tried to figure it out many times, but, when we did that Nashville date and I took over, 'cause Fred had his heart attack, he didn't care about anybody else being on that recording date but Betty Ann."

If the prisoner had been a brave man, his heart was cooked and eaten by the young warriors, who believed that they would acquire his courage in this manner.[5]

"Partly," suggested mj, "because she could provide any sound that he needed." The 'Cordovox', as Fred would explain to the audience at every single live concert, was an electronic accordion with stops for everything from piccolo to church organ. Betty Ann could give Fred virtually any sound he heard in his head that should have been there but was missing because of the small size of his orchestra.

"Yes, that's certainly one thing."

"That's an enormous crutch," mj said. He had to soften Bill up so he’d be open to a ‘mother theory’ this time. The two friends were birds of a feather in at least one way: that neither would give up his cause and call it quits, as some of the reading public later complained.

"Well, not only that," Bill said, "but she was a phenomenal musician, and he immediately had a dislike for any phenomenal musicians because he felt," Bill spit it through his teeth, "they didn't respect him. That's one of his big hangups, his orchestra. He's had a hassle running with musicians for years!"

"Hmm," mj thought about this. "He must have felt she respected him too." That added more weight to his ‘mother theory’.

Act 1 then became the sole possession of the "Young Pennsylvanians," who received their heaviest applause for "Tie a Yellow Ribbon," before Lorraine Pirochta and a pair of veterans, Heidi Olstad and Nancy Tangen, made solid impact as the Andrews Sisters doing "Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B." The troupe then kidded the singing commercials of television for a sock finish that brought down the house.

They had talked their way into the wee hours of the morning now, and Bill still showed no sign that he might stop. Mj doubted his friend was even on the subject of salvaging a working relationship with Fred, he rambled so. But Bill knew what he was doing, as mj realized later: if mj was to understand, as he had just asked to understand, ‘how important was Betty Ann’ to understanding the falling out with Fred, he had to know how important she was to him, Bill. And that, in Bill’s mind, required a careful description of the moment when, ironically, Fred’s habit of advertising Betty Ann as the most critical and valuable member of The Pennsylvanians became the very thing that led to Bill’s finally being forced to get to know her better; since, when Fred had his heart attack, Bill had taken over the recording date, and Fred had told him that she would be more critical to the recording than anyone else. And Bill’s getting to know Betty Ann, finally, after years of working around her, was what had led to his falling in love with her and having to leave the Organization and Fred.

"Now with Betty Ann," he said, "he insisted on her being on the record date, to Nashville. He had to have her. And that was really how I got to know her. I mean, when she was down there it was the first time I ever felt anything but dislike for her. She was drawin' phenomenal money, money he couldn't afford to pay. He was payin' three times as much as anybody else in the Group. And I thought, 'Well who the hell is she’? My attitude was it was stupid for him to be paying this kind of money, other than bein' a dumb crutch for him."

The last verse was a frenzied pizzicato, so accelerated it passed in a flash.

.!.!.!.!.!.!!!!...

"But," mj’s voice strained: "she also meant something to him personally."

"Yes, but I was trying to look at it in strictly a business-like way."

"Which was wrong!" said mj, frustrated that he couldn’t keep Bill focused on the important, very special personal relationship Fred had enjoyed with Betty Ann for years, the very special relationship with her of which Bill had robbed Fred, in effect, by marrying her and then encouraging her, most likely, to stop working for Fred. Bill was indeed focused on that, however. He was building up to it. He was a storyteller. Complicated stories took time to tell, in Bill Blackburn’s television-free Huron world.

Although Act 2 had the psychedelic "Theme Song From 2001" as a highlight, its hour on stage was a special delight to older Waring fans for a trio of trademarked numbers by veterans Leonard Kranendonk ("Old Man River"), Jerry Toti ("On Top of Old Smokey") and Ralph Isbell ("Climb Every Mountain"). The troupe added the familiar "Dry Bones" featuring McClintock and, in magnificent fashion again, the stirring "Battle Hymn of the Republic," before winding up with Handel's “Hallelujah” chorus.

Afterwards, the prisoner's body was cut up to be cooked and eaten. Some Huron ate it with horror, while others relished the taste of human flesh, but to all it was an act of religious significance.[6]

Mj had meant his statement, ‘Which was wrong’, as an invitation to Bill to reflect for a minute on the extent and kind of personal feelings Fred had felt for Betty Ann. The thought was good, but his timing was not. Bill had decided to tell the story of how he and Betty Ann had suddenly fallen in love after working together all those years. He was coming around to it slowly, but surely, and could not be interrupted to worry about Fred Waring’s feelings. If he had wanted to think about someone’s feelings right then, it would not have been Fred’s feelings. Please. So naturally he stayed right where he was in his story about the way they finally had noticed each other after all those years; and he kept on going with it.

"Well, when she was in Nashville, see, she was sittin' down there with all these country pickers, 'n, she's usually, she just –." Bill sat up straight. "’Put the music before me and I'll play it, anything you put before me’. But she's not a 'head', a musician like these country pickers.

"And I bent over backwards to make sure she felt relaxed, and she said, 'I don't even know what I'm doing here, it's ridiculous of me to be here, to be even associated with them, they're fanTAStic’.

"These guys, I'd walk back there, I'd say, 'Can you give me, "Dah, duh Dah, d-duh Dah”’, y'know and BANG, it was there. Well, I felt compassion towards her, y'know."

Trombones and trumpets played staccato:  Blah!   blah!   blah!   blah!   blah!   BLAah!...  (I love you much too much!)  Violins swirled....        

"An' I think, one of the things that started this relationship off, she saw me in complete and total charge of a big unit of people, musicians, singers, and take over when Fred had his heart attack, right in the middle of recording in Nashville: a record. And NO-body knew the way to do it right. People tried, George Andrews tried, ah.... But I think that's one of the things that developed this relationship. One, I took great compassion towards her and started to notice her. As, I mean, something more than –....

"I had seen her before, and this aloof quality, and she'd walk in and she was a queen. And she walked in, I mean, not because of Fred, the way she carried herself. She was warm. She was friendly. But the way everybody –; like: to the young girls in the group she was somebody that knew a lot more than they knew, so they consequently leaned on her."

"She was everybody's mother!" mj managed to get in. He was getting excited again. Bill had robbed Fred of not just his mother, but everybody’s mother, mother Mary herself.

But it got no reaction, naturally. Bill had reached the all-important moment when he and Mother Mary were getting shivers here and there and stars in their eyes and mj’s job was to shut up and listen. Men didn't sit with each other very often and get frank about falling in love with a woman. It was a very special thing when it happened. No matter if it was three a.m. and Fred Waring was being barbecued alive, sinew by sinew, and you wanted to rescue him. It wasn’t the time to be shooting off psychiatric theory or rescuing a high-class imbecile snob boss from being roasted alive or having his employee walk out the door mad.

"The other Cordovox player," said Bill, "the one that alternated with her, she'd sit back and let Betty Ann play the rehearsal and sit there and watch her, finger a little bit, y'know. Everybody showed great deference to her.

"And, the first time I saw her –; it was during a reading or something. I showed compassion towards her, and when she saw George try to take the reins away, and I walked in and slapped them down, in a very nice way, and took over and conducted the date, produced the date, I think that was a –.  She gained a margin of respect on this date, and I gained respect for her."

The Show, which had opened to the strains of "Sleep," the Waring theme song, now closed with it. But the enthusiastic audience would not permit the 30-member troupe to leave, before coming through with a pair of encores. There were three curtain calls.

"Do you think –." Mj was exhausted. He desperately had to give birth to his mother-stealing theory somehow very soon or die. So, right on the shores of Indian hell, in a faintly glowing Huron longhouse, past the midnight of sacred council, and still lost as hell, in the middle of hearing out big Chief Interminable’s Deganawitha saga, he gave birth. "Do you think," he breathed as it came out, "that Fred sees it as your fault, that she," he breathed again, "left him last year, after you married her?"

"Yes, but she finished the year."

"Does he blame you and not her?!"

"Oh, of course. I think Fred respects my intelligence, to put it nicely, something like that. 'Cause, y'know, I've been –, I don't want to put it in a crude way, I don't want to say, 'nose to nose’. It wasn't nose to nose, but I stood there and matched words with him. I think he respects that. And he thinks, well, I've taken some of her respect away from him."

Mj’s Fred Waring in the mirror thought it was time for a finale, a huge orchestral wrap-up, BIG-movie style. It felt like a premature denouement, oddly, but maybe that was what the arranger had intended, since the subject was, after all: "I love you much too much!!!"...

"Well, you probably have taken some of her respect away from him," mj said with assurance. He relaxed for the first time in what seemed like hours and hours, feeling he finally had the answer. Bill had stolen Fred's mother from him. It made sense. Fred’s mother had been ‘his horse’, as Bill had said earlier in the evening, and then Betty Ann had become Fred’s horse in a similar way; and Fred had been ‘the apple of his mother’s eye’, as Bill had also said, and then Fred had become the apple of Betty Ann’s eye. She had demonstrated that fact all night by the way she would get mushy over how she saw Fred in her mind’s eye, every single time Bill portrayed him as a spunky, feisty, teenage-y brilliant brat.

Bill was calm. "No. She was going to leave Fred when I met her."

"Yes, but I mean your talking with her," mj frowned. "You probably helped her see Fred in a different light." Mj might have taken ten peyote buttons, but he was more rational than Sigmund Freud. He had his mother-stealing interpretation nailed down tightly already and it was right, as he would understand much better, and much later. In Fred’s deepest emotions, Bill had stolen the wine god’s mother-substitute, Betty Ann, everybody’s mother, Earth Mother herself: Demeter; Cybele; Mary; whatever you called the earth mother. Bill had stolen from Fred his goddess-mother. But it would take mj lorenzo years to pinpoint exactly what this must have felt like for Fred. It was an ancient theme in religions the world over. Almost every tribe or people had used a different name for the earth-mother goddess, going practically all the way back to her biggest heyday during the Stone Age, and a different name for her son, the wine God, but almost every civilization or culture had worshiped both deities, and they were almost always linked, an earth mother, and her wine-god son who had been and/or would be cut up in pieces and/or sacrificed in some form.

And Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians for some apparently deep and unconscious human psychological reason had just spent the last 56 years playing the whole thing out.

Right down to the gruesome sacrifice of the wine God.

AS IF:  Fred really HAD been as worthy of deification as his devotees had acted, and really HAD been the Wine-God son of the Earth-Mother goddess, Everybody’s-Mother, Betty Ann.

HOW WAS IT POSSIBLE?![7]

Dr. Lorenzo’s Jungian pundit followers claimed their hero mj, ‘without even trying’, had ‘proven’ Jung’s theory of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, the universal symbolic structure of human psychology, and that was a very big claim to make, everyone said, because Jung’s theory was a huge and difficult thing to prove. Jung himself had practically gone psychotic trying to demonstrate and prove it!

Fred Waring and Betty Ann McCall Blackburn

the mythical archetypal relationship which was the true source of the huge fuss

that led to mj lorenzo’s

second book

Tales of Waring

More shocking yet, therefore, as mj would also realize years later, Bill Blackburn had done something even more unspeakable in Fred’s eyes than just to ‘steal Betty Ann’ from the Pennsylvanians. He had broken a taboo of almost every ancient religion. He had not merely stolen the Earth Mother from all of her worshipers, including the Pennsylvanians and the audiences. He had robbed the sacred, divine, widely worshiped goddess of the earth from her wine-god son, the one god who was always more human than all the other gods, the one god that always came to live on earth in human form, and the one always designated for sacrifice so that all humans could be reborn and experience a new life, a life after death even, maybe. Bill had intruded into the sacred circle and robbed divinity of divinity. It was like robbing Jesus and his Christian religion of Mary, and 'Jesus' was pissed. ‘Jealousy’ didn’t cover it. Fred was ‘righteously pissed to high heaven and knew he had every right to be’. That was how the ‘Hoha pundits’ put it eventually, only for purposes of emphasizing, as usual, just how arrogant Fred Waring and people like him could get.

"I don't think I talked her into anything. I think she saw him for what he was before I came along," Bill said in all seriousness, of course; it felt like eons since he had last cracked a joke.

And this answer bode poorly for Fred’s verdict because it left Fred with no excuse for his mean behavior toward Bill, if it was true. And Bill was known for speaking the truth. If Betty Ann made her own choices, then Fred could not blame Bill for Betty Ann’s quitting the Pennsylvanians and had no right to treat Bill badly over it, even if Fred and Betty Ann were both divine, as egomaniac Fred seemed to have felt. In fact, he would have had no right treating Bill like dirt even if Bill had encouraged Betty Ann to leave Fred, yet he had treated Bill like dirt for some reason and Bill had felt devalued, dehumanized, and emasculated. It was obvious. Otherwise, Bill would not have been so mad. And Bill’s answer did not help psychoanalysis either; or mj and his fairy tale. It helped Bill Blackburn more than anyone, at this point; and so mj sounded rather disappointed when he finally said, "Really?"

Bill nodded like a tribal statesman. He sat like the Five-Nation Tree of Peace, rooted, penetrating the ground beneath the house, grasping a turtle-shell earth. He was the storyteller Deganawitha, Iroquois Peacemaker, born of a Huron virgin, reforming and uniting the Iroquois nations. In six hours this man had endured a soul-combing of mythic proportion. What more could anyone expect from him in one night?

It was time to put an end to it, this tedious, morbid, pointless longhouse ceremony sacrificing the man the Pennsylvanians treated like a god.

"Mj, my honest opinion is, Betty Ann is a lot sharper than she's given credit for, in that respect. I know she doesn't think that, but I think that, and I don't know what to do about it. That's the light she saw Fred in!"

On each of his visits to the Masonic Temple, the septuagenarian band leader provides first class entertainment geared to the '70's, but which needs no X-rated material to please its audiences. In addition, Scranton Kiwanis Club sees to it that funds are raised for worthy community purposes. How lucky can we get?[8]

The scalps were tanned and, in time of war, were fastened onto poles and set upon the walls of villages to frighten attackers.[9]

With a heave of gut and a loud sigh, mj got in a kind of last word on this subject for the moment; and it was his brand new baby of a theory, still coming out into the world, looking for daylight. He sighed: "But anyway, even if it was not your fault, the point is, Fred blames you that she is gone. That’s the point. It’s how he sees her leaving him that matters, not how it is; because how he sees it is the thing that determines how he treats you. And he sees you, right or wrong, as having taken from him someone who had been a kind of mother to him, and a mother to everyone else in the Pennsylvanians too."

It was obvious.

Vuh vah-vah-vah-vuh-voooommmm!!!! There was a nineteen-thirties cinematic orchestral racket, the kind played before the movie intermission, when everything is still up in the air.

Bill looked at his friend without reaction. He had NO interest whatever in understanding Fred Waring or making peace with him after what Fred had put him through. That was why he had focused his night’s activity on revenge in the excruciatingly protracted form of a book that would torture Fred mentally like a sub-lethal flesh wound over the next ten millennia. It was becoming more obvious with every passing minute. He was meting out revenge right now and had been doing it for hours already, even though he continued to hide overt expressions of anger, as tribal custom required. And who knew how much longer he would draw out the torture? Mj was the only one looking for ‘understanding’ and ‘peace’. Bill certainly was not. He was talking and talking, true, but merely to try and help out his poor, mixed up friend, mj, see what had really happened, not to find a way of making peace. But it was all happening too fast for poor mj to sort out, so he kept fumbling and stumbling like a nervous freshman tenderfoot brave, right through the whole dark and protracted, gruesome longhouse ordeal.

the Deer Head attracted Fred’s Pennsylvanians after their rehearsals at the old Castle Inn

because it was just across the street

the Deer Head’s jazz schedule as photographed on November 8, 2018