Tales of Waring: i married her so she'd quit

[1] Virginia Waring mentions with regard to Fred’s frequent incorporation of barbershop technique into his concerts: “Fred was irrepressible to the end. In July, 1984, three weeks before he died, he was invited to St. Louis to receive an honorary lifetime membership from the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America. He was standing onstage before many thousands in the audience while the presenter was going on and on about the lifetime honor. Fred interrupted, saying dryly, ‘I’m glad you didn’t wait any longer.’ He always saw the ridiculous side to a stuffy situation.” (p. 359) He died three weeks later.

As for the notion ‘millions of concerts’, 100 concerts a year times 25 years on the road is 2500.
The song is "I Want a Girl (Just Like the Girl that Married Dear Old Dad)" by Harry Von Tilzer and William Dillon, but the Dr. appears to have heard it a little unlike the only recording of it he possessed, the one on the second side of the second record of "The Best of Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians." In that version there is no actual barbershop quartet or sound, for example, just the full glee club.

[2] In defense of passages of this nature in his Tales of Waring, Dr. Lorenzo offered corroboration from Virginia Waring’s biography of her husband. See "How It All Started," footnote 4.

[3] Somewhere in Trigger. The exact number of the page for this quotation had fallen in a black hole and no one could find it in Trigger’s stupendous, minutely researched volume of Huron ethnohistory, as of press time, 2019, not Sammy or his editors, or Dr. Lorenzo. But, they could produce a similar thought from Trigger’s final summary statement at the end of his whopping, historymaking 850-page oeuvre (p. 848): “Most Huron became convinced that the Jesuits were malevolent sorcerers who sought to destroy the Huron people. Motives were established why the Jesuits should do this and as the Huron learned more about what the Jesuits believed and did, their actions and possessions were interpreted as proof that they practised witchcraft.”

Throughout the years of interaction between the two societies, that of the Amerindian Huron tribe and the French Jesuits, there were two Huron groups, each with its own reaction to the Jesuits. One group, called the ‘traditionalists’, wanted to retain their old way of life and have the Jesuits from France disappear; but they needed the trade items which the French traders provided them, traders who said (as the French king had told them to say) that they could not provide the goods (especially guns) unless the Huron accepted the presence and Christian teachings of the Jesuits. The other group were the semi-converted Huron whom the Jesuits were still working on, making them into more perfect Christians. The resulting split and chaos in the Huron tribe weakened them exactly when they most needed to defend themselves against an increasingly aggressive and far more populous neighboring nation of Iroquois. While recognizing this, as Trigger claims, the Jesuits nevertheless persisted aggressively with their chaos-producing attempts at Christianization (p. 849): “Their [the Jesuits’] failure to understand Huron beliefs, or to work effectively to [gradually, and respectfully, and carefully] change these beliefs from within, must therefore be attributed to the limited and [merely] pragmatic nature of their research and to their inability even for strategic purposes to transcend intellectually the values to which they were so fiercely committed. [In other words:] The Jesuits’ desire to destroy Huron religion [as fast as possible] outstripped their search to understand it.” Another way to say it might be: they tried so hard and inflexibly to convert the tribe, they killed it. How can you convert a tribe if it’s dead? Another quote along the same lines, about the Jesuits being ‘sorcerers’: “There can be no doubt that the Huron regarded the Jesuits as shamans or sorcerers who controlled immense power and, therefore, had to be treated with great circumspection. Evidence of this power was perceived in their ability to transmit messages on pieces of paper, to control the weather, and to avoid or easily recover from illnesses that proved fatal to the Indians. The Jesuits further enhanced their reputation by predicting the lunar eclipses of 1637 and 1638, which made many Huron believe they had caused these events to happen...” etc., etc. (p. 566). It was a tragedy of errors on both sides (p. 848f): “Both the French and the Huron used their own concepts of evil as a means of structuring their respective lack of understanding of each other’s ways.” Also p. 848: “As frequently happens in such situations, both the Huron and the Jesuits interpreted those portions of each other’s beliefs that they could not understand, or that they believed threatened their own interests, as manifestations of evil as each conceived of it.”

Americans and all nations should be studying such history in second grade and every grade thereafter. The Republicans and Democrats are perfectly capable of destroying each other too, and with that, America. This is why Dr. Lorenzo has stressed situations of cross-cultural misunderstanding in almost every work of writing and/or images he has produced.

[4] Somewhere in Trigger. Exact page number lost. See above note. Explanation the same. But the next two quotations from Trigger (footnotes 5 and 6) essentially say the same thing as the quotation here.

[5] Trigger, pg. 59. As for the Huron use of ‘circumlocution’, Dr. Lorenzo offered some canny and far-reaching observations in early 2019. He felt that the Mexican flare for the indirecta, or hint, probably came at least as much from their Native American roots as from their Spanish European heritage, if from the latter at all. Unlike U.S. Americans (and their English European forebears), Mexicans usually did not confront each other either in print or in person, but ‘spoke around’ (literal meaning of ‘circumlocution’) an issue. As Trigger stated in his analysis of the Huron culture, the same was true of their tribal elders, who spoke around an important point they were trying to make, so that the listener(s) could fill in the real meaning on their own, a trick which gave more power to the listener, and taught him to listen carefully if he wanted to survive. It showed the listener more respect, in a way, than just blasting him with the main point, as if he couldn’t figure it out on his own. But it took longer, that was the problem for Americans; who in their impatience when they spoke on a subject (or did practically anything) considered it ‘inconvenient’ to help a listener attain understanding in such a protracted, time-consuming way, a way which showed the listener so much ‘unnecessary’ deference.

The Dr. felt Donald Trump’s treatment of the leaders of Western democracies was possibly an example of this last, our unfortunately often typically impatient American approach to non-Americans. Trump was an exaggerated example of the phenomenon, in fact, he said in January, 2019, during a Tales of Waring reading for the CAWC, The Canadian and American Writers’ Club, in Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico. “Unlike Waring, who gave philanthropically to Boy Scouts and U.S. soldiers on leave, and the elderly, the maimed, the needy and so on,” he warned, “Trump shows respect and deference only to filthy rich, super-powerful, tyrannical global oligarchs similar in many ways to himself, no matter what country they come from, as if they were the only kind of people he could ever really and truly understand, identify with and like, and want to emulate, no matter how totalitarian, militarily aggressive against neighbors, murderous, or generally ruthless; and he treats all others like insensate dogs that need a good kick whenever it might serve his selfish purpose. This is, of course, a crime against his true human self, and against his God (he calls himself a 'good Christian'), his Christ, and against most religions and all humanity, for which he will probably eventually suffer abasement at the hands of all of the globe’s people, likely dragging his own country into the cauldron with him, for having been so arrogant as to elect him and keep him in power by remaining in denial and in passive, obedient, brainwashed and depersonalized silence through all of his outrageous transgressions of public and sacred Christian democratic Western-world tradition, just as the Germans did for Hitler. Heil, Donald!”

Lorenzo's sentences were too long, screeched the writers, but other than that, most agreed heartily enough to stand up around their four long tables and cheer in the middle of brunch for La Nueva Posada’s hotel guests at the lovely lakeside patio restaurant. And Michael Eager, owner of La Posada, was so delighted with the unusually huge CAWC turnout (four long tables when one was standard!) he offered the Dr. free lodging with a lovely lakeside view the next time he came to town.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Op cit, 544.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Op cit, 561.

[11] Ibid.

[12] The concert at East Stroudsburg State College mentioned in two previous chapters: “Those Audiences Are My People;” and "How Important Is Betty Ann?"

[13] Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1733.

[14] A further example of lyrics written (and sung) in ‘Tone-Syllables’. For an explanation of Fred’s choral technique of ‘Tone-Syllables’, see "How It All Started," footnote 3.

[15] Trigger, 544.