Tales of Waring: should there be a benediction?

[1] More information on this cartoon may be found in the prefatory note, “a note regarding the Waring Collection cartoons,” and in Tales 11 and 18 (where selected portions of the cartoon appear), “The Biggest Boozer of Them All” (one portion at top of page, another at bottom), and “How to Write a Book about Fred Waring” (bottom of page).

[2] Numbers 6:24-26. New American Standard Bible.

[3] Psalm 41:13. New American Standard Bible.

[4] The Dr. won that suit in Federal Court in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and settled two suits in Colorado years later in his career as psychiatrist. “Just three suits,” he said, “and none won by the other side. That’s not bad after treating THOUSANDS of the most difficult mental illness cases in prisons, penitentiaries, state mental hospitals, private hospitals, public and private outpatient mental health programs and my own private practice, not to mention the patients treated by clinicians who worked under my license, who likewise could have sued. I always took patients nobody else wanted,” he added, “and I supervised many therapists whose patients could have gone after me. Which means, I think, that most of the people I doctored felt they were helped. That’s my impression. I helped people, even some of the worst suffering people on the planet. But I don’t take ANY of the credit. I can’t. I just learned from the best teachers in the world how to let healing energy run through me – from the Source of Healing – to people who needed it.”

[5] Virginia Waring, op. cit., p. 367.

[6] Dr. Lorenzo sent one note more to Sammy as they were closing down the project to publish their ‘look at’ Tales of Waring: “I’ve always loved working on this book because it took me back to my parents’ world, the good ol' days when people still sang love songs. Hearing the Waring love songs still reminds me of how my parents loved each other, and their love produced me. It gave me life, brought me into the world. It protected and surrounded me. I remember sitting in my mother’s lap in Florence, at the Browns’ across the street from the parsonage, before we got our TV, watching Fred Waring on the Browns’ TV half asleep and dreaming, with my head between her breasts, and my father and big sister a few feet away, all of us having gone to great excited and happy effort to take a break from serious preacher work and go watch a FUN! Fred Waring choral extravaganza on TV. Any child could get the essence of a Waring show. The pranks and jokes on a Waring recording still remind me of how my father joked with everybody in the family and church and neighborhood. My mother was more serious. I think I’m affected by Waring’s music so profoundly, at least partly because it takes me back to that love, when I often feel there’s nobody left in the world who loves me like my parents did. I was about 15 when one day suddenly it dawned on me that for the past fifteen years I had been falling in love with first one parent, for maybe a year or two, and then the other parent, for about the same amount of time. I’d switch back and forth in my dreamy infatuation, blithely ignoring anything Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung taught about 'normal' and 'abnormal' psychodynamics, since happily at that point I hadn’t heard of them. Maybe it wasn’t normal, my falling in love with BOTH parents, but nobody complained. Maybe nobody noticed but me. I’m sure I’m not making this up. It really happened, because I remember the day I realized how I was constituted, as far as loving parents was concerned. Ever since 15 I’ve honored that dawning realization and kept the understanding alive in myself, my own special secret, which you are the first to hear because just a few years later I learned that Freud said a boy was supposed to fall in love with his mother, not his father, and everybody right then thought Freud was gospel. (You can print this revelation if you want. I don't keep many secrets any more.) And Waring’s music, maybe better than any other trick, zaps me right back to that feeling of bliss surrounded by love. And I know that their love for each other and for me and my sister and everybody else came from another source, at least partly. The love for life and eros were built into them by biology, but there was an added dimension provided by basking in a religion and its worldview, which was founded on love and forgiveness and faith, and though you could twist an argument for thinking that maybe a Grateful Dead concert could produce the same effect in some people, I think that in me, at least, that effect is produced – certainly in my case – better by Waring’s than by Jerry Garcia’s music.”