The collection of burnt-out late-sixties radical pundits and such-like who rallied around mj lorenzo everywhere in their minds from late 1971 on, weighing his importance; criticizing him literary-wisely and every-wise-ly imaginable; and then publishing their thoughts on ‘everything from his writing to his wringing of hands’ (as Newsweek put it); insisted that his fourth book, while it: ‘appeared to be’ about a fairytale love affair, courtship, wedding and honeymoon of two friends of his, as its title pages advertised; was more correctly – and ‘really’ – a story about:

‘escaping  from  maya’.

For (as a core group of Legs pundits agreed in a jointly signed letter to the San Francisco Jung Society Library Journal in 1990):

...Mrs. Nixon’s Legs was the author’s answer to his whole life up until then, even to his greatest book, The Remaking; for it confessed he recognized he had become trapped and lost again in his own magnificently spun ‘web’. His fourth book in reality was about escaping from that kind of mental ‘spider’s web’ which people in India for millennia have called:  maya…¹

Or so claimed the Legs pundits anyway.

‘Instead of going crazy or killing himself’, as the ‘psycho-pundits’ added in The Village Voice later, meaning: ‘...for once without resorting to the Western world’s usual bad-mannered responses to falling into the mental trap called maya; as were the Dr.’s habit during too much of his life before and after Mrs. Nixon’s Legs’.

By the early nineteen nineties, in other words, it was just as clear to mj lorenzo’s profundity-pundity following, as it was to high school English clubs who had made understanding the doctor’s first four books their after-school project, that by late summer of 1974, the young doctor, as they all said: ‘might have committed hari kiri, had he not heard about a meditation taught by a teenage guru from India’.      

Legs pundits loved to sum up mj’s first four books in a famous four-point way, therefore. It was not the only way to comprehend the author’s first four books, as they admitted; but it certainly was the best way to understand his fourth book, Mrs. Nixon’s Legs; which they complained had become a best-seller ‘only because it was completely misunderstood as being a romp of a romantic comedy’.

They called themselves the Legs pundits because, as they said, it was their mission and job and responsibility to make sure that ‘the whole planet’ got the real message of mj lorenzo’s ‘very popular but often disgracefully underestimated fourth book’, Exactly How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert.

That was why they traveled around the globe in psychedelically painted VW buses until they died, every single one, doing just that.

Or so they said they would do.

And it appears that most of them must have succeeded; because few of them are around these days any more.

And yet most of the planet has heard of mj lorenzo’s Legs pundits, and their all-important ‘four points’.