Oh tell us, what was the groom dressed in? Ooo-aahh.

Sky-blue britches with silver stitches Ooo-ooo-aaahh...

Fall had passed its color peak in the Poconos. And, in all of the little hick podunk outposts like Minisink Hills, brown and purple leaves sat nearly a half-foot thick. Around the Blackburns’ little bungalow of buttercup yellow with sky blue trim, sweet colors of the Swedish flag, thousands of these dark leaves blanketed and hid a recently mowed grass lawn which had been fluorescent green a few days before. Big green oak leaves that had turned darkish colors buried the frostbitten tomato patch. Dark and wet matted leaves hid the reddening poison ivy and the two little dirt paths at the back of the house, the paths which Bill had carved through grass lawn to show Betty Ann how much he loved her; since she had begged him for those two paths over and over again. And away back at the end of the property, dead leaves matted the two muddy banks of Minisink Creek, framing its ripples of silver with two sloping walls of mottled brown and purple.

Mj had just pulled his badly faded blue Volkswagen Bug into the Blackburn driveway and turned it off. And now he sat there with Dlune, mesmerized for a second by the scene. The day’s last fading sunlight, as he saw it, danced on the rippling creek like a spangled chorus line of girls that changed formations and slipped offstage one sparkle at a time, doing it all so discreetly and perfectly that all the light and life abandoned the scene without anyone noticing; until it was blacker and emptier at the back of the Blackburns’ woodsy, rustic little parcel of earth than anyone would have thought possible, since the sun was still low in the sky, trying to keep things light.

The same sun had shone all day like a Renaissance Sun King, dressed in gold in a French fairy tale; and now it too did a sleepy slow-motion dance, preparing for bed with a grandeur that was precise. And the whole deliberately slowed-down sunset display and performance seemed supervised by an eastern woodlands Indian chief, whose forehead, nose and chin looked proudly upward and outward from the dark and jagged face of Kittatinny Mountain, just across the Delaware River.

These were mj’s crazy thoughts.

But mj's mind liked to wander too wackily far at times, he knew; and so he kept them to himself and let Dlune watch in silence.

How could a Native American tribal chief attend the nighttime bedding down of a Renaissance French king?

What a ridiculous pile of simile, metaphor and mierde for thought.

Anachronous thought, too, for that matter.

Mj’s roving mind coughed up the craziest, most unlikely and anachronistic, impossible thoughts sometimes, just as the guru said. 

But on the other hand ‘a sunset was not a sunset’, simply and merely, as even the guru admitted on tapes that Joey sent in the mail. It was true. The guru made sense. Joey’s teenage guru genius could say simple things in a way that was creative and mind-blowing and produced RESULTS in your poor, lonely, miserable heart.²

And mj and Dlune had brought to the Blackburns’ little woodsy ranchito a new project, a never-ending one in fact, an amazing baby who whimpered just now. And so they hauled the tiny boy and his trappings and mj’s tape recorder and his list of questions for Bill Blackburn up the leaf-plastered lawn, up to the rickety porch steps, right under late-blooming deep red rambler roses, and right up to the warped and old front door screen.

In the bungalow's little living room Betty Ann oohed and aahed over the sleeping baby; maybe because (as she said) his name was ‘Freddie’, reminding her of one of her favorite father figures, Fred Waring. His middle name, on the other hand, was pulled from a paperback entitled Third World Names, and Bill puffed his chest that his friends, mj and Dlune, had chosen a real Native American name for their baby boy and were even using that name on a daily basis instead of ‘Freddie’.

Dlune Lorenzo oohed and aahed too, over something new and blue and yellow and Swedish in the kitchen; forgetting conveniently that she was only one mere thirty-second part Swedish, while thirty-one parts Native American. Maybe she put on this show because pretending to be Swedish produced an intense and ineffable bond with her dazzlingly pretty stage-star friend, Betty Ann; who felt, despite all common sense and plain reason, that she had no earthly parents, no real family, and no clear heritage. So it was probably to help her friend forget all of her exact-family-of-origin neurosis that Dlune, who had thought of herself happily her whole life as raised by a far northerly tribe, not by a family, merely, complained to Betty Ann about a baby-nursing crisis.

Bill and mj grieved like two cornballs over a recent fishing fiasco. And then the ritual of martini and wine began; and the four took up their usual positions on Blackburn furniture around mj’s Sears ‘SOLID STATE’ tape recorder lying on the low oak coffee table.

The storytelling outline was agreed upon again among the four, and it was to be:

Bill’s courting of Betty Ann; their wedding at the Warings’ 'Gatehouse' on December 15, 1972; and finally their honeymoon trip the next day with Fred and the Pennsylvanians to Washington D.C. for the annual White House Christmas Concert and Party for Cabinet and White House Staff.

And Bill was sworn to tell every single one without fail of mj’s favorite stories and vignettes from that special time period in the lives of all four: including, most importantly, mj’s very favorite story, which he and Bill called, ‘Mrs. Nixon’s Legs’.

Dlune and the baby were in a chair at Betty Ann's right side; and mj had found his usual spot on the couch facing the cherry-framed mirror on the east wall. Betty Ann and Dlune were to his left near the kitchen, and Bill to his right near the front door. And he immediately heard in his head – or somewhere – the rhythmic fiddling for a barn-dance hoedown, with yelling and stomping and swinging, just as he had heard it, and seen it, at the concert in New Jersey a week before.

Fred’s famous tenors began a hokey old folkloric song-of-the-South, in faultless, high-class, English-glee unison:³

Mis-ter Frog a-court-in' he did ride, mm hmmm, mm hmmm,

Mis-ter Frog a-court-in' he did ride, mm hmmm, mm hmmm,

Mis-ter Frog a-court-in' he did ride,

A sword and pis-tol by his side, mm hmmm, mm hmmm....⁴

Mj’s plan was to get his own favorite Fred Waring story-sequence recorded on tape, and to try to understand certain things about it that had puzzled his mind for months; and so he had arrived tonight with a list of questions. The other three, however, had come to the interview with different agendas, of course; just as Bill and Betty Ann had come with their own unique goals – conscious and unconscious – to the first two interviews and had created such consternation and disarray thereby. The differences in goals seemed hardly significant to mj this night, however. Dlune’s agenda, for example, when she had described it in the car coming down the mountain, had not seemed to conflict with anything he was wanting; or with what the Blackburns had said they would be wanting either, for that matter. Instead the various wishes overlapped, he thought. They complemented each other this time, you could say. And it surprised him a little. Because: in many ways the four of them seemed to be coming at the story from different UNIVERSES, not just different personalities; the U.S.A. was such a mess of a melting pot of extremely different origins and dreams, at times.

The song in mj’s head had come from tidewater, bayou or Okeefenokee country, probably, since it portrayed a southern cavalier in a swamp. And: since it was a traditional American folk ditty of a slightly silly kind, Fred had made the high sopranos squeal – the next four lines – in schoolgirl unison; vivace; and purposely virginal and naïve:

He rode up to Miss Mous-ie's door, mm hmmm, mm hmmm,

He rode up to Miss Mous-ie's door, mm hmmm, mm hmmm,

He rode up to Miss Mous-ie's door,

Where he had of-ten been be-fore, mm hmmm, mm hmmm....

Bill’s priority for his life at the moment, including even the interview, was to replace former destructive liaisons with the one and only relationship that mattered any more, his marriage to Betty Ann McCall, NO TURNING BACK. He had explained this to mj in private. Somebody in the family had to be established as chief of the crazy ranchito, he had explained to mj; and poor Betty Ann had been given little choice but to agree to accept a secondary role to Bill’s usual chiefly and kingly style of doing things. What good was a tribe or ranchito without a chief? None; as Bill had warned mj.

And so, as the four sat down together now, mj was conscious of the fact that Betty Ann might be taking more of a back seat to Bill’s role than in the past; and that she would choose, most likely, to not raise for general discussion, on such a very special occasion, the blessings and sacrifices of her new role.

The tenor men answered the noncommittal virginal twang of Fred’s ‘girls’ with a swing that was romantic, yet discreet:

And took Miss Mou-sie on his knee, mm hmmm, mm hmmm,

And took Miss Mou-sie on his knee, mm hmmm, mm hmmm,....

Then the baritones and basses joined in, slowing dramatically the song and the whole world:

He       took       Miss       Mou-sie       on       his       knee,

And            said,....

A single bass voice croaked frog-like, all by himself, even more slowly and very soulfully:

'My            dear,          will

   you          mar-   ry             me?'...⁵

Bill had acted like a father to Fred at times; and Fred had been a kind of father to Bill sometimes too; as mj had uncovered during the first two interviews. While Betty Ann had functioned for fifteen years as a kind of holy mother figure to Fred; and yet he had often acted like a father to little orphan Betty Ann, in the same way Poley and Yvette had reacted to her like parents. They had all tried to make up for her lifetime of feeling incurably denied of real blood parents. All the relationships were bolixed up and mind-boggling, in fact; to such an extent that some simple way of making sense of them was required. But the Freudian psychoanalytic way of understanding things had gotten terribly twisted at times too, as mj had discovered to his disappointment during those first two interviews. How, for example, could Fred be father to his mother-madonna, Betty Ann; who in addition had almost married, by the way, one of Fred’s very own sons? And so: even with all the understanding of motives that mj had gained from normal life observation plus psychoanalytic residency training, NONE OF IT had helped him achieve one of his main goals during the first two interviews: which had been to find some Freudian psychiatric trick for preventing Bill’s quitting Fred (since that -- Bill's quitting Fred -- would end the Fred Waring fairy tale they had all been living together, as mj felt).

He had failed. And Bill had quit working for Fred after the second interview.

And yet, let's face it: how could any understanding of these relationships ever have prevented or undone what was bound to have happened to every single previous cockeyed swamp relationship on the day Mister Frog and Miss Mousie fell in love and got holy freaking married? How could Freudian or any psychoanalysis have undone that applecart upset? How could Poley McCllintock, for example, EVER have found a comfortable niche in this newly enraveled nest of river rats and savior frogs? How could all of mj’s training in Freudian psychiatric psycho-schmaltz technique ever have helped make Poley’s weird, fawning ‘father-surrogate’ attachment to Betty Ann McCall fit in to Bill Blackburn’s kingly and chiefly universe? Mj had spent months already, trying to help these two best friends of his, Bill and Betty Ann, find Freudian psychoanalytic tricks for living and working with all of their former best friends; and he had accomplished NOTHING and driven himself crazy.

He would have been in a mental hospital NOW, this very night, as a broad representation of mj lorenzo’s ‘psychiatric’ pundits claimed in a letter to Psychiatric Times in 2003, ‘if the guru had not come along with a meditation that saved Dr. Lorenzo from psychoanalyzing his universe to psychotic smithereens’.

Psychoanalysis could only do so much to help two people – like Bill Blackburn and Fred Waring – to resolve a conflict between them; as young Dr. mj lorenzo was beginning to understand. For one thing, Freudian psychoanalytic theory ignored thoroughly the very important fact that many mental and emotional discomforts in this crazy world, many individual emotional conditions that might otherwise LOOK at first like what Sigmund Freud would have wanted to call ‘neuroses’ or mild mental ‘illnesses’, resulted more correctly from misunderstandings and misinterpretations arising out of simple and unsurprising cultural or sub-cultural or world-view and values differences between individuals or between groups of people, especially in the very culturally variegated U.S. of A. Mj would come to understand this thoroughly only many years later, when he finally realized he had not been able to help Bill and Fred patch up their differences largely because he had failed to comprehend how much Fred’s arrogant, spoiled-rich-kid, white-boss attitude had profoundly offended Bill’s dignified Native American, tribal-Huron sense of how men all over the world of every kind and color, even the men of enemy tribes, OUGHT to be expected to treat one another on a very basic and very human day-to-day working level.

Mj lorenzo, you could say, was ‘still inadequately equipped’ in 1974 for changing the course of world history, or even LOCAL history in the Poconos, as the Legs pundits stressed. He ‘could not even help two friends, Bill Blackburn and Fred Waring, patch up a misunderstanding’, as his pundit following observed years later in a printed position statement sent to a Midwestern college newspaper. That was why the only option left mj at the moment, as it had slowly come to seem over the summer, was what Joey’s guru was calling on his tapes ‘detachment’, meaning: the art of learning how to accept those things one could not change, no matter how much one might want to change them.

Meditating on ‘the wave’ recently had bought mj some of this desperately needed ‘detachment’ finally. Meditating had muted his crazy desires, in other words. And the comfort gained had begun to merge with an affection for the one who had taught him how to feel such wonderful comfort. His newfound ‘detachment’ had associated itself with a surprise affection, even love, for the young guru whom he had never met. And from that point on, mj lorenzo had begun seeing everything in terms of love; because loving a spiritual master was very much like being in love in very shocking fact, as it turned out.⁶

That strange and shocking fact explained why for a few months in late 1974 it seemed to mj sometimes that the only explanation for anything any more was love, unselfish love, fascinating in its surprise and exciting, even banal permutations, including the ins and outs of seeking, winning and losing love. He saw things this way, as the Legs pundits explained to the world much later, ‘because he was in love at that very moment’ with the young guru he had never seen. He came to such conclusions about the prevalence of love everywhere because he realized that the guru’s constant ‘wave’, meaning the method the guru taught, of meditating, amounted essentially – once you had ‘fallen in love’ with the guru who had taught it to you – to riding a constantly rocking wave of pure unselfish love.

Riding that wave, as mj did more and more these days, he gradually suffered the revelation that every selfish and worldly fleshly love was capable of carrying an element of unselfish unworldly love. Some form of love could explain just about every single emotional entanglement in everybody’s world, apparently; and a surprising portion of it was shockingly unselfish.

And the Waring band put out a rousingly loud folksy round-up music call suddenly, right in the middle of their song. The round-up music accelerated, swirlin' and whirlin' and carryin' on like a hoedown. But then, just as suddenly, the tenors returned at original tempo, with their delicate, careful and tasteful love story of how Mr. Frog had asked Miss Mousie to marry, and all hell had broken loose:

Uncle Rat he said when he came home, 'Ah hah! Ah hah’!

Uncle Rat he said when he came home, 'Ah hah! Ah hah’!

Uncle Rat he said when he came home,

Bass solo, very, very bass:

‘Who's    been    here

      while    I've    been    gone’?!...

The guru's young tenor voice, heavily Hindi-accented but always highly intelligent, filled mj’s head at the most unlikely times, transplanted there somehow from all the tapes that Joey had mailed and that mj had listened to – some of them – again and again.

You could go to medical school if you were smart enough to qualify, the guru said, in effect, on one tape. BUT: did that mean that you were primarily a doctor? Was mj lorenzo a doctor primarily, in other words? No. He was in the world for another reason primarily. Being a doctor was NOT the primary purpose of his life.⁷

In short the guru’s powerful combination of enlightenment and detachment, of talking truth and teaching meditation, had left poor mj in a swirl of shock, just about. For several days before the interview, he had kept himself so successfully subdued by meditating on the wave that by this point in the evening he was entranced and elated and heard music others could not hear – in the exact same manner he had heard music during the first two interviews – only a bit more calmly and less crazily this time.

A solo soprano sounded enthralled and virginal:

'A very fine gentle-man has been here, mm hmm, mm hmmm,

A very fine gentle-man has been here, mm hmm, mm hmmm,

A very fine gentle-man has been here,

He wish-es me to be his dear, mm hmmm.'...

Maybe a kind of entranced elation like mj’s was exactly what the Blackburn marriage had needed from a close friend at the moment, as the Legs pundits observed later: maybe the timing of the guru’s arrival in the western world, they said, had been as perfect for the Blackburns (who never would meet the kid guru, or even hear about him) as it had been for mj.

"Mj, are you ready?" Bill said.

"Yes, of course."

Bill wanted the interview thing done with.

"See what you started,” Bill teased super-loudly in his usual manner of hilarious uproar, “when you said to me, when you were supposed to be just fishing in that rowboat of yours made of aluminum (!), that I should ‘write a book about Fred Waring’!!!?  This is all your fault, mj!"⁸

Bill laughed so hard and long, and loud, and louder and louder still, that mj could hear it way up in the stratosphere at the top of the parabolic wave.

"Leave him alone!" Betty Ann out-shouted Bill’s hilarity, defending her cute little teddy-bear buddy, mj, saying it warmly and cutely as only she could do. "He's in shock!” She RADIATED teenage girlish cuteness. “He's a new father!" By all of which she meant, in other words, that even if she could not marry her already married best bud, mj, though she might have done so if only he had been older, or she, younger, certainly that would never have kept her from really liking him as she did, and showing everybody that she liked him; as she did. And he understood. Oh yes. And how he understood.

"I feel," mj said, "like I'm in three places at once.”

And he sounded like a preacher beginning a wedding ceremony with ‘Dearly Beloved’ when next he swallowed; raised his voice; and said: “OH-KAY! Here we go!”

Mj smiled at cute and lovely Betty Ann, but looked at Bill to address him, not her, so as to not cockeye the new chief’s works: “You have mentioned... that people who worked for the Waring organization... had to ask Fred Waring's PERMISSION TO MARRY."

And the basses were boisterous:

Oh Uncle Rat laughed and shook his side, Oh ha-ha ha-ha ha-ha ha.

Oh Uncle Rat laughed and shook his side, Oh ha-ha ha-ha ha-ha ha.

Oh Uncle Rat laughed and shook his side

To think his niece would be a bride. Oh ha-ha ha-ha ha-ha ha....

Bill responded very carefully, implying thereby that it was very important for everyone in the whole WORLD to get it right this time, so as to understand this thing correctly, FINALLY: "It was not a matter of 'had to'," he said. "You know: if you worked for Fred, if he didn't know everything first, everything –.

“I've seen him do it a million times. Haven't you?"

Mr. Frog was asking Miss Mousie a very important question. He needed a quick and final verification of this principal opening point, some kind of quick official and authoritative authentication of his bizarre character portrayal of a star celebrity, Fred Waring, who had possessed, until recently, ironically, nothing but a saintly reputation with his devoted public, and even with mj loenzo.

And Miss Mousie nodded obediently. It was sincere enough to convince mj. He knew Betty Ann McCall did not fool around with truth; except on those few very famous occasions, maybe, when she deliberately clowned and exaggerated in an obvious way. But tonight was not the kind of night for clowning. You could feel the purity everywhere for miles. Bill Blackburn was deadly serious and he was the big scary CHIEF of the ranch now, as established by a recent Blackburn powwow (with grandfather's tomahawk hanging on the wall).

Bill portrayed his boss, the great Fred Waring, with a long sonorous squeak-and-croak, a vituperative martinet of a rat uncle, his Uncle-Rat jowls rattling: "'Nobody­-tells-me-any-god-damn-thing-that-doesn't-matter­-you-don't-care-about-me-bla-bla—', y'know, the whole thing."

The sopranos were noisy now:

Oh tell us, what was the bride dressed in? Mm-mmmm?

Oh tell us, what was the bride dressed in? Mm-mmmm?

Oh tell us, what was the bride dressed in?

And a soprano, screeching and gossipy, answered viva voce:

A cream blouse-veil and a glass brass pin!!

"But it's true!" Miss Mousie reacted, obviously still up to her neck in psychiatric social worker muck, still swept along by the whole darn flooded river of Fred’s crazy maya, as it sounded. She was still, unlike Bill, trying to understand and forgive Fred Waring for the disgusting way he had acted toward Bill. "A lot of people don't tell him they want to marry because they're afraid!" She knew because she had been, for years, the queen of the crazy river of maya that Fred had dreamt up and turned into a road show and a road-show-crew show. That was why she had quit Fred too, a year or two before Bill had quit Fred even. And yet she was still treading Fred Waring’s muddy maya muck this very minute now, still trying to analyze all the ugly gook that she had gotten herself stuck in until it had sucked her down and under for good, almost, pretty blonde Miss-Mousie top knot and all. She hovered, even still, her pretty snout-and-eyeballs barely above the flood when she said the subsequent few words, as mj perceived it. Tension and hurt lingered in her voice, he thought: "A lot of people that DO want to marry he doesn't want to HEAR! So he DELIBERATELY scares them and puts them off so he can use that excuse!" Her real psychological talent was just one of the many things mj liked about her.

In other words, Fred had loved Betty Ann McCall, and she had loved him too, simply put. And yet she had never spoken of their real affection aloud, not in mj’s presence, even as hard as he had worked to help her and Bill understand the crazy darn muck in which they had gotten stuck. Yet it was practically impossible to imagine she might have NOT recognized the fact. She was far too sharp psychologically to have missed noting that she loved a man; which had to mean that she was just fearful of stating the fact out loud IN FRONT OF BILL, probably. So: she never said the words she should have said to clear the air: ‘Fred Waring loved me in his own weird way. And I loved him in my own weird way. And when Bill and I fell in love, Fred felt cheated of the Platonic mother-confessor affection and attention I’d given him for years, poor darn soul’. She had never said anything close to this; with the result that everyone in her world had felt constrained to tiptoe around the obvious fact forever and ever AMEN, deferring to Betty Ann’s obvious fear of her new chieftain husband’s possible tomahawk reaction to such renegade words.

The tenors were newsy:

Oh tell us, what was the groom dressed in? Ooo-aahh.

Oh tell us, what was the groom dressed in? Ooo-aahh.

Oh tell us, what was the groom dressed in?

And a single boyish tenor shouted viva voce excitedly:

Sky-blue britch-es

          with sil-ver stitch-es! Ooo-ooo-aaahh....

In any case, Bill, at this early point in the evening, with Betty Ann’s help, was trying to establish the sorry fact that way back when, two years ago and before, it had been the case that: if the famous Americana music saint and maya king, Fred Waring, had ever thought FOR A SECOND there might be a reason to suspect Bill Blackburn and Betty Ann McCall might ever become an item, let alone MARRY, GOD FORBID, then muddy maya river-muck would CERTAINLY have hit the Fred Waring FAN IMMEDIATELY, and splattered every poor rat and mouse and frog and doctor within a hundred miles.⁹

"Well we had a big fight,” Bill resumed, “between Betty Ann and me over who we were gonna tell first."

Mj looked skeptical. ‘Tell first’?

"Yeh really,” said Bill, seeing that mj doubted that his good, sane and mature friends, Bill and Betty Ann, EVER could have fought over such a petty thing as who to tell first that they were in love and getting married: “Poley McClintock; or Fred Waring; because,” said Bill, “we were walking on thin hen eggs, both of them were so wrapped up in Betty Ann. Poley was going through the garbage to see if I was –, if there was any –...”

Condoms, as the two guests of the Blackburns got, laughing at each other.

Ya-hoooo!!

Another brief stompin' barn-dance fiddler's interlude led into Miss Mousie’s Cordovox solo, a frantic obligato. Then everything calmed in maya muckville. And, in an excellently slowed down river-denizen choral unison, the Pennsylvanians sang ever so sweetly and convincingly (and ever so slowed down):

Oh, they all went sai-ling a-cross the lake, Ah hah! Ah hah!

Oh, they all went sai-ling a-cross the lake, Ah hah! Ah hah!

Oh, they all went sai-ling a-cross the lake,...

And a very dramatically deep bass voice, drastically slowed, bellowed ever so sweetly:

A-A-A-AND...

          They  all  were  swal-lowed  by  a  Big..  Black..

     s n a k e!  Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

Bill sighed, riffling his Mr. Frog jowls. "And I was livid nine-tenths of the time at Poley and Yvette, because Betty Ann was living over the garage behind their house. And when we first started goin' together, Poley'd be there and he'd leave. And Fred would drive in the yard and then he'd come."

Mj stared intensely at his friend for a second, trying to see through to the bottom of this muck. "They wouldn't let you be alone?" he tried to interpret.

"Ohh!" said Bill. "Oh!"

"Oh, no!" Betty Ann confirmed.

"So," said Bill, "Betty Ann and I went together on the phone to start with."

And she laughed at this way of putting it. Her Bill was such a master of storytelling gimmicks, this new Indian chief of hers with his tricky ways of putting things that helped people see through muck faster.

The sopranos, finally sounding less virginal and more deeply fulfilled, just as Fred had no doubt pumped and primed them to sound, now slowed to a sweet pregnant mouse plod:

There's bread and cheese u-pon the shelf, mm hmmm, mm hmmm,

There's bread and cheese u-pon the shelf,

If you want some, just help your-self!......

"From Cleveland,” Bill supported his claim with the sorry factual details: “she called me collect. We talked for five hours on the phone arguin' like hell. She stood me up for a sailboat trip I'd arranged on the West Coast. W'l that did it with me. I thought –." Bill was irate like a baggy-jowled Mr. Frog suitor: "I was right! I should've never gone near this broad. She's not worth it!" 'n all this, y'know, so –...."

An upbeat band did a swamp hoedown roundup, a coda wrap-up:

BANG!

And that was Poley McClintock on percussion and it was over. And the down-home audience in Washington, New Jersey’s high school auditorium with its reddish curtains, had naturally applauded a lot, after such a crazy mess of a funky funny old folk song.

It remained doubtful, however, that the audience had understood the song’s portrayal of recent events, including the fact that Uncle Rat, meaning their beloved Fred Waring, Miss Mousie's OLD protector and savior, had been required by normal U.S. American swamp social decorum to surrender Miss Mousie, meaning Betty Ann, even though she had been to him a mother, a daughter, and maybe even a niece! and a spiritual bride, most of all ! ALL IN ONE! and had been OBLIGATED AGAINST HIS WILL to publicly hand Miss Mousie over to Mr. Frog, meaning Bill Blackburn, her NEW protector and savior, so that the two lovers could marry each other and become one person in spiritual and physical bliss. And the whole thing had pissed Fred off like royal salacious heck.

Everyone in the Blackburn living room knew all of this already, though. It was why the interview was occurring.

And Bill was still trying to be polite as he told the story. He was still pulling his punches. "Then they came into town for two days on tour,” Bill said, “the Pennsylvanians. This is the way the whole thing –... And again to show you –. I'm tryin' to SET THE SCENE here –. I took her out. That was the night I got down on my knees."

Mj laughed with his mouth closed, trying not to mock a fool ass of a frog-friend too obviously.

Betty Ann chuckled too. She was a little embarrassed as well, it seemed; maybe because mj seemed to be.

Bill said: "I took her out to the Beaver House. And we're sitting there having dinner. And for some reason I said jokingly, 'Now see that, you should've gone with me sailing. I'm treatin' ya like a queen, aren't I’? Because that's how THEY treated her.”

Like a queen.
 

Fred and the Pennsylvanians had literally thought of and treated Betty Ann McCall as the queen of the whole crazy razzmatazz ragamuffin river muck crew, for years and years.

"She said, 'No, you're not treating me like a queen. You haven't been down on your knees to me yet’.

"We're sitting right in the middle of the Beaver House."

A soft-spoken orchestra could be heard playing now, while the Pennsylvanians hummed dreamily. They were riveted to Fred's bare waving conductor’s rat claws, as always. And then the harp struck a lovely arpeggio and the men of the glee club began:

Hel-looooh... hel-lo-hel-lo-hel-lo-hel-looh...

Betty Ann was not a little embarrassed. "Well, that was a joke, too, Bee-ill."

The night was young and Bill Blackburn SUDDENLY did not care any more what was a mere joke or who might be embarrassed. He was EXCITED at this point in his tale: "I jumped right out of the booth and sat on my knees like this on the floor!" he demonstrated grotesquely, down on limber hind legs of Mister Frog, right there on the living room floor, in front of the easy chair and the world. "And I looked up and this little old lady is sitting there thinkin', 'Oh, he's proposing’!"

A congested laugh caught Bill’s throat off guard until he nearly choked laughing to deep green frog asphyxiation on the floor in front of his three-and-a-half-people audience.

Mj thought it incomparably funny and quite a bit embarrassing as well.

But Bill was an aroused, red-blooded, New Age avatar-hero, now, fallen on a frog knee, croaking and belching ardor at his new First Lady Mouse Devotee: "And Betty Ann didn't know what to DO!" Bill belly-laughed, almost dying on the laugh, it was so extraordinarily enormous and uninhibited. "A-HAGGH-haggh-hangg h!! –"

And it was so contagious that mj was able to chuckle, finally, and shake off a little of his unwanted useless inherited Calvinist embarrassment.

But Dlune was NOT Calvinist, and NOT embarrassed in the least. She was Native American, and her one-thirty-secondth-part Swedish state-church never-go-to-church Lutheran certainly got the drift too: "I'll bet she did know what to do!" She taunted Bill and ribbed Betty Ann. "She loved every minute of it. Ha-ha."

"He was adorable!" responded Betty Ann with her best mock-devotee lady-clown flare, even including an appropriate reddening of lady-clown cheeks.

The band had formed a one-two-three waltz-beat behind a throaty contralto:

(ONE. Two.) Hel-

LO-oh, young

LUUUH-vers, wher-

EEH-ver you

AAHRE (Two.), I

HO-ohpe your

TROUH-bles are

FEOOOOOW (Two. Three

ONE. Two. Three....)

All my good wiih-shes go wiihth you to-naahight.

AahI've been in luuhove, like

yoooooou...(two-three,

one-two-...)¹⁰

Back in his easy chair already, Bill was much less embarrassed than Betty Ann and mj over his recent demonstration of physical animal love ardor, right on the living room FLOOR. "I took her back late that night. I went back to the Penn Stroud where the Pennsylvanians were staying. I said, 'Let's have breakfast in the morning. I'll come down and see you here’. I was startin' to like her again."

All the men sang in unison:

Hel-lo, hel-lo...

Dlune ribbed Bill, her friend. "Well, you had to work fast. You only had two days."

"Yehhh!" Betty Ann sang. She relished every half-ounce of understanding especially from a woman for once.

"Yeh." Bill flustered for a second at the threat of a gang-up from the ladies, but got back his momentum and multiplied it by putting Dlune’s tease to use: "So....  I came down to have breakfast with her at the hotel, ‘cause we ‘only had two days’ to be together! And Poley and Yvette came in and you could...," he said tensely, "cut the air with a knife that I was sitting with Betty Ann having breakfast. The first thing everybody thought –. You know what they thought."

That the two holy lovers had blown it, and slept together, and made passionate love all night, upstairs in Stroudsburg’s sacred old lady of a hotel, the Penn Stroud, right in the home town where the whole band and chorus had spent the night; a behavior which might have been acceptable if you had HIDDEN it and ardently DENIED it as Fred or anyone of his generation might have done; but not if you both acted all indifferent and all modern about the lady’s reputation, as they seemed to be doing by eating early breakfast together in front of THE WHOLE friggin’ TOWN in a hotel where they ALL knew Betty Ann had just slept!

A contralto took the solo as others hummed moodily in the background:

I knoohw how it feeels to have wiiings on your heeels

And to flaahy down the streeet in a traaaaaance...

Bill sighed loudly. "W'l anyway the scene was, here was Poley acting like crap y'know. This thing really built at this breakfast. Then she called me from Cleveland. This thing really built up! Five hours on the phone long distance on my bill. Right?”

Betty Ann asked a little too innocently, "Is that when I fell asleep?"

"Yes."

The Pennsylvanians aahhed in the background behind the contralto:

You fly down a streeet on the chance that you'll meeet aaaaahh,

And you meeett! –....

Not reeal-ly by chaaaaaance....

She said, "I woke up in the morning. Here's the receiver laying on the...," she laughed, "pillow!"

Hel-looooh... hel-lo-hel-lo-hel-lo-hel-loooh...

Hel-looh, young luuho-vers, wher-eeh-ver you  aaahre...

"We were in the middle of an awful battle,” Bill said. “She's layin' there and she had me boilin'. She was talking like a nincompoop. I was ranting-and-raving. I said, ‘Betty Ann, now, do you agree, or doncha’?

“Nothin',” Bill said, describing the silence. “And she's goin'—, I hear—," he breathed heavily into an imaginary phone.

And it got a laugh out of mj, this shocking portrayal, so very graphic, of a very basic physical animal function in such a sacred and lovely spiritual queen friend of his. No one EVER would have described the Virgin Mary in such physical terms, or Betty Ann either; because Fred had made her into a virgin queen mother and everybody had gone along with it, including the non-virgin herself. She’d given birth to a little boy named Mark, for Pete’s sake! She had been married before! And no one had EVER claimed the conception was immaculate.

Bill said loudly, "'Hello, hello,... hello,... Betty Ann,... Betty Ann??... Betty Ann!!!' I hear:...," he breathed her breaths in and out, loudly and heavily into his imaginary phone, driving his point home. "'Screw you, sister!' And I hung up on her."

Such sacrilege done to the queen of the Pennsylvanians tickled the Blackburns’ guests; but the contralto was unfazed, and kept pining:

Don't craahy, young luuho-vers, what-eeeh-ver you dooooo,

Don't craahy be-caaause I'm a-loooohnne...

"Well the thing is—,” Betty Ann sounded sensible; “and this leads right into the next thing.” The poor debunked stage goddess felt forced to go so far as to interrupt and explain herself; and she did not have to try very hard to make her voice sound like a sweet little – and very helpless – Miss Mousie, since it came so naturally. “I had no telephone where I was living over Poley's garage! And every time I wanted to call I had to go into their house! And they were mad at me in the first place! They were mad because Bill had driven me up from Georgia!”

Bill concurred. "She dropped me at my house after the trip up from Georgia. Now get this. With Mark and Docka the dog and a carful of everything, all her stuff from Georgia where she had lived with her ex. The car was DRAGGIN'. She says," and Bill did a frightened tiny Miss Mousie riding demurely in the passenger seat, "'No! Don't drive me to Shawnee! You'd better not do that! 'Cause if they see you drive in the yard all hell's gonna break loose'!"

The contralto sounded brave now:

Be brave, young lov-ers, and fol-low your star,

Be brave and faith-ful and troooooue.

"This is two grown adults,” Bill pointed out crisply, “both married previously with children, trying to hide from Fred and Poley and Yvette!"

Mj shook his sides laughing like Uncle Rat, feeling all tiny and swept along helplessly by a huge river of funny muddy maya.

Cling ve-ry close to each aaaho-ther to-night.

I've been in love like yoooooooou....

"I said,” Bill continued: “'Alright. Drop me at my house and go from there’. And she dropped me at my house in the NIGHT-time! And Mark was in the car and he said goodbye to me.”

Iiii've had a louuhve of my ooohwn, like yoooou,

Iiii've been in louuuuuuuuhve,
          liii- kyoooooooou.

And the whole spiffy men’s glee club sang in harmony again:

Hel-looooh... hel-lo-hel-lo-hel-lo-hel-looooooh...

Joey's guru, in his many brilliant analogies, would often use water in one way or another; and he explained on one of his tapes – because mj could hear him saying it forcefully and convincingly right now, with that Hindi-accent tenor teen voice of his – that after someone saved you from drowning in river muck a very special relationship formed. It was special in a way so obvious and simple that poor mj was convinced that the kid guru, in describing it, had unmixed him up from decades of psychoanalysis and other kinds of western world thinking and brainwashing. It was not the relationship of brother or sister, said young Guru Garland, or of father or mother, or of marriage partner, either. And it was not the relationship of therapist, for once, either, as mj noted mentally, thank God. It was something else, a relationship greater than all other relationships: savior. What saved you, actually, was the knowledge that the relationship with your savior gave you, the experience it gave you inside. That was why devotees of any religion or creed were always in love with their Lord, the guru explained. The relationship was 'virtually unbreakable'.

Maybe the relationship was not exactly like that of spouse, but all the same it seemed to mj a lot like what Bill had done for Betty Ann when he had extricated her from the very crazy life she had lived with Fred Waring, Poley McClintock, and the rest of the Pennsylvanians. That was how mj lorenzo saw it for the rest of his life once he got to the bottom of it in that complicated head and heart of his. Because it had not been enough for Bill to just LOVE Betty Ann in order to win her. He had found it necessary as well to RISK DROWNING IN A RIVER OF MAYA MUCK HIMSELF, in order to drag poor Betty Ann out from a place where she had gotten so lost and caught: her crazy mind had trapped her in that bizarre and dysfunctional world of Fred Waring’s so completely. Not only had Bill been forced to resort to extensive methods of manipulation to jimmy her out of her dangerous predicament, he had found it necessary to keep talking to her constantly, just like right now, constantly providing her with a framework of thinking and a history by which she could see and comprehend her predicament; in pretty much the same way that a guru might have kept talking to his followers all the time, constantly appealing to their better sense of things so as to convince them that they should pay him any mind at all. That was how thick and hardened the maya mud had gotten around Betty Ann.

And it was how thick the maya had gotten around mj too, so thick that someone had needed to risk their life jumping in to pull him out of there too, with all their force, talking to him all the while on tapes, just to keep his mind calm and focused and keep him reasonably trusting of the effort being made on his behalf. That was what Joey’s guru had been forced to do to save mj lorenzo from so much mud that he had gotten caught in. That was how mj would see it later, looking back on it from the mid-eighties on.

And most of mj’s pundits agreed with him. Even many years later, in the early part of the 21^st century, they would turn up with white hair in interviews on MSNBC or public television – even on BBC or Al Jazeera (!) – saying things like, “It was one of the Dr.’s best portrayals of the totalitarian tyranny of the U.S.A. Christian right.” Mj lorenzo loved the story, they said, and they did too, because it showed two lovers escaping together from that kind of tyranny. Bill Blackburn, some pundits said on a Princeton Seminary blog, had: “...unwittingly helped mj lorenzo paint a picture of the world as it would have looked, and would look eventually, if and when the extremist fundamentalist Christians took over the U.S.A. and took over the rest of the world too, and finally accomplished their politico-religious agenda of establishing a Calvinist Kingdom of God in Christ on earth, with God’s new chosen people – their own neo-Calvinist selves, of course – in charge.” That was what Fred Waring had come to represent to mj, most of his pundits claimed, once mj finally had been able to see things more clearly, many years later after writing the book. And Dr. Lorenzo never refuted this claim; probably because those pundits were, as most felt on every side, obviously correct. What else could the book, Exactly How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert, have been about? they asked.¹¹

But a few of the Dr.’s pundit following came up with another theory. Maybe mj’s fourth book had been meant as a careful look at how much help ‘detachment’ could be to you if you ever came to a place in your life where you felt helpless to do anything about terrible tyrannical things going on in front of your face. They knew that kind of feeling too, some of mj’s Remaking pundits said, because they had felt that way in the early seventies, right before they had gotten help from gurus of various kinds to survive emotionally the crazy controlling world of Richard Nixon and his Kent State guns, his secret Cambodia invasions, his ‘government blacklisting’ of folk singers like Pete Seeger and anyone who seemed to be complaining about Nixon, etc. etc.

If it hadn’t been for their gurus saving them from mucky maya in the 70s, they said, they ALL would have committed hari kiri.

¹  For more understanding of the meaning of ‘maya’ and how it applies to the present work, please see the chapter “and yet another kind of propundity’s ‘look at’ mj lorenzo’s fourth book: Exactly How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert” at the end of this volume, question #11.

²  Most references in the present work to ‘what Guru Garland said’ are either paraphrases or direct quotes from Prem Pal Singh Rawat, known variously to his devotees worldwide as Guru Maharaj Ji, Maharaji, or Maraji. They may be found in their original form in: The Living Master. Quotes from Guru Maharaj Ji, Denver: Divine Light Mission, Inc., 1978. The present reference to sunsets, for example, is from page 14: “How many people see sunsets? It’s fantastic, you know – people go out, and that’s the big thing. Every Sunday night, if the sky is clear and beautiful, people go out and watch sunsets. So they have a nice time. But there’s a lot of difference when I see a sunset, because I don’t just see a sunset. I understand that what is making everything go up and down is that energy, is that Knowledge, and when I look all around me, look everywhere, it is that energy that is making it happen. I don’t see that energy in this mike, but I know that what is making this mike exist right now is that energy. What is making me talk – I don’t see my talk come out, but I know that what is making that sound is that energy. And I see everything, and I know it is the energy; it is the essence that I have got.” (From a satsang, i.e. discourse on truth, delivered by Guru Maharaj Ji in Frankfurt, Germany, November 29, 1976.)

³  For a glossary of many of the musical terms used in this work, such as 'English-glee' and  unison , please see the 'appendix' near the end of the work, just after the chapter entitled 'Afterthoughts'.
 

⁴  “Mr. Frog a-Courtin’ He Did Ride,” traditional American folksong, arranged for Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians by Livingston Gearhart. May be found on the old Reprise 33 RPM record, “Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians in Concert,” and on the CD that comes with Virginia Waring’s biography of Fred (see footnote 8 below), as well as on other Waring recordings over the years of the 20^th century.

⁵  Poley McClintock, Fred’s lifelong best friend and Pennsylvanian Number One (after Fred), was famous for not just his skilled percussion antics but also his comical cartoon-like croaking frog voice during certain songs.

⁶  The Dr. had often talked to Sammy Martinez, his right hand friend, about how it had been when he had first run into Joey and his guru and the guru’s tapes. It had been ‘like a state of shock’. After just a few weeks or months he had suddenly one day realized that he was ‘walking around in a state of nearly-constant shock’, whether at work or wherever. His whole take on everything was askew, only in a way that was not bad, but good, overall. His whole life felt different, not just the department of life called ‘seeking truth’. Everything. All from the guru’s impact on one’s life. In the middle of a staff meeting or while eating spaghetti with wife and baby, one constantly found oneself remembering things about the guru, how he dressed, how he acted, how he talked, what he said, and most of all how he changed your life so drastically overnight. It was certainly not a stretch, as mj lorenzo put it to Sammy, to liken it to falling in love. In fact it WAS falling in love, not with a man’s body but with his heart and your own heart in the mix.

⁷  This reference to ‘what the guru said’ is paraphrased from pg. 8 of The Living Master (see footnote 2 above): “You have to understand what this life really is, who you really are. You have to look at an overall picture, and say, ‘Who am I? I’m a doctor, or I’m an engineer, or I’m a pilot, but who am “I”? Who is that real thing? What is that real thing that is within inside of me, that I am here for?’ Because, by no means are you here to become a doctor. You become a doctor because that’s what you want to do. But does that mean that whatever you want to do in this life is the purpose of your life? Certainly not.”

⁸  The story of mj’s suggesting that Bill write a book about Fred Waring may be found in mj’s second book, Tales of Waring, in the chapter entitled “A Great Golden Fairy Tale.”

⁹  Virginia Waring confirmed the difficulty Fred Waring and Poley (and Yvette) McClintock posed to Bill and Betty Ann’s getting married, in her biography of her husband: Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians (Chicago and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997; paperback edition, 2007), pp. 334-336. Many of her details in those pages are exactly the same as Bill’s details in the story he told mj and Dlune, in the interview recorded here. Probably because she got the story verbatim from Bill and used it almost verbatim in her book: a fact which reveals that Virginia Waring too, like mj lorenzo, believed Bill’s story about how ridiculously Fred and Poley and Yvette had reacted to Bill and Betty Ann’s falling in love.

¹⁰  “Hello Young Lovers,” a song from Richard Rogers' and Oscar Hammerstein’s “The King and I,” arranged by Hawley Ades for Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians.