Joey’s guru was just a kid, actually, as Joey had explained more than once. He was younger than Joey even. He was younger than anyone that followed him around the globe. And he had not been born in the states of Indian parents, he had come over young all by himself on a plane, because his father, when dying, had told him that the Western world was ripe for receiving him. And yet he was modern and Westernized. He had attended a Catholic school in Dehra Dūn, India, and he must have been of genius I.Q. the way he learned American English by leaps and bounds. And so when he was asked how he might help a person ‘play this game we play on this planet’ his answer was astute of both thought and language, despite his very young age of thirteen or fourteen or so. He answered that he was going to ‘supervise’ their ‘game’ and stop them when they played it wrong. Nothing more. He was going to give them the ‘Knowledge’ they needed to make them perfect at the game. And he wasn’t talking about a ‘qualifying’ game, he said, but the ‘final’ game. It would be a real game, a final game in fact. That was what he was going to make them perfect for.¹

Mj gave the Blackburns one more chance. “So did anything else happen, historically newsworthy?”

“Yeh, a lot,” said Bill. “The thing was flowing with things happening.”

“That's uh... story-worthy!” mj clarified.

“Oh, yeh!” Betty Ann was excited: “And the kids that sang started to fall apart, and Fred started conducting them!”

“First he was just standing there going like this with his finger,” Bill demonstrated, teaming up with her.

She confirmed it. “Yeh, with just one finger.”

“The minute they started to sing,” Bill took over the story....: “The pianist played the music, the introduction, and Fred was standing back there goin',” Bill did a handsome, white-haired Fred Waring in his star-power technicolor koochie jacket toward the back of the crowd, with his right index finger close to his belt, trying to help the Pennsylvanians discreetly. “Then they started fallin' apart, and he started goin' like this:” Bill did Fred Waring's two famous, graceful, matchless conductor’s hands in the air. “And he started walkin' forward.” Bill got out of his storyteller’s chair to illustrate. He crossed the living room floor, conducting majestically as he went, gesturing gracefully, dodging obstacles, penetrating the throng, passing friends and family like shadows of a prior existence. Fred was as merged with his singers now as with the ground of his being, as they with him, grimacing the Latin lyrics with a mouth like Kali the Black Mother, replicating the whole astonishing road show, accepting the marriage of Bill and Betty Ann, glowing, letting it happen, surrendering like a Tibetan monk for one brief musical moment, giving the bride to her new savior.

Fred Waring had finally surrendered.

Amen.

“And before you knew it,” said Bill, “it was a Fred Waring concert!”

He did Fred's mouth, mouthing the tone-syllables silently for the Pennsylvanians. He exaggerated Fred, mouthing the lyrics:

Ahy Bee-leeve...!  Grah-tee-ah-play-nah...!  AAaauuuummmmennnn!

Mj cackled in some kind of ecstasy.

“And he’d said,” Bill pronounced it through indignant teeth: "’Don't expect me to conduct! I don't want anything to do with it nobody asked me if you could have the chorus –‘!"

Mj exploded with laughter. He was blissed out, maybe because he had started to experience practically everything and anything as a reflection of the incredible ray of light the guru was shining all over the globe. “Do you have any other memories of Fred at this bereft nuptial!?”

“I have a lot of memories,” Bill said as if he could write volumes on the wedding alone. “I don't know about Betty Ann –.”

“I don't,” she said. But she didn't think long. “I remember him giving the toast. Glimpses now and then. I was so occupied in the wedding that I just didn't think of him. I remember first sight of him in that jacket which was –.”

“Startling,” said Bill.

“Very startling,” she agreed. “Bright vivid colored thing, typical Fred. It was dear. He was going to be the Star of the Event.”

“I remember you saying that,” Dlune said.

Betty Ann was filled to overflowing with affection for Fred by now. No one could take it from her. “Sure he was.”  Her eyes and smile were touched with cuteness and irony: “He was the Star of the Wedding!”

Ahy Bee-Leave,..... AAAAAHY, BEE-LEAVE!

Aaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmmmmeehnn.

The very young guru went on to say that they should just wait and see, have patience. If they waited they would see how far out the game would be, how far out the things that would happen. If they had patience, very soon the room they were in would be on the other side of the river, he said, the whole world would float right over the vast ocean of materialism and inhumanity in which it was presently drowning, and get to the other side where there was purity, purity, purity, all the time. It was going to go like a hovercraft, only faster.²

¹  The Living Master, p. 26. Question and Answer session with followers and interested persons in London, England, November, 1971, when Guru Maharaj Ji was about age 14.

²  Ibid., p. 27.