Bill looked bored. Disgusted. Or maybe tired. And on an ordinary night the two men might have wrapped things up for the sake of the baby and mother. After all, mj had recorded ALMOST everything he wanted from the Blackburns by now, after two and a half interviews: ‘enough to set a generation on fire’, as Legs pundits claimed in a live, televised, international-long-distance group interview with Bogotá’s El Espectador in ’95. BUT: the four had agreed to do the ‘whole marriage including honeymoon’; for the honeymoon to the White House had produced memorable fairy tale chapters too.

And maybe that was because Bill Blackburn’s people skills made history wherever he went, even at the White House. Most Americans might have expected he would be upstaged at a place as high on the social register as the U. S. White House. Good thinking Americans might have preferred that a U.S. President, not an unknown from Minisink, population 25 and a horse, be the leading hero at the White House. But Bill was his own generous, open, honest and natural self wherever he went, whether young Dr. and Mrs. Lorenzo’s grey Californian split-level on Spring Lake (with its picture-window view of the Delaware Water Gap), Fred Waring’s famous ‘Gatehouse’ at Shawnee Inn (with its views of his own Inn and Golf Course), or Richard Nixon’s White House (with its too often self-centered view of humanity's future); and the results of Bill Blackburn's actions, if irritating to some, were not Bill Blackburn’s problem. He operated under a highly developed system of conscious moral and behavioral values and skills, as the story he told about meeting Pat Nixon made clear.

It was one thing to know what was the right thing to do in this world. But more important, Bill knew how to do that right thing. AND, best of all, HE DID THE RIGHT THING ON A REGULAR BASIS, consciously and purposely, AND HAD FUN DOING IT. And so, no one should have been surprised when his visit to the Nixon White House shed light on an important piece of American history, the ‘White House tape scandal’. It was a political and moral debacle that had infuriated enough Americans, mj included, to end with Nixon’s resignation from the presidency just a month before this third 1974 interview with the Blackburns. That White House tale of Bill’s wanted preserving too.

And in addition: mj still, in this last night of interviewing, had to probe Bill’s psychic sense of things, shared one day when they fished from a rowboat on Spring Lake, that SOMEBODY had sabotaged deliberately his participating in the White House Christmas Party. Bill’s psychic instinct had been sound as long as mj had known him. This thing was important to mj’s fourth book, therefore, according to mj – this Huron-Chief-Blackburn hunch – since ‘it gave Dick Nixon away’, if true.

And Bill Blackburn knew by now that his friend would pursue that hunch until the loon-bemused, wet-in-the-neck journalist-cum-psychoanalyst in mj lorenzo found its way to the very bottom of the White House Honeymoon Sabotage story somehow.

And Bill wanted it over with.

"Well anyway," he proceeded, "the day after the wedding we got up at 6:30 and drove down to Washington because the Nixons had invited Fred to do the White House Christmas Concert."

Now:... every new groom in history, almost, had stayed in bed the morning after marrying. Hardly a just-married man would have left before dawn, to help the very same ‘petty tyrant’ who had done so many things to make the groom’s getting into that wife-warmed bed almost impossible. Hardly a new groom in earth’s history, that first big morning of marriage, would have gotten out of that warmed bed to help even a kindly boss; or a kindly boss who was helping a good friend of the boss’s; not even if the friend had been the President. In this last case, Bill might have gone to the White House happily on such a morning, maybe; perhaps; but only if Fred had been a close buddy, probably; and not for the reasons that motivated most people, either. He was not a political or social opportunist for his own private sake. He was too dedicated to The Truth and Honored Huron Tradition; and committed to treating others with a developed art of decency; especially new wives; to ever be successful as a social climber. When he had first met the famous, rich and powerful Fred Waring years before, for instance, instead of crawling on his knees so as to be able to climb up Fred’s pant leg to kiss his ass later, he had put the notoriously rude tyrant in his place immediately – deftly; courteously; and even with a dash of Manhattan Entertainment Industry humor – in a way that had kept the Manhattan music-maker tyrant, Fred Waring, in line for all those years: until, that is, the day that Fred learned that Bill might steal the holy queenly Betty Ann McCall away from him and his holy Pennsylvanians.¹

But Betty Ann, though married now and living under the political and spiritual regime of a new and better man, could not abandon her old friends after years of living with them like family, especially just one day after those very friends had saved everything, by letting her marry in their living room. So Bill made things easy for his new little wife and set the wake-up alarm and drove a car to Washington, D.C.; to be at her side that whole first symbolic day of their marriage; and because the concert at The White House, after all, was the only honeymoon they would get, like it or not; since Betty Ann had quit working for Fred (except when he needed her in an emergency, as today), and there were no rich parents around, and they possessed less bread than a new family of three needed to live comfortably in the United States of America in 1972.   

The interviewer missed these points until later: years later, in a few cases, as Legs pundits pointed out many times over the decades.

Mj lorenzo was not into such subtleties when Bill began his honeymoon story; because, in part, he could hear and was trying to catch the very meaningful lyrics of the song he had associated with the White House and President since the time the Pennsylvanians had sung it on Sunday night TV during a grand old holy Thanksgiving tableau, back when he was six in 1949. Since six he had understood ‘house’ in the song, ‘Bless this House’, to refer not to a home; or dwelling; or even a church, merely; but to the whole sacred USA nation and country, with its government structure and holy land-mass, all the institutions and divine geography, the complete framework, spiritual and physical, that ‘housed’ the U.S. American people and their American dream: ‘the whole shootin-match’, as he put it once.

And just how the little boy mj might have grasped such a concept at the very young age of six was a valid question, according to Legs pundits. Some members of mj’s family thought he had made it up to make himself ‘appear more godlike’. They put the Dr. on the spot personally with this question during a ‘Legs’ workshop in Atlantic City in 2006. The Pennsylvanians’ unforgettable tableau on TV, that 1949 pre-Thanksgiving Sunday night, may have helped him understand ‘House’, the Dr. answered, with its old-fashioned family sleigh drawn by horses over snow past church and across the creek to grandmother’s house.² And certainly his familiarity with religious and Biblical language must have helped him too; plus the bigger meanings which many words possessed.

These bigger meanings had been explained in church; in Sunday School; and after dinner every evening when Daddy and Mommy, meaning Rev and Jo, would read the Bible or Pilgrim’s Progress to his Big Sis and his little pip-squirt self at the table in the kitchen. His father would lean over the important page on the kitchen table and ferret out the meaning of ‘The Slough of Despond’ – for example – a ‘kind of swamp’ which ‘Christian’ ‘got caught in’ at one point in that super-Calvinist allegory of a novel-like story.³ A kid comprehending a truckload of meaning so heavy and ponderable at the age of six, could understand what ‘House’ meant in a song which possessed holy, country-wide context; probably; in other words.

Dr. Lorenzo, it might help to recall, was raised from the womb on the Bible – Old Testament as much as New – and on every single one of the complex and multi-layered symbolic religious words with their many simultaneous meanings; raised in a large extended family of teachers, professors, preachers, famous coast-to-coast Sunday night TV evangelists, and lifelong Ivy League scholars, where education never ceased from morning to night, in a fun way; and where half the tribe were also professional or semi-pro musicians.

And in private the Dr. told Sammy Martinez once that his mother must have probably sat down with him and explained it all. Jo Lorenzo was a school teacher of first-graders, from a family of church-going Presbyterian Philadelphia Germans, a family cultured for generations, full of highly honed trumpeters, ballerinas, engineers, high school teachers, and even piano manufacturers.

He could easily picture his mother explaining to him the meaning of the Bible verse, ‘In my Father’s HOUSE are many mansions’,⁴ for example. Maybe she had talked to him right during Fred’s’ show on TV, in fact. He could remember sitting in her lap and falling asleep there around age five and six, when they went to Dr. Schisler’s a few blocks away, or to the Browns’ across the street, after church to watch Fred Waring and mj’s ‘Uncle Percy’ and other evangelists on TV every Sunday night. (Until the day when Rev finally saved or wangled enough coin from parishioners and bought his family their own TV.)

So it’s no wonder that now, somehow – and the world has yet to understand how, fully, including the Dr. himself (“I’ve always heard music in my head constantly ALL OF MY LIFE,” he said during his 1989 Lamont music lecture at Denver University, “What can I say? Sue me!”) – mj loenzo ‘heard’, as Bill talked, a very heartful and convicted, full-throated men's church chorale, four-part, with no organ or any other accompaniment, coming from the Fred Waring men’s glee club:

BLESS THIS HOUSE, OH LORD, WE PRAY....⁵

Live television coverage of Dick Nixon’s fall from American grace, bit by agonizing bit, as scandal over the ‘White House tapes’ grew and grew, had bothered mj lorenzo the whole summer of 1974, the very summer during which the three Blackburn interviews had occurred. The President and his top aides had withheld recorded White House tapes from government agencies which had demanded to have them; and this meant that the White House had tried so hard to cover up its own misdeeds, obviously; and then, had lied about its cover-up attempts to such an extent under oath; that impeachment proceedings were in full swing against the President. And then a month or so before this night with the Blackburns, rather than wait for the axe to swing one last time and sever his head from front to back while he just stood there watching it come into his neck, Richard Milhouse Nixon ‘bit the bullet’: i.e., he lowered his head a little, still looking forward, straight at the incoming axe, and caught and bit that axe between his teeth, and ran from the White House forever, with Pat and dog: IN PAJAMAS, as it were, axe in mouth still, so to speak, meaning: he cut and ran in IGNOMINY.

And in the MIND of the young Dr., which was writerly, inquisitive and forever-imagining, especially now that he had watched dozens of hours of senate impeachment hearings over many weeks: the shocking White House tape story of Richard Nixon as told in the news, AND the no less incredible White House tape story of Bill’s own, which Bill had always told, BOTH of these stories, were beginning to seem more comprehensible and critical the more they were combined into a single tale in mj’s mind. Nixon, in the end, as mj came to understand his own developing version of the White House tape story, would remain the villain that the country and world had found him to be. But Fred Waring, in the end, would become a new kind of hero by comparison, and would win back some glory he had deserved all along, as mj felt: glory which Fred had deserved from the beginning of the first interview with the Blackburns in June; or more correctly, from as long ago as mj’s childhood, when mj had first witnessed the results of Fred’s conducting and stagecraft on TV. Fred would win back a rightful glory which the many uncomplimentary Blackburn tales had stripped and stolen from the poor little old music maker, as mj felt.

And so, as a result, and as it turned out in the end, meaning in 1985, in mj lorenzo’s first published version of Exactly How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert, there appeared

FROM SOMEWHERE

as a New York Times headline put it accurately and simply: a very detailed

Secret Service file on Bill Blackburn.

And naturally the question in everyone’s mind forever after was

FROM WHERE?

as a 1986 cover of TIME put it succinctly and with fitting mystery.

And mj’s book sold millions, in part, as careful Princeton researchers (of public opinion) informed Reuters: ‘Because the public was so enthralled by the White House Tape part of the story’. Lorenzo’s book certainly seemed to argue that such a Secret Service file existed. Such a claim was a reasonable one, after all, as informed observers said, since White House Secret Service agents had in fact taken pictures of Bill Blackburn…

Looking Up Pat Nixon’s Skirt.

This was how The National Enquirer would put its headline when they published the alleged pictures in ‘86. And Dr. Lorenzo in later years would always say that

‘it could have been true’

that a Secret Service file existed. He seemed to be protecting someone; and so he would refuse to add one more jot or tittle to that short, one-line statement. And Blackburn, for his part, would tell his friends at Variety more than once:

They HAD to have a file on me after the White House took those pictures.

There damn well HAD to be a Secret Service file on Bill Blackburn.

After all, Bill was an expert on government and military security, having served in Air Force Intelligence in Korea. But neither Bill nor mj would say unequivocally whether there existed a file or not; nor would they answer whether they had seen any kind of manila file anywhere in the world with Bill’s name on it.

And so, ‘expert’ ‘observers’ accustomed to evaluating government secrecy situations were quoted in the Washington Post as ‘believing with certainty’ that both men ’knew perfectly well’ that a Secret Service file on Bill Blackburn existed; simply because, ‘they had kept copies of it in their safe deposit boxes at their Stroudsburg bank since perhaps as early as 1973’; and had taken the file home when needed; this accounting for why mj’s description of the file in his book was so ‘convincing’. Neither man would ever admit outright to having possessed it, or even a copy, due to U.S. government or personal security reasons, or marital or other explanations, they said. And by the year 2010 no one had come any closer to solving the conundrum than some Legs ‘secrecy theory’ pundits, the exponents of an inevitable Legs ‘secrecy’ theory, which they based on the aforementioned ‘expert’ government ‘observer’ ‘convictions’.

It was a theory which seemed reasonable and complete to practically everyone on the planet. BUT, unfortunately, as all moaned, it had not been proven, ever; not YET anyway; and would remain unprovable until well into the future, probably, when major parties were dead and gone from harm’s way; when – or if – some posthumous papers or government declassification of documents revealed the truth at last.

White House Secret Service File

on

William S. Blackburn

CLASSIFIED:  PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL

In Secret Service handwriting: on a sheet of official 8½X11 Secret Service office paper stapled to a letter called ‘Exhibit #1’:

Exhibit #1:

“The attached (by staples) routine form letter from Waring’s Pennsylvanians was sent to the White House because of the upcoming Christmas Concert and because this particular form letter, including Bill Blackburn’s signature, was sent in exactly this manner to all impending concert locations as standard routine. The only thing non-standard about it was Mr. Blackburn's personal P.S.”

Waring Enterprises

The Old Castle Inn

Delaware Water Gap

Pennsylvania USA 18327

November 16, 1972

To:

Mr. Richard M. Nixon, President

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, D.C.

Stage Requirements - Fred Waring

For the most effective presentation, we ask you to provide:

1. STAGE  -  45 feet wide X 35 feet deep; . . . CLEARED.  A solid-color backdrop, light blue, grey or black should be hung 25 feet from main curtain line. Two (2) or more LEGS with borders are required, HUNG PRIOR TO ARRIVAL.

2. SOUND  -  We carry our own COMPLETE SOUND SYSTEM AND ENGINEER. If house sound is to be used the decision will be made by us, upon arrival.

3. PIANO  -  You supply one (1) five or six foot Grand Piano TUNED TO A 440 PITCH. The size of the piano is important; however we can use a larger one. Must be tuned day of arrival.

4. CHAIRS  -  We carry our own, plus music stands.

5. ROOMS  -  (A) FRED WARING (B) 10 women, minimum of two rooms (C) 30 men. - Clean and comfortable, with dressing and costume-hanging facilities. Lights, mirrors, chairs, tables, soap, and paper towels.

6. SPOTLIGHTS  -  We will use house lamp if it is in good condition and made available.

7. STAGE LIGHTS  -  We carry our own Front Pipe or Booms and lamps. (450 lbs.)

8. LINES  -  Downstage lines are required to hang our special lighting equipment.

9. POWER  -  We carry our own switchboard, requiring 3-wire 220 volt single phase power supply (NOT 220 volt service). It can be provided with two 110 volt circuits, on each side of a ground or neutral circuit each LEG fused 100 AMPS.  Must be accessible to right stage.  (Within 50 feet)

Dr. Lorenzo spoke in public on the subject of his fourth book a few times in later years, and he always pointed out that the most relevant parts of this routine standard form letter sent by Bill Blackburn to the White House (as part of standard Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians instructions and procedure), other than its intermittent mention of ‘LEGS’, were its next few paragraphs. In them, said the Dr., were the lines which would most provoke the President of the United States to ‘near-hospital-admission insanity’.

For that reason, in 1985, when the Dr. published his book, Exactly How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert, in order to help his readers wade through this maya muck, he had put every single one of the crucial psychosis-triggering words and lines in BOLD, CAPS AND ITALICS, he said, and sometimes even UNDERLINES too, just as above, and as in the following example:

10. NOTE  -  We urge you to acknowledge at once receipt of these requirements. WILL IT BE POSSIBLE TO MEET ALL and/or ANY OF OUR NEEDS? We do not expect the impossible, but BETTER FACILITIES MAKE FOR A BETTER SHOW. If modifications are in order, they can best be met with the earliest knowledge re the problems to be encountered. PLEASE CONTACT ME BY MAIL STATING THE NATURE OF YOUR PROBLEM. Also include phone number and I will contact you.

11. ADDRESS  -  

Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians, Inc.

Delaware Water Gap, Penna. 18327

(717) 476-0550

With many thanks,

(personally signed:  BILL BLACKBURN)

Bill Blackburn

Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians

P.S. Happy Thanksgiving to the Chief Pilgrim and ESPECIALLY TO HIS FIRST LADY, PAT, and to all the Pilgrims at the White House and their Indian friends, wherever they may graze their turkeys and raise their corn (and wheat).   BB

N.B. THIS REQUIREMENT SHEET SUPERSEDES ALL OTHERS as of August 1, 1972

The P.S. about Thanksgiving, as the Dr. would explain, was handwritten by Bill and had a glaring personal feel. It was scrunched and squeezed into the space below the formally typed ‘Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians’ near the bottom right of the form letter, and above the formally typed ‘N.B.’ at the very bottom of the form letter. And it definitely seemed aimed at Mrs. wheat-farmer's daughter Pat Nixon more than anyone else, considering all of the conceivable recipients at the White House, including the President.

White House Secret Service File

on

William S. Blackburn

CLASSIFIED:  PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL

Exhibit #2:

White House Oval Office dictation tape dictated by Richard Nixon, President, and transcribed by Oval Office staff.

Page 1

Two can play at this. As of now, THIS PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE SUPERSEDES ALL OTHERS! Ha!

Connie, this is your boss, Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States of America, winner of history-making diplomatic victories in China and Russia, plaguing you on the home front. I'm dictating a letter to my good golfing buddy, Fred Waring. Type EVERY SINGLE DAMN WORD WITHOUT EDITING, please, you and your dictation girls. Sometimes when I write to close golfing buddies, you girls get a little uh, carried away editing.

Page 2

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, D.C.

December 1, 1972

To:

Fred Waring

Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians, Inc.

Delaware Water Gap uh, Pennsylvania 18327

Dear Fred,

Patty and I hope you and Virginia are well. We can hardly wait for your royal entertaining presence at the party.

Please, Fred, ask your employee, Mr. William Blackburn, to leave the staging details to us. Why raise millions to re-elect us a month ago, if you can't trust our staging a month down the road from now? Ha ha! We can handle any item that a uh, Shawnee uh, Gatehouse golf king uh, fundraiser can! Ha hah! Anyway Fred, my friend, whose party is this? Huh???!

Until the Christmas Party and your concert, and uh, Patty and I look forward to it with great uh, uh, anticipation,

Your great friend,

(personally signed:  'DICK')

Richard M. Nixon, President

Note: THIS PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE SUPERSEDES ALL DOCUMENTS, PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE.  HA HA.    12/1/72

And once again prominent literary critics lambasted mj lorenzo’s ‘collage’ approach to literary composition, one saying it was ‘lamer than a one-legged ostrich with a black Cadillac limousine tied on its back’. The author had tried to meld tons of scientific research quotes about Native Americans, many Fred Waring songs, plus the ‘cockamamie’ contents of a fat Secret Service file 'OF HIS OWN BIZARRE INVENTION', into his interview with the Blackburns, and foist the “UNSIGHTLY SQUAWKING MESS” on the public “as a ‘book’.”

But mj’s people struck back. THEY got what mj lorenzo was getting at, they prated in a letter to The New York Times Book Review. THEY ‘loved’ the sound of the collage meld in their heads, in fact; especially when ‘reading it and singing it together in a circle smoking pot’ (!!!). And the critics should be ‘corralled on ostrich farms wherever they’ll be allowed to focus on feathers and messed up LEGS to their hearts’ content’. For they were ‘hooked on surface appearance’ and ‘not artistically developed enough’ to understand ‘the profound depth of the one thread that pulled all collage components together into a single perfectly unified fabric’.

Whatever that thread was. They forgot to mention it.

But his 'millions of' readers knew what the thread was, Dr. Lorenzo said on a TV talk show just after that letter to the Times; because he and his GUULP helpers had written and edited until they had woven that ‘one unifying thread’ all through the ostrich of a book, brought it home, and tied it so hard in place, that no one should be able to rip the book’s meaning to pieces.

But whether potential readers might wade across mucky, muddy literary collage to ever read the damn ‘unsightly squawking mess’ in the first place, laughed the Dr. in private to Sammy, was ‘a fowl of a different hew and squeak (plus even, maybe, a foul of a different hue and squawk)’.

Nor did the Dr. spell out during his TV interview with Charlie Rose what that ‘thread through the muck’ might be, 'literarily speaking', complained The Rolling Stone.

So the Legs pundits sent a short letter to the Stone explaining that the ‘thread of meaning’ through all the collage was the standard GUULP interpretation of the book which they, the Legs pundits, had propounded; which mj lorenzo had endorsed; and ‘which everyone in the world knew by heart’. And they reminded the Stone that this was: “A comprehension that what Guru Garland gave to mj lorenzo in 1974 could rescue from egotism, darkness and confusion, not just mj lorenzo, but the nation, and even its President; and the whole world too. And maybe even The Stone.”

But The Rolling Stone decided to not publish the letter. Because, as one of its editors complained to Sammy Martinez (as they stood talking in a Greenwich Village bar), though they could have edited out the rude words, ‘And maybe even The Stone’, the remainder still ‘smacked of ungraciously promoting a pet religion or ideology’.

Sammy then told the Stone editor, sitting down at a table over Belgian beer and mussels in the same bar, that a nation of people that did not debate in the light of day its religious and ideological underpinnings, would operate – and die – in darkness. Though, of course, such a debate should proceed amicably, with grace and literary taste, as much as possible. Neither side should accuse the other of ‘egotism, darkness and confusion’, especially in a ‘sacred public forum’ like The Stone, unless the accusation were undeniable and irrefutable, as it looked to be in Nixon’s case.

Sammy, uncharacteristically ruffled by the undignified brouhaha, called the Dr. about this; and Dr. Lorenzo agreed that open debate regarding ‘egotism, darkness and confusion’ was absolutely essential, as was naming names. And he named the name of Benjamin Franklin, who in his autobiography had thought it natural, educative, and informative to the colonies in general, to name names and criticize, poke fun at, and even compliment a specific famous preacher or a church denomination or two of his day, the 1700s, in English colonial America. On many pages, said Dr. Lorenzo, Franklin had criticized and poked fun at even his own young Ben Franklin self and his own egotism, his own moral darkness at times, and his own confusion; and this had made his autobiography’s criticism of others, including named prominent politicians still in office, less offensive. While at the same time, Franklin had made perfectly clear what kind of morality, ideology and religion he was endorsing; or tolerating; or had, on the other hand, hated enough as a boy to leave home over.

For, as the autobiography explained, Franklin left Boston and sailed for Philadelphia as a teen precisely because Philadelphia was famous in the early 1700s for its religious tolerance; whereas Boston had been driving him crazy with its strict, rules-obsessed, intolerant Calvinists. And that included young Ben’s father and all the way back to the grandfather in England who had kept a Bible hidden under a work stool. With one child guarding the door to be on the lookout for the kind of neighbor who would rat on a man who read the Bible church-service-like at home, meaning a Calvinist like Ben’s grandfather (a ‘Separatist’, or ‘Dissenter’, or ‘Puritan’, in other words), someone who refused to worship in the theologically ‘looser’ English state-sponsored church in town: Ben Franklin’s father’s father in England would place the stool on his lap, upside-down, would open the hidden Bible, and would read to his family from Holy Scripture, endangering everyone’s lives! Ben wanted it known that this kind of thinking, too, this strict, Calvinist, saintly-ascetic workaholism ethic, could be its own kind of ‘egotism, darkness and confusion’.

The Dr. admitted to Sammy that his fourth book, Mrs. Nixon’s Legs, was ‘not perfect’, but could probably be considered ‘pretty good’. The general public liked it, he said. They must have gotten ‘a pretty good ride’ off that ‘unsightly, squawking mess called a book’, or ‘the lame bird would have languished on a shelf and never gotten up and trotted all the way to Broadway’.

“And how, specifically and literarily, do you defend the ‘collage’?” his friend, Christ Roberts, who taught High School English in Kalamazoo, asked the Dr. after that.

“Readers’ tastes and talents are different,” the Dr. wrote back to Chris. “If a person never had read William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (as I know you have, not just one time but many, many times) or were unused to reading collage, Mrs. Nixon’s Legs would be harder the first time they read it. But after multiple readings, just as with the Bible, or Castaneda, or anything ‘a little complex and otherworldly, strange, or foreign’, and just as the Legs pundits claimed, it would probably get easier.” And later he added, “Probably the critic who likened ‘Legs’ to a lame bird, had always disliked literary collage, and never liked Burroughs either.”

And then in the end, not quite satisfied, Dr. Lorenzo resorted to one of his favorite tricks and pastimes, comparing his writing with The Holy Bible. And failed. For once (thank goodness). Because he could find no collage writing there.

A more apt comparison, he told Chris later, might be a Catholic mass or Protestant communion service with its quick back and forth between short statements from the clergyman, lines of songs sung by the choir, short prayers, praises, congregational responses, and short passages of scripture. It was therefore fitting, he thought, that Legs pundits had turned parts of Mrs. Nixon’s Legs into a ‘private-group-performance experience’ and described it in glowing, almost holy, terms. The pot, he added, had probably helped them switch to a less rational and more right-brain mode and mood, and helped to leave them feeling ‘kind of holy’, as their description of the event implied: “We love the sound of the collage meld in our heads.” For, as the Dr. told Chris, one of the purposes of ‘ritual’ was to shift human apperception from left-brain to right-brain, from rational and logical perception, to creative and intuitive perception.⁶

And – ‘BUT’ – he added: ‘the only ones for whom a ritual such as a mass will ever ‘work’, are those ‘open to it’. Some critics of his collage technique would never experience what the Legs pundits experienced while group-performing Mrs. Nixon’s Legs, probably, because they were not ‘open to it’ from the beginning.

‘And what about the pot?’ asked Hechizo, one of the many young heavy pot smokers who helped the Dr. (retired and elderly by now, and needing a lot of help therefore) in Mexico, when he heard about mj lorenzo admirers doing private salon ‘performances’ of the Dr.’s collage-like books in a ‘ceremony-like way’ while everyone present sat in a circle: ‘drugged on ganja’,⁷ as Hechizo loved to put it.

“It’s entirely possible,” Dr. Lorenzo’s son Freddie heard his father answer Hechizo during a trip to a rustic Mexican surfing beach in 2012, “that everyone in the world would understand and appreciate my books, and especially the literary-collage sections, far better if only they were ‘stoned’. ‘And reading or reciting them aloud in ritual group performances’.“

And Freddie swore his ‘Dad’ was 'dead serious' that July night in Nexpa, relaxing after a nice friendly dinner of fresh huachinango,⁸ beside the droning Pacific surf, where they sat in molded plastic chairs that sank in the sand six inches and more, talking about everything including his books, while passing joints rolled expertly by Hechizo, in the moonlight of a warm Michoacán nighttime.⁹

¹  This little vignette of a story, the first time Bill and Fred worked together in a recording studio and Bill found it necessary to ‘put Fred in his place’, is told in mj lorenzo’s Tales of Waring, in the chapter entitled, “I Put Him in His Place.”

²  As part of the Thanksgiving tableau, as mj imagined he recalled, Fred's singing 'Pennsylvanians', all got up in Victorian winter outdoor dress, top hats and bonnets and all, had sung wonderfully not just “Bless This House,” but also an old-fashioned ditty that went: “Over the river and through the woods, To Grandmother’s house we go. The horse knows the way, To carry the sleigh...,” etc., etc. The Waring program booklet for the concert season 1972-73 (prepared by Bill Blackburn) confirms that a few of Fred's famous 'spectacular' hour-long shows during his TV years (1949-56) had the titles: "Alice in Wonderland," "The Emperor's Clothes," "Tom Sawyer," and "Grandma's Thanksgiving." ("Fred Waring Presents Year 56: Music Then, Now and Forever" - see bibliography). Fred's 50th Anniversary Program presents much more on this subject (see bibliography).

A modern reader might find it hard to understand how a young boy could be so dazzled by a show on TV as to remember it for the rest of his life; since today, in 2013, we are deluged with movies, TV, rented DVDs, and moving visual media of a thousand kinds from morning to night; but mj was aesthetically sensitive; and too, in 1949, as the above paragraphs reveal, TV was a relatively new phenomenon on the east coast, and had barely reached the Midwest or west coast as of yet.

Furthermore, although movies had been around since the early part of the 20th century, Rev and Jo shied away from going to theaters because conservative Protestants had not yet given movies their full stamp of approval..

So in 1949 movies were still taboo in the Lorenzo household; and Fred Waring on TV might have been too, except for the fact that Fred came on Sunday night TV just before a string of preaching and scripture-reading evangelists like Percy Crawford and Jack Wyrtzen. And Fred had a sacred-patriotic aura about him in those days just after World War II, that made his programs seem almost holy.

So Rev, the ultimate arbiter in the household on what was moral or immoral, sinful or not sinful, opted immediately in 1949, when mj was 6, for Fred and the evangelists on Suncay night TV, but did not start taking his children to the movie theater until mj was around 9 or 10, and even then, at first, only to the movies based on Bible stories; although eventually he allowed his attractive blonde blue-eyed daughter to not just go to certain approved movies, but even dance with boys in the gym during high school lunch hour.

When mj started at Wrigley College in 1960, however, all of this was taken away again, at least during the school year, for he had to sign a very Calvinist 'pledge', reminiscent of the Mayflower Compact, promising he would not attend movies, dance, smoke, drink, or play cards! For four years straight he had to sign this Calvinist pledge or oath, styled directly upon life in Calvin's Geneva and Puritan New England, at the beginning of every one of his eight semesters at Wrigley College in the Chicago suburbs!

Poor little mj was lucky to get exposure to fine art of any kind in those days, thanks to the church 'reformers' who had influenced his family for generations. One of the first things the reformers did all over Europe in the early 1500s was to strip the churches of all art objects, which they felt came between and interfered with the purest form of piety, namely, the direct pious personal relationship between man and God, the kind demonstrated in the Bible by Abrahan, Isaac and Jacob. The only art in most Methodist churches in those days was an occasional stained-glass window of Jesus holding a lamb; and, of course, the church music, especially the organ playing and the choir.

 
U.S. Americans who want to understand themselves and their country, even today in 2013, will want to remember that most of the people who settled the colonies were from strict 'reforemed' and 'Protestant' sects, and will want to remember too, therefore, that the French and Swiss-French word for Calvinist, or church-reformer, the word they used in Calvin's Geneva to describe themselves, 'Huguenot', was derived from the German word Eidgenossen, which meant 'oath-sworn'; and that when Calvin first set up his religious community in Geneva, the stalwart core of whom were middle-class self-exiled French and French-Swiss entrepreneurs, he required that the entire Geneva congregation, all parishes, every Geneva citizen without exception, attend a service in the biggest church sanctuary in town during which the entire populace swore aloud their agreement or 'covenant' to live piously their lives in this new God-blessed community (whose mission was to reform the church, starting with themselves), i.e., to live according to certain Bible-based rules and principles spelled out in great detail; and that anyone unwilling to swear in public to these rules for Christian living and unwilling to abide by them every second of their lives henceforth had to leave the city. Completely taboo in Geneva and Puritan England was any kind of theater-going, just to name ONE of MANY 'self-reforming' taboos. Accordingly, Jo, although she loved to highest heaven her church music, was the one who usually resisted new 'modern' trends in the other arts, for her German Presbyterian family background was super-straight-laced, super-Calvinist strict Protestant, whereas Rev's Methodist family background was a little more relaxed. Rev was usually the first to give in to a new and modern trend that appeared at first a little 'sinful', maybe, or less than perfectly pious; whereas Jo would hold out longer; and this would give rise to cultural-religious wars from time to time in the Florence Methodist parsonage, wars to which the little mj was an intimate suffering witness.

And Rev was the first to give in to modern trends for another reason too: because he had a quick and rich sense of humor and could see more easily than Jo the comedy in certain kinds of hyper-religiosity. Rev therefore appreciated Fred Waring's sense of humor about religion. A photo in the 50th Anniversary Program, for example, shows that during one of Fred's TV spectaculars about the Pennsylvania 'Dutch' (who were actually German, i.e., Deutsch, not Dutch), Fred's 'Pennsylvanians' poked a little fun at the Amish, a strict branch of the Mennonites. Fred, raised devout Methodist like Rev, nevertheless from a young age eschewed ministers and church people who had no sense of humor about their own hyper-religious selves. So, derived from Fred's sense of humor about public hyper-religiosity, the photo shows from the side three bearded Amish men (Fred's singing 'Pennsylvanians' in costume) in black shoes, suits, bow-ties and black wide-brimmed shallow derbies, in a perfect row, six inches apart, and duck-walking like The Three Stooges doing a threesome automaton 'dance'. Rev would have split his side at this, while Jo would have chuckled a little self-consciously; for, after all, her ancestors had been Pennsylvania German, probably from super-pious sects closely related to the Amish and Mennonites, although eventually they ended up strict conservative Presbyterians and worshiped with Scots and Englishmen; while Rev's Maryland and Virginia people WERE Scots and Englishmen, and had been tobacco aristocrats for generations; and then, after the Civil War, when they lost status and property and wealth and slave labor, had evolved into poorer Shenandoah Valley farmers whose farms still had formal 'names' just as the great gentry estates of southern and western England did, like 'Silent Spring', or 'Clifton'. And from the earliest colonial days on, public super-pious super-religiosity had never been much admired in upper-class Virginia, where big plantation owners like Jefferson and Meriwether Lewis tended more to wenching, gambling, whiskey-drinking and shows and showing-off of every kind, than to severe ascetic piety.

³  The protagonist of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress ‘fell into’ the ‘slough’ called ‘Despond’ only about six or seven pages into the story. It was the first big obstacle he encountered on his way to Truth. Elderly Dr. Lorenzo probably remembered it so well, even after 64 years or so, because, since the Slough of Despond came so early in the allegorical novel, it must have been one of the very first things that stopped the family dead in their tracks as Rev read at the kitchen table. Rev would have had to stop reading, and he and Jo would have had to take the time to explain how the ‘slough’ or ‘bog’ or ‘swamp’ called ‘Despond’ represented, allegorically, a phase of depression or downheartedness, meaning discouragement, which the protagonist, ‘Christian’, was experiencing at that point on his journey from misery to triumph, from lostness to foundness, from ‘the wilderness of this world’ to the ‘Celestial City’.

⁴  The New Testament, John 14:2.

⁵  ‘Bless This House’, hymn by Helen Taylor and May H. Brahe.

⁶  Castaneda, in his The Fire from Within, made a similar point when he described the way don Juan had taught Carlos the profoundest techniques of shamanry and of ‘see’-ing like a ‘seer’. His method included techniques for shifting from a normal and everyday state of awareness, to a ‘heightened’ state of awareness that had to do with ‘mystery’ and ‘psychic’ perception. See: Carlos Castaneda, The Fire from Within (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984; paperback edition, 1991), “Foreword,” pp. ix-xiii, where he explained that pulling knowledge learned during the ‘heightened state of awareness’ back into one’s ‘ordinary’ everyday awareness required “a staggering effort of recovery.” (p. xii)

⁷  The word ‘ganja’ sounds very foreign to English-speaking people but is in the digital 2003 Merrriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (Version 3). It is in standard use among pot-loving people not only in the USA and other English-speaking countries, but also in Mexico and many other non-English-speaking countries, and derives from Hindi and Sanskrit words for pot (cannabis; marijuana), a significance which it still retains everywhere it is used.

⁸  The word huachinango or guachinango (from the Nahuatl language spoken 500 years ago by the Aztecs and still used by a number of native Mesoamerican groups) is still used here and there in Mexico for several different kinds of fish, perhaps at times incorrectly, but in this case for a Pacific Ocean fish that may be pargo (porgy) or zalamero.

⁹  More discussion of the Dr.’s ‘collage’ approach to writing may be found in the present work in the chapter entitled “Mrs. Nixon’s Legs” (in Part I); and also in Question #16 of the final chapter of the present work, the chapter entitled “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” (in Part III).