events related to

the creation and publication of this study:

a look at mj lorenzo’s fourth book

Exactly How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert

and links to those events

where they are found described in this work
or in other mj lorenzo creative works at this website

1.  birth year and roles (in history and/or in story) of some of the persons appearing in this ‘look’ at mj’s fourth book, in chronological order by birth:

1890 – Dwight David Eisenhower (‘Ike’), ‘Five-Star’ U.S. Army General (1940s), and the ‘Supreme Commander’ in wartime Europe, i.e., military-administrative mastermind of the victorious 1944 ‘D-Day’ allied invasion and subsequent conquest of Nazi-German Europe, one of the greatest military achievements in universal history; and then, although he wants to retire and go home to Mamie, his wife from whom the war has separated him for several years, and ‘just go fishing’: 4 additional but slightly less heroic posts in close succession, all 4 on the grounds that ‘America needs you’ and he should do his ‘duty’: Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army; President of Columbia University; Supreme Commander of NATO; and finally, the 34^th President of the United States for two terms (1953-1960)

1900 – Fred Waring and Poley McClintock, best buds since being born six months apart in Tyrone, a small town in central Pennsylvania on the Main Line (Philadelphia to Chicago) of the Pennsylvania Railroad; and 2 of the 4 co-founders of the funky ‘Waring Banjazzatra’ in 1917, noisy singing banjo pickers (with percussion) who then transform themselves into ‘Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians’, a high-class ‘Choral Big Band’ (as Betty Ann clarifies adroitly)

1905 – Rev Lorenzo, mj lorenzo’s punchy preacher father

1910 – Jo Lorenzo, mj’s perspicacious preacher’s-wife mother

1912 – Pat Nixon, cleverly longsuffering wife of Richard Nixon and an assistant to Bill Blackburn in his dealings with a difficult Fred Waring

1913 – Richard Nixon, ‘too glib to be U.S. President’ (as Ike calls him), 37^th President of the United States (1968-74), who resigned under threat of certain impeachment

1930 – Bill Blackburn, jack of all trades, employed by Fred Waring (1960s-70s) as his sincerely dedicated and loyal publicity director, his annual concert tour program-brochure coordinator, and even his record producer, his gofer, his punching bag, etc., etc.

1943 – young Dr. ‘mj’ Lorenzo, naive but super-sincere budding psychiatrist (60s-70s), and eventual author of 1985 best-seller, Exactly How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert; plus, in later years, a wiser (?) commentator on his own less wise (?) younger self

1944 – Dlune Lorenzo, once mj's savior-nurse and now a new mother of their first child, raised by Native Americans in Montana and in sub-polar Canada (Fort Smith, Northwest Territories)

1952 – Joey Rosenblatt, mj’s friend; and thankful follower of a guru

1957 – 'Guru Garland', Joey’s teenage object of adoration from India, who takes Joey and mj to the other side ‘faster than a hovercraft’

1957 – Sammy Martinez, of San Juan (Ohkay Owingei) Pueblo, in northern New Mexico, mj’s matchless writing assistant from the day of their first meeting in 1971

1967 – Chris Roberts, mj’s much younger hang-out pal at the 1987 Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics summer writing workshop embodied at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado; and then, much later, a high school English teacher in Kalamazoo, Michigan (2013)

1974 – Freddie Lorenzo, mj’s son who ‘remembers’ what Dad ‘said’ in incredible detail, even though they were all stoned at the beach; in the exact same way, one suspects, that beer-drinking Martin Luther’s nephews ‘remembered’ his beer-guzzling dinner table talk, embarrassing poor Luther forever (but forever saving far northern Europe from Calvinist super-ascetic righteousness, justifying themselves thereby)

1975 – The Chockawhoppin Tin Can, the elderly Dr. Lorenzo’s first and longest-serving (1998-2011) young Mexican impossible sidekick (in the U.S. and Mexico)

1976 – Nico Lorenzo, mj’s perfect daughter

1988 – Hechizo, yet another of Dr. Lorenzo’s young Mexican impossible sidekicks (serving as such in Mexico from 2010 until exactly September 21, 2012, the night he was pipe bludgeoned in a typical Mexican small-town Saturday night street brawl and died in 45 minutes, half on the cold pavement and half in his wife’s warm loving arms)

1994-2000 – the famous literary genius-aborning ‘high-schoolers’, and especially the students in Sammy Martinez’ after-school reading club at Española High, in the town of Española, northern New Mexico

???? – Betty Ann McCall (Blackburn), a Swedish-American Big Band blonde bomb and orphan-madonna; who never seems to age; although allegedly, 'at age 12' (!) she kicks off her musical career in the guise of U.S. national accordion champ (an accomplishment as amazing as an immaculate conception almost); and some years later, featured with Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians in the 50s, 60s and 70s, she finishes her musical career as a madonna-like star on a magical music-making instrument called 'cordovox', even playing privately for President Eisenhower at his home in Gettysburg

2.  other important events, in chronological order

1920s-1930s – Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians make it big on college campuses and Broadway; in major-city theaters; in vaudeville and Chicago Speakeasies (playing in secret for big mafia bosses Al Capone and Bugs Moran); in Hollywood; and in the very spiffiest Paris venues; and on DAILY radio with impressive sponsors (like Ford, and Chesterfield cigarettes, and Old Gold cigarettes); and with the biggest hits on Victor Talking Machine 78 RPM records

1935-50 – Bill Blackburn spends his boyhood summers on Native American ‘Indian’ reservations with his mother’s Huron-tribe relatives, listening to tales of the humble but noble Huron past

1946 – first nuclear bombs are dropped on humanity (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) by the USA, effectively ending World War II; but immediately the ‘Cold War’ begins between the communist Russians and Chinese, on one side; and the more democratic ‘West’, led by the USA, on the other; and leading parties begin developing ever-growing nuclear arsenals over the following decades; along with the means to deploy nuclear bombs from thousands of miles away; and a single long-range missile bomb can make your day and your whole metro area (and its every man, woman and frog) into twisted melted trash; it’s a new kind of global disgusting war, a world war of Nerves, allegedly over who has the correctest ‘ideology’ or ‘religion’ or way of life; although some think it’s about power and 'security'; or money; and others complain it’s about ignorance (whereas really, as Joey’s guru  points out, it’s really about ego and 'mind', i.e., just plain craziness)

1949 – Rev and Jo Lorenzo begin taking mj (age 6) and his Big Sis (10) every Sunday night to the homes of church members who have the new thing called ‘TV’, to see their musical idols (ever since Rev and Jo were teens), Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, doing television’s first hour-long ‘Spectaculars’; and the one mj remembers in greatest detail for the rest of his life is called ‘Grandma’s Thanksgiving’

1952 – Eisenhower wins the presidential election for his first 4-year term, and the night he wins, at the victory celebration, he selects Fred Waring to introduce him to the nation as their new President, on coast-to-coast television, all major networks at once

1953 – U.S. President Eisenhower (‘Ike’), in his first inaugural address to the American people, warns that ‘science’ ‘seems to have’ ‘given’ ‘US’ ‘the power’ to liquidate the human race ‘from this planet’; little mj is now 10 years old and his childhood is punctuated by school air raid drills and running for cover from imaginary but very possible nuclear bombs; Fred Waring has been a leading factor in inducing Ike to run for president, and in fundraising to help him win; they are very close buddies, Ike calling Fred once a day at times

1953 – Fred gives Ike a grand Birthday Party with tens of thousands in attendance, and leads his ‘Pennsylvanians’ and a chorus of a thousand school children from all over Pennsylvania in Roy Ringwald’s saga-cantata about America’s founding, The Song of America, lyrics drawn from the poetic works of American writers: Bryant, Emerson, Lowell, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, Whitman and others; in effect, it is a thank you for Ike’s ‘saving the world for democracy’ and for his highly moral global leadership

1953 – little mj, ten years old in 6^th grade, is elected president of his class for the first time

1957 – teenage mj is elected president of his school class (10^th grade) for the last of four times

1960 – mj graduates Florence High as valedictorian, president of the Honor Society, and pole vaulter with a letter in track; in Band he has played trumpet, French horn and baritone horn; and for hammering out Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G minor on a grand piano at a competition, he wins a music scholarship to Wrigley College (but meanwhile, for years, and in secret, he has been a big reader of novels)

1960-64 – mj attends Wrigley College, passing all courses required by medical schools (Organic and Inorganic Chemistry; Physics, and Zoology), and all those required by Wrigley (Bible and Philosophy), but with a ‘departmental’ major in Social Sciences (anthropology, history, political science and sociology) and plenty of electives in literature and psych, so as to get ‘the broadest liberal arts education imaginable’; and he graduates magna cum laude

1961 – President Eisenhower delivers his ‘Farewell Address‘ to the American people on January 17, warning of the possible accumulation of too much power by the U.S. American ‘military-industrial complex’

1961 – mj discovers the writings of two Swiss psychiatrists, Paul Tournier and Carl Jung, and decides to become a psychiatrist

1964-69 – mj goes to medical school in Philadelphia, at the University of Pennsylvania; and, having used one of the world’s first computers to analyze his data, wins an award for the “best research paper in Psychiatry,” which he presents at a Penn medical symposium

1966-67 – Waring celebrates his fiftieth year in show business with an 84-page photo-biography available at all his concerts, including the annual nine-month nationwide road-tour

1969-73 – U.S. President Richard Nixon secretly orders the U.S. American military to secretly bomb Cambodia in grossly illegal defiance of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed by Congress (which has been carefully designed to prevent spreading of the Vietnam War into neighboring countries such as Cambodia); and in the end a hundred thousand peasants quietly farming rice on ancestral lands in a spiritual state of semi-Nirvana are blasted to DEATH, and ONE FIFTH of all Cambodian property IS DESTROYED (see Encarta article, “Secret Bombing of Cambodia,” AND READ THE WHOLE VERY SHORT ARTICLE); and for a long time all but about three Americans, even Congressmen and Senators, DO NOT EVEN KNOW IT IS HAPPENING! It's Richard Milhouse Nixon's PRIVATE WAR, using illegally the resources of the U.S. military of which he is commander-in-chief, and funding his private war with the U.S. Treasury, i.e., with Americans' tax dollars without their knowledge or the knowledge of any of their elected representatives, without whose approval the USA can NOT wage war, as very clearly stated in the U.S. Constitution.

1960-72 – the non-violent street politics of Martin Luther King, the liberal leanings of the Kennedys and President Johnson, the writings of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and the New Left political philosophy of Herbert Marcuse and the ‘Frankfurt School’, all together, help trigger a decade of ongoing student protest and social turmoil which focuses primarily on racial integration and on ending America’s ‘illegal and immoral’ involvement in the Vietnam civil war, but also on other social issues, and even on the loosening of sexual mores; and after things calm down, everyone realizes that a permanent cultural revolution has occurred, a profound change in the way most Americans think and act

1969-72 – mj participates in several massive anti-Vietnam-war marches in Washington, D.C., carrying a big, street-wide ‘RESISTANCE’ banner with Joey and other friends; and as they march past the White House they give Nixon the finger

1970 – in May, four of Ohio’s Kent State University students, while peacefully protesting Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia with U.S. ground forces, are SHOT DEAD WITH RIFLES by Ohio National Guard; while eleven other students are wounded; and mj’s ‘60s generation’, in shock, blames Nixon, because of his blind, machine-like, militarism and the anti-protest tone he has set as the country’s leader; mj, for the first time in his 27 years, is truly emotionally distraught

1970-71 – from June to June, mj undergoes his ‘remaking’ year and trip, with a resulting book, The Remaking (see also the ‘brief chronology’ of events at the end of ‘a look at mj lorenzo’s first book, The Remaking’, also at this website)

1971 – in November, unbeknownst to mj, Rev publishes his son’s first book, The Remaking, by photocopying it and handing it out all over the Delaware Valley and especially on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where mj has just graduated medical school; in it the author mentions that he believes he has been born on the planet to keep the human race from annihilating itself; and within a few months he has a rapidly growing following of ‘pundits’ who are intelligently picking apart every aspect of his The Remaking

1972 – a burglary and wiretapping of Democratic Party campaign headquarters at the D.C. ‘Watergate’ office complex on June 17, is traced eventually to Nixon’s Republican White House

1972 – mj moves with Dlune to the Poconos in northeast Pennsylvania to direct the Tri-County Drug and Alcohol Program; two months later, in August, Bill Blackburn and Betty Ann McCall move in next door and the two couples meet for the first time; at about the same time Bill meets Pat Nixon during a Waring benefit concert for Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania flood victims, and she helps him deal with difficult Fred Waring; in December Bill marries Betty Ann in Fred’s living room and they spend their honeymoon at the Nixon White House, giving, with Fred and the Pennsylvanians, the 1972 White House Christmas Concert

1972-74 – Bill and mj fish in Spring Lake together as often as they can; and on each fishing jaunt mj hears another entertaining and provocative tale of Bill’s years working for Fred Waring

1974 – mj researches the history of Bill’s Huron tribe and discovers historian Bruce Trigger at Yale, eventual author of The Children of Aataentsic; Trigger’s description of Bill’s tribal history hits mj like a revelation and a nightmare

1974 – mj interviews Bill and Betty Ann on three separate evenings (over a stretch of five months or so) about their life with famous Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians; that same summer President Nixon resigns rather than face impeachment for covering up criminal acts that have been orchestrated from the White House, including a break-in at the Democratic Party Headquarters and an attempt to cover up the administration’s involvement in it; after Nixon’s resignation, and just before mj’s third interview with the Blackburns, he listens to tapes of Guru Garland that Joey sends him in the mail; mj begins to ‘meditate’ without proper instruction, and yet his life changes for the better

1975 – mj and Dlune move to Denver, Colorado, equidistant from their two birthplaces and families, his in the Philadelphia area (Delaware Valley) and hers in the Fort Smith area (Northwest Territories, Canada), so that young Dr. Lorenzo can complete his psychiatry training

1976 – mj, as part of his pay, is housed with his growing family in the same Victorian mansion that housed Ike (President Eisenhower) when he was a young officer with a growing family

1978 – mj lorenzo sees Guru Garland in person for the first time, in Rome, Italy, and soon receives proper instruction in the guru’s meditation

1979 – young Dr. Lorenzo is elected president of the medical staff, Fort Logan Mental Health Center, Denver, Colorado

1981 – mj lorenzo’s second book, Tales of Waring, is published underground; the first book of the Waring trilogy; structured around mj’s first 1974 interview with the Blackburns; a comedy becoming a nightmare, it is noticed by few except mj’s most diehard supporters; and in fact, his sharpest and most ardent defenders, the ‘culture hero’ pundits, abandon him for ten years over it

1983 – mj lorenzo’s third book, Grandfather’s Tomahawk, or Grandfather’s Tomahawk and Other Tales of the Last Great Huron Storyteller and the Last Great Swedish-American Big Band Blonde-Bomb Orphan-Madonna Storyteller is published underground; second book of the Waring trilogy; structured around mj’s second 1974 interview with the Blackburns; and it is noticed by very few

1984 – Dr. Lorenzo reads Carlos Castaneda’s The Fire from Within, and realizes it helps explain Bill Blackburn’s way of dealing with Fred Waring

1985 – mj lorenzo’s fourth book, Exactly How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert, is published by a mainstream New York publishing house, the biggest publishing coup of the author’s career (as of the present, 2013), and an immeasurable help in establishing his name; the book is third and last in the Waring trilogy; structured around mj’s third 1974 interview with the Blackburns

1985-86 – Mrs. Nixon’s Legs becomes a New York Times best-seller; serialized by France’s Le Monde (translated by the author into French) and Britain’s The Guardian; a number of mj’s devoted pundit following known as Legs pundits promulgate a theory about the book’s creation; it is called the GUULP theory, or the General Unofficial Underground Legs Pundit ‘version’ or ‘interpretation’ of Mrs. Nixon’s Legs; they travel around the world presenting it, and it becomes the standard version of mj’s fourth book by the early 90s; meanwhile international opinion is in a flurry over the White House Secret Service file on William S. Blackburn published as part of Mrs. Nixon’s Legs

1985-86 – a new group of mj lorenzo pundits forms, known as ‘religionist’ pundits, who argue that Mrs. Nixon’s Legs ‘proves’ he is trying to form a new religion; they stress his emphasis on ‘ritual’ in his second and fourth books, Tales of Waring, and Mrs. Nixon’s Legs; and Dr. Lorenzo admits they are ‘essentially right’, but he prefers the term ‘world view’ to ‘religion’

1989 – during his Lamont music lecture at Denver University, Dr. Lorenzo confesses he has heard music inside his head ‘constantly’, ‘all of my life’

1990 – mj’s ‘Sacred Wedding’, or ‘hieros gamos’ pundits publish their webpage ‘Guide to the Dr.’s Fourth Book’, which encourages a sympathetic understanding of the author’s use of the difficult (for some) writing technique called ‘literary collage’, throughout his fourth book, Mrs. Nixon’s Legs, and especially in the chapter by that same name

1995 – the Broadway musical Mrs. Nixon’s Legs opens in a London theater; and a year later, on Broadway

2000 – the Hollywood movie Mrs. Nixon’s Legs debuts in cinemas

2001 – mj retires from practicing psychiatry in order to write full-time; he moves to Chockawhoppin, in the central Mexican state of Michoacán; and every year or so, when he runs out of money, he returns to Colorado to work a few months in the Colorado prison system and the state psychiatric hospital in Pueblo

2002 – The Pueblo Chieftain, one of southern Colorado’s principal dailies, interviews Dr. Lorenzo about his fourth book; the paper wins Pulitzers for the photo and headline,

Locally Renowned and Beloved Psychiatrist

Dr. ‘mj’ Lorenzo

Divulges Own Mental Disability

and

Mind-Shrinking Cure

2006 – famous email interchange between Sammy Martinez and mj lorenzo debating whether mj has been ‘trying to found a new religion’, as some claim; and whether Mrs. Nixon’s Legs might be ‘sacred text’: and with ‘sacred text’ mj agrees; but he prefers the word ‘weltanschauung’ (or ‘world view’) to the word ‘religion’

2006 – at a ‘Legs’ pundit workshop in Atlantic City mj’s family asks him in public how, at the terribly young age of 6 (!!!), he could have understood the Waring song “Bless this House” to have been about THE WHOLE USA, and not just about a single house, or building like a church, or the White House

2010 – Legs ‘secrecy theory’ pundits attempt to explain where the White House Secret Service file on William S. Blackburn in Mrs. Nixon’s Legs may have come from; and also, where, after mj wrote the book, it may have gone

2012 – the Secretary General of the United Nations invites Dr. Lorenzo to address the UN’s UNESCO symposium on world peace, and his speech creates a global conflict (of words)

2012 – the Dr., during a phone conversation with Chris Roberts, likens his collage-technique writing in his fourth book to – not the Holy Bible this time, but – a Catholic mass or Protestant communion service

2012 – in Mexico, in the presence of his son and his Mexican helper, Hechizo, the Dr. states, “It’s entirely possible 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.”

2012-13 – students of Sammy Martinez’ after-school reading club at Española High in Española, New Mexico, produce a ‘group ritual performance’ of ‘Mrs. Nixon’s Legs’ and perform it in Santa Fe and Taos; and the Santa Fe Opera borrows it

2013 –Española high-schoolers help Sammy Martinez put together a series of questions and answers for the closing chapter of the present work, ‘a look at mj’s fourth book’, 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

2013 – Sammy Martinez nominates certain of his Española High after-school reading club students for two MOISTR awards, each for an exceptionally brilliant interpretation of mj’s writing; it is an honor, like an Oscar, Emmy or Tony (for cinema, TV or Broadway, respectively), usually reserved for the elite of mj lorenzo punditry

2013 – Dr. Lorenzo’s Thanksgiving ‘long letter’ to Sammy’s reading club goes viral worldwide and to such an extent that it provokes a nasty rebuttal contest on an international cable news channel

2013 – extremely late in the year, possibly December 31 (or later?), the present study, ‘a look at mj lorenzo’s fourth book, Exactly How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert’, is finally published (lugubriously) at the present (very dead serious) website, www.bruceduvall.com , with Sammy Martinez as grinning editor in chief (got up in black lenses and long black pony tail, a buff buckskin vest with fringes, and no shirt), (who refuses to have his picture taken for this web page) (just kidding he always wears a business suit) (still kidding) (just to torment him for refusing a picture)