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The Essay
Show #34
A Swami in Hartford
David Gunn
Bon radio. This is the way it happened, eighty-odd years ago today. No part of the story has been omitted, although several names have been changed so as to limit the chagrin many of the concerned parties -- especially those in Boston and Hartford -- may yet feel. A written transcript which includes the original names will soon be available. And now, the story.

Or rather, and now, an anecdote. The year was 1863, the place was a hamlet in India, and Hindu thinker and swami-to-be Vivekananda was one day old. Born Narendranath Datta, which in Indianese means le flambeau oriange, Vivek emerged from his mother's womb fully neutered and smelling of talcum. He promptly dozed off for 16 hours and woke up the next day, a Saturday, 133 years ago today, and began to speak in tongues, which was particularly remarkable because the odd toddler had six of them slithering about in his mouth. The sounds which issued forth were like none ever heard before in his village, which was called Blimh. There also lived in the same village a direct descendent of the ancient travel writer, Odoric of Pordenone, which has no bearing on this current tale, but I thought you might like to know anyway. Anyway, Vevekananda went on to write many scholarly works, including reams of correspondence to a penpal, and some time later he died, and along with him disappeared whatever moral there might have been to the story.

But, back to the tale at hand. The year is 1920. The war is no longer at world, though one ethnically-garbed zealot is attempting to hold 600 acres of a desert in Outer Mongolia hostage. However in Hartford, Connecticut, a guy named Al, as in Fuller, is about to revolutionize marketing methodology with a novel foot-in-the-door technique, or, pied de la fromage. But I wager you didn't spin the radio dial to this locale to hear marketing drivel, so just forget I ever broached the subject. Thank you.

This portion of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Sesquihour Expansive -- which if I failed to mention, is what it is and we are -- is brought to you in part by this portion of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Sesquihour, now available in easy-to-digest molecularly homogenized sesqui-sequences at your favorite radiophonic retailer.

This episode, number 34, will have the same significance to numerologists as would a crop of wheat to a creased box of saltines that has languished on a Chicago deli counter for two weeks while the owner stalks his parole officer in Pontoon, Texas, while pursued by his own, sausage-like demons, a plot for a story contemplated by neither James Joyce nor Horatio Alger, but rather by Charles the Fat shortly before he inherited the kingdom of Swabia in 876 and thereafter swore off all organized thinking.

It's another feast day today, the feast day of St. Hilary, the patron saint of amusement, but there's nothing funny about this day, which like all of the others is thus far feast-free, with no sign of comestibles to come, so again we implore you, our listening audient, to cater to our musical whims; until then, try to curb your bonny appetite with Kalvos.