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The Essay
Show #51
The Worst Plucked Parts of the Crow
David Gunn
In the year 1066, one thousand years before electric tap water zapped the thirsts of pilloried pilgrims and rayon was proclaimed world fabric, there were, in a sense, no mothers. Ambivalence to costumed horses had reached epic proportions. Bats had only recently learned how to swoon. The last of the great ionic marble formations had retired, dooming the potential careers of thousands of talking rocks. Anchovies became extinct, briefly reappeared, then went extinct again. Capricious subduction forces at the earth's core caused the points of the compass to shift 90 degrees to the left, wiping out what was to someday become Chicago. Strange spacecraft festooned with alien smiley faces were frequently spotted hovering near the equator -- which was, due to the compass shift, really Niagara Falls. And somewhere, somebody named Zanamuse was watching over all of the special effects and epiphanic meddling and chuckling mightily to himself ... chuckling, yes, but also keenly aware of his own escalating gastrointestinal discombobulation. Clutching his abdomen, he tried to mime the Fibonnaci sign for "mother." Experts concur that what he really gesticulated was "the worst plucked parts of the crow," but somehow the notion of maternal need got through, and soon anchovies began to show up again and his mother appeared to him in a dream where his pancreas should have been, speaking Labradorian. She said ... well, I can't read it, it's Labradorian.

Meanwhile, the ghosts of Fred Astaire, King Oliver, Edward Lear and Salvador Dali have congregated over Minnesota, reluctant to disregard the wishes of their respective earth mother, who likens the image of their incorporeal hovering to Yogi Berra sewing his wild oats into vast fields of gabardine. Grudgingly, the seed of an idea takes root, festers, and swoons, much like the bats do. The ghosts relax, play a little golf and laugh it off with an extended bout of didactically eliptical reasoning, sometimes called le flambeau oriange.

Speaking of reasoning, if -- and let's ignore the ramifications of why a reasonably sentient biped would do it in the first place -- if you were to rearrange the letters in Martha Graham's name and combine them with those of Burt Bacharach, Bedrich Smetana, Bob Marley and Fats Domino, you would get "A smart tango march to arachnid home baby hard babble such rimram fate." And I don't think I need to apprise you of its significance.

And then there were two, as in the number of shells not considered vital to tie in a protracted hand of whiskers six-draw, or the amount of meringue comfortably concealed in a stovepipe hat, or even the price of peace at a Federal Communications Commission all- day hearing on financially-impaired public radio stations, such as the one to which you have so willingly in-tuned, and on which you are likely to hear the unsubsidized vocal realizations of Kalvos & Damian today on the 51st episode of the New Music Sesquihour, this portion of which is being brought to you by Kalvos & Damian's New Music Sesquihour, now as always in its pluperfect season.

And, in this radiophonically eclectic world, seasoned is we have become, enabling us to better serve you, our listening audient, with more tunes and fewer bouts of dead air ... most of the time. Also most of the time is, our mothers preserve us, the one who has successfully practiced the art of circular heaving, Kolvas.


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