Mark Dunn - Ibid - A Life

The Norwegian Songbird Who needs Jenny Lind when our very own Jean Norvist will stand before you and sing your tear ducts dry with her heart-wrenching ballads of love and loss and incontinence. She will then circulate through the audience, sniffing proffered objects and telling where they have been.

The Goony Goofballs will pound your funny bones with verbal ballpeen hammers, they are that funny. A madcap diversion that will have you howling, but then weeping your tear ducts dry over tales of personal loss through government-sanctioned deprivation.

The evening will close with a Sousa march in a high-flying patriotic tribute to our fallen American heroes in the War to Suppress Arrogant Philippine Self-determination.

Afterwards Mr. & Mrs. Grund will offer punch and pastry in the foyer.

24. Jinks Nyberg’s career was long and varied.Among the many stops made by Jinks in his peripatetic performing career was a brief stint on the vaudeville stage as half of the comic duo of Jinks & Skinks. The two comedians were best known for their send-up of one of the first transcontinental telephone conversations — a party line involving Alexander Graham Bell from the New York City offices of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, his assistant Thomas A. Watson from San Francisco, and others, held on January 25, 1915. One of the more sanitized versions of the sketch survives. Nyberg Collection, Mid South Community College Theatre Archives.

BELL : Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.

WATSON : I cannot do that, Professor Graham Bell.

BELL : And why is that, Mr. Watson?

WATSON : Because you are in New York City and I am in San Francisco. We are 2,572 miles apart.

BELL : And yet we are talking to one another by way of this miracle of science and industry at this very moment, and with no delay whatsoever.

WATSON : Yes! Yes! It is a wonder and a miracle!

(At this point the conversation is joined by Theodore Vail, president of American Telephone and Telegraph, speaking via a spur line to Jekyll Island, Georgia.)

VAIL : Hello! Hello!

BELL : Mr. Watson, your voice has changed.

VAIL : It is not Mr. Watson. It is I, Theodore Vail, speaking to you from the Goober State.

BELL : And what has happened to Mr. Watson?

WATSON : I am still here. I understand there is someone else who wishes to join the conversation.

BELL : Ahoy! Who is there?

O. W. HOLMES : It is I, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Junior. In our nation’s capital. I have President Woodrow Wilson seated next to me. He is eager to speak to all of you.

BELL : By all means, ask him to join us.

O. W. HOLMES: (muffled) Take the mouthpiece from your ear, Mr. President. You have reversed the apparatus in a comical manner.

WILSON: (muffled) Dear me. Yes, I see.

O. W. HOLMES : One moment, gentlemen. It appears that the president is having another little stroke.

(Momentarily, President Woodrow Wilson joins the conversation.)

PRESIDENT WILSON : Good afternoon, good afternoon. What a miracle of science to be having a conversation from points far flung!

BELL : Ahoy, Mr. President! It is indeed an honor and a privilege to be speaking to you across such a distance.

PRESIDENT WILSON : May I say it?

BELL : Say what, Mr. President?

PRESIDENT WILSON : Tee hee. Come here, Watson, I need you.

BELL : Not need you, Mr. President. I want you.

PRESIDENT WILSON : Well, I want you too, sugar. Tee hee. Oh dear, I just made a monkey of myself there, didn’t I?

WATSON : It’s all the same to me.

VAIL : Mr. Watson! Come here! I want you! Ho ho!

PRESIDENT WILSON : Yes, come here this instant, you servile little man. Tee hee.

WATSON : I’m hanging up.

(A silence)

BELL : I believe we have offended Mr. Watson. (Another moment of silence.) This, gentlemen, concludes our demonstration of long distance communication. Please help yourselves to wine and cucumber sandwiches. What a day. What a day.

25. Jonathan’s legal fees were paid by a mysterious benefactor.There is a difference of opinion as to the true identity of this benefactor. Some say that it was Pettiville merchant J.P. Morgen. Morgen was occasionally confused with millionaire financier J.P. Morgan. The two did resemble one another, even down to their bulbous noses and rosaceous complexions. However, Morgen rarely left Pettiville, and Morgan rarely came to Arkansas. Additionally, Morgen hailed from the rural Ozarks and took no pains to change his accent or retire his overalls or fix his teeth or divorce his sister.

26. The lawsuit was finally settled.Box 17, Legal Documents, JBP.

27. The ether had already been administered.The heroics as described by Nurse Monette (New England Medical Union Oral History Collection) were only slightly exaggerated in the yellow press. Jonathan’s “rescue” by a motley band of side show performers and irate Blashette family members was the stuff of the “mellerdrama” or some heart-stopping Kinetoscopic short. What we know to be true is that the rescue party did indeed storm the operating room just as Dr. Meemo was positioning the amputation saw, not, in fact, over the tertiary leg — nor any leg, for that matter — but over Blashette’s right arm. Numerous eyewitness accounts attest to Meemo’s advanced state of inebriation at the time and the subsequent Keystone Cops-like arrest of both Meemo (for public intoxication and potential malpractice) and several of the more anatomically intriguing members of the sideshow brigade who mistakenly entered the children’s ward and frightened the youngsters into eating not only everything on their dinner plates but their paper napkins as well.

28. “I, Jonathan Blashette, make these solemn vows.”JBP. In addition to vowing never again to seek removal of the extraneous leg, Jonathan made a number of other promises to his thirteen-year-old self. Below is the full text of Jonathan’s “Promissory Note to Myself.”

On this day, February 12, 1901, I, Jonathan Blashette, vow the following :

1. Given the grave risk of accidental removal of a non-designated appendage, I will never again seek to dispatch any part of my body with which I have been either blessed or inconvenienced by the good Lord, nor will I ever again complain of my lot on this earth.

2. I will apply myself to diligent study and mold myself into a man to make my mother and father exceedingly proud.

3. I will marry a woman with large and exciting breasts, like those on Batanya Batavia, the hatchetman’s assistant.

4. I will seek a career in either the ministry or as a fitter in women’s foundation furnishings.

5. I will serve my country and my fellow man through whatever means are offered to me but will never — regardless of financial incentive — dress up like a clown because some people find clowns scary or at the very least comically unengaging.

6. I will buy my mother an emerald choker, one size too large as a margin of safety.

7. I will transport myself thirty years into the future as did the gentleman in Mr. Wells’s novel The Time Machine and I will find out where my future self will be stationed at that particular moment, and I will hide behind a hedge with the intention of jumping out and startling him but because my intended victim will remember being the me of thirty years previous, he will be prepared for this prank and will not be in the least bit frightened but will wag a finger at me, and say, “I’ve been waiting for you, rascal!” and invite me to sup with him and he will let me drink beer because he will know how much he wanted to but was prevented from doing so when he was thirteen, and it will be a very droll evening indeed.