Recently, I completed a 10-day solo Stand-Up South tour as the World’s Oldest, and it turned out to be quite an adventure for an older man like me, who struggles with memory lapses and often forgets words like ‘cognitive.’ Nightly, over 90 unscripted minutes of solo material in front of big audiences for sure a lot of whom voted against my last November political views would be to make them laugh.
Since people forget things at the age of 82, on one evening I attempted to remember the story of the Butt Grip Contest in Lake Wobegon. I found myself unable to reach a logical position where elderly Norwegian gentlemen would simply drop their pants to try and lift a half-dollar coin with their bare bottoms. This funny anecdote was narrated to me by Alan Simpson, a Republican senator from Wyoming who enjoyed the show, which I’m now loath to lose. It just fits so well.
It’s really for the audience rather than an indulgence for myself. I give them a musical interlude during which to sing “America” and “I Saw Her Standing There,” much to the enjoyment of some of the older gentlemen as they hit those falsetto OOOOHs. They also sing “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made,” often with tears in their eyes. Several times, Unitarians have come up to me later to say how much they enjoyed singing that old-time Baptist hymn. (When else would they get a chance to do that?)
No mention of Elon Musk or his buddy was made by me. I kept a Minnesota winter, being 82 and my mother, a little bit of sense, and how one gets into the wall in the morning to dress without it. I didn’t bring up Elon Musk or his companions. Instead, I mentioned something about Minnesota winter, being 82 and my mother, and a little bit of sense when you get up against the wall in the morning to dress Mother – “Sense” drawn from a wit/humor. He instructs on righteousness: Nevertheless, he has chosen to. He instructs us to act righteously, yet He still… Encourages us to ease our burdens. Encourages us to ease our burdens Being playful is part of what it means to lighten the mood.
And even something uncouth, which is fun for the older folks.
I ended up in Key West for the final performance and just had to go see the Ernest Hemingway House and Museum. When I was 18, my mother got very worried because she caught me reading A Farewell To Arms. She thought it might turn me to the dark side, which it never did. I never dabbled with themes of death or violence, and certainly not deep shadows of depression. What attracted me rather was the elegant writing style of Hemingway, which I attempted for a moment to copy.
Narrating somehow the stories of my Minnesota’s younge winters was such a hit during the shows in the South. Not quite taboo, but was never discussed – ‘no school’ cancellation because it’s always been ‘blah blah blah’ like atheism, communism, and boys who took up ballet. First I put on my long underwear; then I ate my Cream of Wheat; then I took a cat called Mickey, already far from partial to snow, to be made to droop over the back fence so his sphincter would loosen up enough for me to rub him because the cold forced it to tighten up. This gave me an errand of softly moving the private parts of an old tom cat who’s an orphan – you wouldn’t suggest his life be taken away – because a full saucer would break the hearts of the children and damn them into delinquency.
They walked out into the biting wind toward the county road, almost invisible in the dancing snow, waited for the bus crouched in the ditch, listening for coyotes, and watched for snow snakes moving under the snow with only the slightest ripple.
My group, dressed for summer in shorts and sandals laughed at this situation, no doubt as a story. The boy in the ditch seemed half asleep, half listening for approaching lights, while shapes black, were buzzards sat upon the dead trees, large, fierce wingings watching me like waiting savage beasts. If the bus didn't come– and this was before kids had cell phones, so we were alone without a lifeline—would I be able to fend off a hungry horde of sharp-beaked birds?
Fun, with humor and poetry and a pretty sensimilla of sexual awakening; pond hockey; somber themes of Ecclesiastes; warmth of aunts and girl cousins; singing and buzzards. T ever really felt it was a valuable public service. Not one word of Musk, Vance, nothing about constitutional rather, carbon emissions, or climate change. You might call me a coward, but I feel that my role was to provide them with an evening of liberation If you can get Unitarians to sing joyfully about the Second Coming, then you know you’ve made a positive contribution to this world; how I wish my mother could have been there.
