A Head Full of Ideas that were Driving Me Insane....

That line has been one of the most enduring, and most obscure, taglines of my entire marriage. It derives from a comedy album dating to the early first term of the Nixon administration, by then-famed Dick impersonator David Frye, which I got a hold of in fifth or sixth grade, promptly memorized, and have managed to retain  little bits of for the rest of my life.

One of those little bits still burned into my brain, all these years later, begins with the line in the header. It's from the third cut on the first of Frye's Nixon albums, titled I Am The President, where he voiced both the title character and the equally impersonate-able Nelson Rockefeller, then Guv of mine own home state. In the bit, based on an apparently actual incident from 1969, Nixon asks his vanquished GOP rival to recount the results of his "goodwill" visit to various South American nations. History confirms that Rocky didn't do any better than Nixon's own ill-fated 1958 visit south of the border, but the album makes all kinds of fun of their respective visits to Points South, beginning with that very tag line of "put down your crutches and tell me all about it."

Over the years, we've tossed off that line to refer to any situation where an employer, a client, a co-worker or (quite often these days) a daughter has been particularly brutal to one or both of us.  It came up earlier today when our new health insurer was messing with us, by (seemingly) requiring us to obtain all of our monthly-maintenance meds through a mail-order service rather than our friendly Wegmans or Wally-World prescription counters. I never expected to use the "crutches" reference literally, where an actual Fucking Pair Of Crutches was propped up within two feet of my poor wife's knee.

I had pain of my own this morning, listening to Eleanor going through an entirely one-way audio conversation with the Medco drug-by-mail voice recognition voicemail tree, asking about each of our meds by name, dosage, quantity and age of user. All of their generic options turned out to cost substantially more than their $4 fills at Chez Sam. Eleanor's brand-name-only brand would be way more than her own store charges; mine, a little less; Em's, about the same. All of this, though, reeks of micromanagement and bullying of a patient population that has just been beaten into submission by our Best Health Care System In The World™.

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I did find a way to ease some of that pain, though.

Although I've occasionally checked library catalogs to see if they had CD copies of my old-favorite comedy albums from the 60s and 70s, I'd never checked Google for this particular performer, and lo and behold, for $17.99USD, I was able to score a complete .mp3 set of both of the David Frye Nixon albums I'd had, and loved, as a kid: the aforementioned I Am the President,  and the sequel, a fanciful imagining of what a Nixon-operated radio station would sound like; the call sign was WNIX and the album title was Radio Free Nixon.

Five minutes later, both albums were on CD and my .mp3 player. My 2:30 clients, 3:30 coworkers, 4:15 fellow gym rats and anyone who called me all afternoon could have seen my shit-eating grin even if they had closed eyes or were far far away. I was hearing classic schtick from 40 years ago, most of which I still remembered. and hearing Nixon getting skewered all these years later was just as satisfying as hearing the Wait Wait crowd continuing to skewer Bush and Palin even as they refused to let even a single barb touch the thin skin of the new Occupant at 1600 PA Ave.

I'd have enjoyed a clip of Barry and Michele showing up at the place at 4 a.m., telling Dubya they were "the President-elect.... and Mrs.-elect." Until the gloves (or blue dresses) come off, though, at least I have my fifth-grade memories to tide me over.