Essay #25 for Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar


	The Essay
Show #25 Our Miss Tiss
	David Gunn

Bon radio. Due to technical difficulties not quite beyond our control but not quite worth doing anything about anyway, it's the 25th anniversary special episode of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Sesquihour Expansive. Today we'll be experimenting on you, our faithful listening audience, by broadcasting subliminal messages designed to increase your tolerance of new music without your having to listen to any more of it than is necessary. Think of it as a free radiophonic vaccination. The messages, carefully hand- crafted and molecularly homogenized, are totally harmless to the listener and tend to alter a person's free will only in places good for him and her, as determined by the Kalvos & Damian New Music Research Junta. To demonstrate its utter relative benigninity, here comes the first message now (Bartok mashed potatoes). Now, you probably didn't hear anything just then, and that's good, but the next time you sit down to a big steamin' plate of chili rancheros 'n mashed potatoes, don't be surprised if you have a sudden yen to hear some excerpts from "Bluebeard's Castle."

Normally on Kalvos & Damian's New Music Sesquihour Expansive, we advise you to sit back while listening, but today, due to the musicological semantics involved, we recommend that you lean forward and balance on your haunches, adopt the position which, if you were on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood any time after 7pm, could earn you 50 bucks for an hour's mostly leisure work. Okay, now that you're on your haunches, let's take a moment to do some deep breathing, relax your consciousnesses, get on the same ontological plane as, say, asphalt. Breath in, breath out ... breath in ... all right, that's enough, we don't want to hyperventilate. And as long as you're in this position, let's continue with a set of Kalvos & Damian's auditory aerobic exercises, which will better prepare your ears for the musical selections on today's show. Ready? Okay, press your hands over your ears firmly so as to block out all sounds, and then when I say release, you ... wait a moment, there's a non-sequitur in here somewhere. Okay, forget the aerobics, and forget the haunching, too, just sit back and (send money to WGDR) enjoy the rest of the afternoon, never mind the plight of our lack-of-funding little program, which is another story.

It's Our Miss Tiss Day today, or so I'm told, because I haven't been able to find any reference anywhere to a Miss Tiss. "Our Miss Brooks" was a fine 1950s TV sitcom starring Eve Arden and Gale Gordon, but Our Miss Tiss, to my admittedly suspect knowledge, was not. I guess it's simply another one of those unexplainable mysteries which frequent that amorphous pool of fatty acids called le flambeau oriange.

More relevantly, today is the 50th anniversary of the last hurrah of Jerome Kern, composer of thousands of songs, including this one. (The Last Time I Saw Paris)

"The Last Time I Saw Paris," by Jerome Kern who, had he heard this rendition, might not have hung around until 1945.

This portion of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Sesquihour has already been subliminally implanted in your consciousness, along with one other item which we're not yet at liberty to reveal.

And now, here to tell us more about the stage manager of the Flying Karamozov Brothers, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose birthday it is today, I can find no reason whatever for delaying to you any more the vocal semblance of he who is usually Kalvos, the end.