This posting is reprinted from my contributions to the Writer's Collection - a collaborative blog featuring writings on common subjects by myself and nine great authors. The challenge was to write about "Henry VIII." Surely a student of history such as myself should have no problem with that subject (funny, thinking of Henry VIII as a "subject" - think about it). However, a song got stuck in my head as soon as I saw it...

“I'm 'enry the Eighth, I am,
 'enery the Eighth, I am, I am.
 I got married to the widow next door,
 She's been married seven times before.
 And, every one's been a 'enery...”

I CAN'T GET that damn song out of my head ever since they announced this week's topic – Henry VIII – on the Writer's Collection. I'm a student of history. My head should be full of historical images. But no, I'm stuck in the land of doggerel. You know where this is going to end up, don't you?

No? Maybe you don't, not unless you lived through the 50s. Those of us of advanced years complain bitterly about today's music, especially rap. However, you haven't heard anything until you get an earful of the novelty songs of my youth, doggerel set to music.

They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha Haaa – Monster Mash – The Purple People Eater. These are not the titles of serious art. Disco Duck – Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport – Beep Beep. Dear God, I still remember many of the lyrics. At the very least I could sing along without hesitation. In fact, I typed the lyrics to Henry the Eighth without looking them up and am absolutely certain that they are correct, although I cannot remember what I ate for dinner last night.

Who came up with this stuff? Surely, not a talented artist. I suspect that novelty numbers are the brainchild of some music producer. I can see it now...

Imagine the offices of a major record label in Los Angeles. Surely, no one in Nashville or Motown would have done the deed. A gaggle of lithesome twenty-something fillies wearing mini-skirts (remember, this is the 1950s) with hemlines rising well to the north of Modesty are smoking dope and dancing in the aisles between their desks. (Did I mention that I visited a few record labels during my ad biz days?) The recording engineers are getting wasted at the corner bar or snorting lines of coke in the break room.

The boss is getting so desperate he might even call an agent (the bottom feeders of the music industry). All his talent, including the one-hit wonders so prevalent in those days, are touring, and the scouts haven't sent anyone new by for several days. Payola payments to the DJ's are coming due (you couldn't get airtime in the 50s without paying it, and without airtime you can't sell records) and he needs inventory, something new to sell. 

Our music producer goes for a walk on Hollywood Boulevard, a tourist mecca like no other. Forget the glitz and glamor, this thoroughfare is the stalking grounds of peddlers, pimps, and prostitutes. Forget Julia Roberts, most of the women are men in drag or diseased rejects from tawdry strip clubs. Tourists weave their way through the idling degenerates, distracting their children with the stars embedded in the sidewalk to honor stars that most of them never heard of. 

Outside the Hollywood Magic Shop, our record executive is almost knocked off his feet by a beatnik (Google it) landing after a bad trip. Our man is about to kick the reprobate aside when he notices the pendant the man is wearing on a leather thong (not that kind of thong) around his neck. It looks like a purple monster with one eye and one horn swallowing Adlai Stevenson (again, Google it). He rips it from the beatnik's neck and tosses some coins to the man as he turns to charge back to his office.

With a few calls he finds a down-on-his-luck songwriter and gives him twenty minutes to come up with the lyrics. A few more calls is all it takes to assemble a group of session men – musicians who are hired temporarily to back up the regular talent at recording sessions – and he creates a fictional band. 

Now it's his turn to be creative. Naming singing groups is the prerogative of the record executive. What will it be? Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs? Boris Pickett and the Crypt Kickers? Dweezil and Moon Unit Zappa? No wait, can't use that. They're the children of Frank Zappa. Chuck Wagon and the Wheels? Damn, he's good at this.

If you must know, it was Sheb Wooley who recorded Flying Purple People Eater, and I'm sure it was a serious effort, in no way resembling the sophomoric fantasy that I have spun here.

Really, I should have been able to come up with something serious befitting the theme. I wonder... how would Henry VIII have reacted if a group of minstrels known as Herman's Hermits had shown up in his court performing I'm Henry the Eighth I Am?

This posting is reprinted from my contributions to the Writer's Collection - a collaborative blog featuring writings on common subjects by myself and nine great authors. "Brazil" was a real challenge for me to write about. I'm not really all that creative. My stories are about history, mostly people, places, and events I've experienced. I've never "experienced" Brazil...

I'M NOT FUNNY. Seriously, not funny. I once had to write a speech for a PR client who wanted to open with a good joke. That assignment was agony for me, but I did it. I popped a corker for him. Funny thing is that his speech was preempted by someone more important who showed up at the last minute. So, my client booked a cocktail party and invited the whole audience. His replacement ended up speaking to an empty room while my client went from person to person telling the joke. I guess the point is that even I can be funny once.

Now, let's talk about someone who is seriously funny most of the time, Peter Gilliam of Monty Python fame. He can make almost anything seem funny. Almost, but not quite when he tried to make bureaucracy seem funny in Brazil, a 1985 film about a retro futuristic technocrat who becomes a public enemy while attempting to correct a bureaucratic mistake. (You were wondering how I was going to connect this to the subject of “Brazil”, weren't you? Don't worry, I wander off in the next paragraph.)

What could possibly be funny about bureaucracy? Nothing. That's probably why the film bombed – less than $10 million earned on a film that cost $15 million to make. I know. I once was a bureaucrat. I worked for the Social Security Administration as a Post Entitlement Adjudicator – you have to love that job title – while attending law school at night. I was sucked into civil service by John Kennedy's inspiring “Ask not...” speech. What could I do for my country? Little, actually, while working as a civil servant.

I worked at the Baltimore Payment Center on the sprawling Social Security campus at Woodlawn, Maryland. Sprawling? Teeming might be a better word. More than seventeen thousand bureaucrats worked at that one facility at that time. My job encompassed changes in disability benefit payments after the initial award had been made.

During my tenure at this post the Administration made the change from manual to automated processing of disability benefit checks. The project went south quickly and after six months, many of the disability beneficiaries and their families stopped receiving their monthly stipends because of a failure to encode benefit changes in a manner that the computer understood. Sometime during the third month of this circus I had the temerity to suggest that we get together with the computer programmers to discuss what was going wrong and how we might correct the problem. Unfortunately, bureaucrats are more concerned with doing things according to fixed regulations rather than accomplishing anything. If there is an error in a regulation, the bureaucrats must wait until Congress fixes it, and we all know how efficient that process is. Thus, this problem persisted until I escaped to the relative sanity of the Army and the war in Vietnam more than six months later. I don't know when they ever got it fixed.

I am reminded of this experience every time I listen to my more socially conscious friends advocating another government entitlement program or to expand an existing one, all efforts to make it more intrusive into our lives. I am sorry that life has fashioned me into such a curmudgeon that I rail against every attempt to grow our government. Every visit to the U.S. Debt Clock makes me even more curmudgeony. 

Incidentally, Peter Gilliam's film had no more to do with Brazil than does this posting. The hero of the story, Sam, hums the song Brazil by Geoff Muldaur, at the end of the film as he is being diagnosed catatonic. I can relate. I almost became catatonic – an alcoholic at the very least – working as a bureaucrat.