Yesterday in a used book store I stumbled upon a lovely old illustrated textbook called something like Excelsior Rhetoric and Oratory. I didn't buy it because $38 is a lot to spend on a book just because I like the title, but of course I can't remember the title exactly so today I've been hunting for it online. Instead, I serendipitously found a book called Excelsior, You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepard by a guy named Eugene B. Bergmann. Now there's a title to conjure with, even better because I hear it in the voice of Jean Shepard, who may not have mastered the type of oratory promoted in Excelsior Rhetoric and Oratory but whose voice is heard by millions of television viewers every Christmas season.
Everyone knows Shepard from A Christmas Story, based on Shepard's tales of his youth in Indiana. Excelsior, You Fathead! evokes the image of little apple-cheeked Ralphie encountering the obsessively misguided youth in Longfellow's poem "Excelsior": the Longfellow youth goes barrelling past just as Ralphie is trying out his Red Ryder gun for the first time with tragic results, or perhaps the two youths get into an altercation involving fists, gun, and banner. Who is better armed, the boy packing the Red Ryder b.b. gun or the starry-eyed youth wielding the banner with the strange device?
Longfellow's youth would be hopelessly out of place in any milieu where the word "fathead" might be uttered, but I suspect that Ralphie and his chums would be right at home swelling crowd scenes in any work of literature ever written. The urchins we will always have with us; it's just their weapons that change over time.
Now I'm stuck: if I can't buy one book just for the title, how can I possibly justify buying two? I'll have to add them to my wish list. After all, Chrsitmas is coming, and with it Jean Shepard. Excelsior, you fathead.
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