2006 Dialog About 1968 (Apple #1)

“Do you want to know a secret, Uncle Pete?”

“Yes. And I promise not to tell.”

“Okay. Contrary to popular belief, the Beatles did not name their company ‘Apple’ 

 because of the fruit.”

“Then take me to the core of the apple, nephew. Tell me why.”

“Yes or no, Uncle Pete. When you attended college in the sixties, were you a member 

  of the literary  subset known as ‘Salinger freaks?’”

“Yes I was. I lost my virginity to a co-ed after reading excerpts of Catcher in the Rye in the backseat of a 1968 Buick Electra. She said that if she got pregnant, we’d name the baby Holden, as in Holden Caulfield–the main character of the story–or Phoebe, his sister. That car was so big that a family of four could have lived in it. So we could have had a Holden and a Phoebe.

“Salinger freaks plagued every major campus in America. Over a thousand of us, including students from as far away as UCLA, gathered in Central Park for a J. D. Salinger Rally. Everybody wore a red baseball cap like the one Holden Caulfield wore on the cover of Catcher in the Rye. We wanted to brand ourselves with Sf but the science fiction crowd beat us to it.

“The author did not make an appearance at the rally because if you looked up the word recluse in a dictionary, you’d see a picture of J.D. Salinger. There were a lot of people in Central Park that day wearing Pencey Prep t-shirts. That was the school Holden had just been expelled from at the beginning of the novel.”

“Unfortunately, Salinger freaks were a passing generational fad, like bobby sox.
Today, the college kids are Carrie Underwood freaks.”

“Who the hell is he?”

“She. Carrie Underwood won the grand prize on American Idol.”

“What the hell does that have to do with the secret of the Apple?”

“Your generation–and my mother’s generation–was smart enough to appreciate literature when you were in college but that was a passing fad for American youth.
“Meanwhile, in England, reading literature has always been ingrained in the DNA of all its students. For over a century, many British youth were–and are, to this day–‘Lewis Carroll freaks,’ aka Alice in Wonderland wanna-bees. In the nineteen fifties, four Liverpool teens were bigtime fans of Lewis Carroll.”

“That being the future Beatles, I presume.”

“Yes. Ringo wanted to be Humpty Dumpty because Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall and Ringo sat on a drum stool. John, of course, would fulfill his dream of becoming the Walrus. George wanted to be the Cheshire Cat because he kept getting curiouser and curiouser about spirituality. But Paul McCartney, maybe just to be different from the others–or in a strange nod to reality–wanted to be Alice Pleasance Liddell, the very real child who inspired the story.”

“I smell an acronym.”

“Exactly. Her initials are A.P.L. And that begat Apple Records."

This is the real Alice.

Happy googling to one and all!

(Apple #2) is here.