I like that song too.

But it's never been quite the same for me since a day in the summer of 1992 when I was sitting in a class in graduate school at Virginia Tech and had a rather singular experience relating to that song. Our department was full-to-the-brim with postmodern thinkers, the sort of people I came in time to really loathe for their wooly-headed gormlessness. We tended to get some rather strange people in the department, people I devoutly hoped would NEVER wind up working in any sector of government administration. One such gentleman was a student from the great nation of Mongolia, Lidscha by name, in his forties and studying at Virginia Tech in pursuit of a PhD in public administration.

Lidscha liked to go off on strange quasi-Marxist rants, the sort of thing that just about none of us understood the meaning of, but which everyone but me pretended to attach great significance to. I'm certain that if you had buttonholed one of my fellow students in a quiet, isolated spot they'd have readily agreed that they had next to no idea what the hell Lidscha was babbling about but they'd never have said so in the classroom setting out of fear that everyone else understood him perfectly.

One day, a warm sunny afternoon where the air lay heavily upon the earth and more than a few yawns were quietly being stifled behind upraised palms, Lidscha was in fine form, holding forth on the morally bankrupt American society he found himself in. With our eyes glazing over, I'm quite sure that he could have begun reading the Nestle Toll House Cookies recipe and no would would have registered the fact. But then, somehow, something he was saying seemed oddly familar and I roused myself to a higher state of wakefulness:

"So this man, this man, you see, he goes back down this alley with this, this, roly-poly little fat-faced gal"

And I realized he'd been quoting a whole stanza of "You Can Call Me Al".

He didn't continue to the incidents and accidents, the hints and allegations, as, apparently, the reference to the roly-poly little fat-faced gal had proved whatever point he'd been trying to make about our culture.

He sat back, looking triumphant, and there was a long silence. Then the professor sat forward and said "Okay. Now. The next reading assigned for today was..." and we moved on. To this day I don't really know what the hell "You Can Call Me Al" had to do with the normative foundations of American public administration.

jayfurr 5/1/2008 2:09pm