All About the Presidents
—or— Foibles Ole Aesop Would Have Loved To Write
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Our 6th President, John Quincy
March 4,1825--March 3,1829
A chief foible of President Adams, son of our 2nd President, was behavior he adopted following the recommendation of the renowned Roumanian Veterinarian, Dr. Wolfgang Von Bittenbachrescu. Known by those closest to the President, including of course, wife Louisa, "Quince", as she would call him, had become increasingly tense. This began to show during his second term as Secretary of State under our 5th President James Monroe. At that time, the White House physician, Dr. Hugh Kiurem, found the future President in reasonably good health and suggested the tension might be due to either overwork, a salt-rich diet, or tight trousers causing no small discomfort to his male distinctives.
Bittenbachrescu had then caught a dozen of the tense animals, put them in an observation pen, installed an eighteen inch bright yellow disk in one corner about twelve feet high, and shrouded it. The wolves, nervous all day, became increasingly so by dusk. Then when it was fully dark, they growled and grumbled and paced up and down as if walking on hot coals. Suddenly, Bittenbachrescu unshrouded the disk and the wolves howled like The Hounds of the Baskervilles until 1 a.m., then yawned almost simultaneously and fell off to sleep. The brilliant Veterinarian then placed the yellow disk on the pen floor, poured a drizzle of honey all over it, and upon arising, the wolves licked the moon clean! Through all that next day, he observed they exhibited no tenseness at all, behaving somewhat as if they had just scored an ace on Farmer Brown's chicken coop!
This article was enough for our 6th President to connect the dots reasoning that if it worked for the wolves, why not him? With that, a meeting with Dr. Bittenbachrescu was arranged and
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About the Book
It was Lord Byron who penned in 1823, “Tis strange-but true, for truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.” Then, later on Mark Twain wrote, “Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.” And what says the author of “Foibles...”? That truth, though often stranger than fiction, is not always so. In “Foibles...” any reader with reasonable discernment would likely conclude it contains much strange fiction, and undeniably some truth. Separating the two is not the author’s desire for his reading audience. It is rather to motivate readers-while entertaining them-to revisit history via biographies of our past Presidents, and other media sources be they literature or film/TV presentations, and taste of the times in which they lived and we didn’t. Now, what can you call a work mixing fact with fiction? Were it a play or film, “Docudrama” might fit. But being a book, that would be misleading, especially where much narrative is involved. And so, be it established here henceforth and forevermore, the coining of a descriptive name: “Faction”, combining both fact and fiction! Yes, “Foibles...” is a work of Faction, and is crafted to provide for its reader, action! Hopefully, you’ll find it so. If not, then read a fraction of this faction before bedtime, have pleasant dreams, and call my receptionist in the morning to report your satisfaction.
About the Author
Offbeat, bizarrely imaginative authors are a world of fascination unto themselves. This one is classicly so. Because his writing is the product of a fertile imagination, it conveys—beyond the immediate read—a sense of liberation from reality, i.e. that all things are not only possible in Lauria’s particular world, but can be made to seem plausible! Something comes across in the style of expression that pretends seriousness but doesn’t descend to slapstick. He has written several books of poetry which are laced with similar leaps into fantasy, and most recently, “How! The States Really Got Their Names —or— Lauria’s Legendary Lowdown”, another “History humor” work.