Live from the Ann Arbor Art Fair!

Ladies and Gentlemen, please join me here at this summer's fabulous Ann Arbor Art Fair! I'm delighted to present our very own Senator Elijah Creek!

You know, all this here ... art, I guess it is, that we had to walk through to get up here is certainly artful. We had to dodge a lot of it, or we'd still be back there on State Street, talkin' to those people in the looney booths. But anyway, art. Talk about art, they told me.

I was readin' a book a while ago, a book by some British feller. Mudguard, I think it was. Coupling. Mudguard Coupling, that was it, more or less. I was a bit distracted while I was readin' it, what with that McConnell youngster ... you know him, that boy from Kentucky ... goin' on about this and that. I tried to get him interested in something else, something besides just beatin' his gums all the time, but he wasn't willin'. "Don't beat your gums like that," I said. "It's bad for 'em. Beat something else, like a dead horse." I even offered to loan him a dead horse, but no. He wouldn't listen. I told him nobody else was, either, but he didn't seem to care.

Anyhow, I was readin' this story by the guy with the auto parts name, and one of the people in it said "That's art! Flat art!" I missed the drift, a bit, because of all the hullabaloo in the background, and so I'm not sure what he was referrin' to. The author. Of the book. But since it was the first thing I could think of when they pushed me up the steps to this platform I'm standin' on, I said to myself, "Art. Flat art."

Well, I tell a lie, there, to be truthful. It was the second thing. The first thing I thought was "It is a far, far better thing I do ..." But I didn't want to lose my head, so I went on to the second thing. And lookin' around, I see a lot of it. Art. Nice and flat, some of it. But along here, in front of me, there are a bunch of tents with art that isn't flat. It's more round, unless I'm misled.

That's pronounced "miss lead", they tell me, by the way. For years, I'd been pronouncin' it "mysled", but no such luck. Preacher used to talk about innocent youth bein' mysled by the flash girls who walk in the city ... or was it the other way around? Flash girls bein' mysled by preachers? I remember, back in the days of my youth ... What? Oh, right. They're remindin' me not to talk about what I did, back in the days of my youth. Don't know why. There isn't any one of you here today who hasn't. Done 'em. The things they don't want me to talk about.

But anyway, I think we should avoid invidious distinctions between flat art and the roundy kind. We shouldn't be invidious. Not like that Chinese doctor. The invidious one. The invidious doctor Foobar Chew or something like that. Still, invidious or perfidious, it hardly seems to matter to all these folks wanderin' back and forth, lookin' at the art. Some of 'em even look up here, on occasion. And I can see they're wonderin' as they're wanderin', who is that old guy up there and what's he talkin' about? And why?" And let me just say, in closin', that I don't know either.