The King Did Not Hang

On the evening of May 6, 2011, Ron Hagglesoap called a press conference to announce he’d formed a Presidential Exploratory Committee. Ron Hagglesoap, a cable car operator in Patoka, Ind. had never called a press conference before, but he felt sure that calling a press conference was the correct thing to do immediately after forming a Presidential Exploratory Committee. And so he did.

Billy Furt, of the weekly Patoka Waxwing, was the only reporter to show for Ron Hagglesoap’s press conference, which Ron Hagglesoap had - perhaps somewhat rashly - called for six o’clock the next morning.

It was likely that the only reason the Waxwing sent a reporter to cover the press conference was that Billy Furt had been sitting next to Ron Hagglesoap at the bar the previous night at Ye Greene Sheepe when Ron Hagglesoap formed his Presidential Exploratory Committee and subsequently called the press conference.

Also, that next morning Billy Furt woke up on Ron Hagglesoap’s living room pull-out sofa bed, parched like you fucking read about and without his car keys, so he needed Ron Hagglesoap to give him a ride back to the Sheepe so he could get his keys back from the tavern’s proprietor, Shifty Hooker, and collect his ’88 Hyundai Zebedee.

In return, Billy Furt agreed to cover Ron Hagglesoap’s press conference, during which, it was rumored, Ron Hagglesoap would announce the formation of a Presidential Exploratory Committee.

Also, Billy Furt was, technically, the only reporter in Patoka (Roberta von Crispp was regarded by most everyone in town as a celebrity bloggist, not a proper reporter) and the only employee of the Waxwing.

Both Ron Hagglesoap and Billy Furst arrived at the press conference nearly 18 hours late. They had been on their way to the Patoka Community Center & Ice Arena where the press conference had been scheduled, when Ron Hagglesoap realized they were passing Ye Greene Sheepe, and that Shifty Hooker’s rusted out Mitsubishi Pentateuch was parked out back. Shifty Hooker (real name was Palsy) sometimes opened for brunch on Sundays, and on this Sunday Ron Hagglesoap and Billy Furt stepped in for some caramel corn and gin.

When Ron Hagglesoap and Billy Furt finally made it to the Patoka Community Center & Ice Arena, a little after midnight, Ron Hagglesoap made the announcement that he’d formed a Presidential Exploratory Committee. And then he opened the floor to questions.

Billy Furt began with the obvious press conference opener: Did Ron Hagglesoap have Billy Furt’s winning Quick Draw Keno ticket from the night before? Ron Hagglesoap checked his pockets and announced to Patoka’s press corp that he did not now, nor did he ever, have Furt’s winning Quick Draw Keno ticket from the previous evening.

Billy Furt was a natural reporter, a curious truth-seeker who had covered Gibson County politics for three of the last seven years, and so he asked Ron Hagglesoap a follow-up: Could Ron Hagglesoap please check his jacket pockets for the Quick Draw Keno ticket?

Ron Hagglesoap produced the crumpled Quick Draw Keno ticket from the left pocket of his Pacer’s windbreaker. Veteran beat reporters like Billy Furt know that persistence pays off. When no one else in the gaggle is willing to ask the obvious, it’s sometimes that softball question that forces the source of the question itself - the act of questioning itself - to locate the root of all answers. And if some reporters are willing to plumb those depths while others stand on the edge of foamy darkness, if some reporters are willing to travel low to the dirty dirt floor of the valley and then, after that, travel way up high to the top of the much cleaner valley top, like to the clean roof of the valley…

Billy Furt sat down on the floor at the Patoka Community Center & Ice Arena. He’d had fourteen Galliano shots at the Sheepe, and he wasn’t thinking straight. It was after midnight, the tail of a six-day bender, and he was confused. He was forgetting things. He’d forgotten, in fact, what Ron Hagglesoap’s Presidential Exploratory Committee was exploring. Could Ron Hagglesoap please remind the assembled press about the reason this committee was being formed?

Ron Hagglesoap looked stricken. Ashen. White as a white, white ghost that’s has been in a bleach bath for four hours because it hadn’t been quite white enough to be so scary. For a moment Ron Hagglesoap pretended not to hear the question. Then he mumbled something about freedom and America and turkey gravy, which was confusing. But then, the entire scene at the Patoka Community Center & Ice Arena was confusing. Finally, flustered, Ron Hagglesoap left the podium, yelping about exploring Billy Furt’s dumb cranium for brain cells. Also, he threw up. And then Ron Hagglesoap drove Billy Furt back to the Sheepe in his ’97 Pontiac Pleroma for five more Galliano shots before last call.

The headline, above the fold, in the following week’s Patoka Waxwing was - most Patoka citizens agreed - unkind.

“Local cable car operator forms Presidential Exploratory Committee to test…what waters? He doesn’t really know. And then he threw up on me.”

It wasn’t one of Billy Furt’s best headlines, but he’d always had trouble editing himself, and since there were no copy editors (or any editors at all) at the Waxwing, he was left to crush his own dreams. From Ron Hagglesoap’s point of view, things didn’t really improve in the story itself. The lead of Billy Furt’s story - most Patoka citizens agreed - was cruel.

“An explorer traditionally sets out exploring for something other than his own ass. Not local cable car operator, Ronald Hagglesoap.”

Waxwing subscriber, Shemmie St. Yachtthrottle, read the paper that morning and felt horrible for Ron Hagglesoap. First of all, before they’d split three years earlier, she’d been married to Billy Furt for what seemed like fucking ages. And, secondly, Shemmie St. Yachtthrottle had once been a member of a Presidential Exploratory Committee. She knew how these things worked, and she knew the process wasn’t pretty.

She called Ron Hagglesoap. Hey, she said. I can help. I’ve got experience in the Presidential Exploratory Committee sector, and I have a friend from class who is itching to lead a Presidential Exploratory Committee. This guy has ideas, Shemmie St. Yachtthrottle said.

Ron Hagglesoap appreciated the sympathy, and even the offer for help, but he wasn’t sure. After all, he’d already been humiliated in the media. Why put himself out there again, when - if he was honest with himself - Billy Furt was right? He really didn’t have anything worthy of presidential exploration in mind.

I read the Waxwing story about your press conference, and from what I understand, it sounds like your passions have something to do with freedom and America and rabbits and chalk, Shemmie St. Yachtthrottle said. Those are ideas I can get behind. I believe in you, she said. I believe that you believe. As long as you believe, then I believe in you and your campaign for chalky American rabbit gravy.

This is crazy, thought Ron Hagglesoap. A week earlier he’d decided to form a Presidential Exploratory Committee, then he called the press together to announce his intentions…of nothing. And now here he was, on the cusp of really forming a Presidential Exploratory Commitee; of having believers. Yes, it was crazy. But if there was never a crazy, Ron Hagglesoap thought, then Thomas Edison would never have been a member of Mumenchanz.

Let’s do it! he said to Shemmie St. Yachtthrottle. But she had hung up while he was trying to remember the difference between Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin. So he called her back and said, Let’s Do It! very loudly into her ear. What the fuck?!! Shemmie St. Yachtthrottle asked. And then Ron Hagglesoap apologized for screeching like that.

So Shemmie St. Yachtthrottle brokered a meeting between Ron Hagglesoap and her friend, Morris Kraptost, whom she’d met in continuing-education crystal calligraphy class at Patoka College, and who was studying for an advanced degree in Panda Math - the discipline of teaching linear algebra and (later) game theory to pandas. The Chinese bears.

Morris Kraptost had, indeed, led a Presidential Exploratory Committee, he told Ron Hagglesoap. The year was 1987, and the candidate was Heather Skrylbottum who had launched a campaign for election to the Eleventh Presidency of the World Garlic Council.

It had been Morris Kraptost’s idea to set up a fake organization, Pelt Children with Garlic - or PCwG (pronounced “pee see smalldoubleyou jee”) - which advocated throwing bulbs of garlic at children whenever that opportunity presented itself to one.

In its fake mission statement, PCwG said garlic “should be thrown at children because children represent innocence and who wants to look at that anymore?” Morris Kraptost’s strategy had been to heighten, then corral, parents’ anger against the PCwG, and finally provide an anodyne to their pain via Heather Skrylbottum. A mother herself, Heather Skrylbottum - in remarks during the committee exploration phase of her bid for the Eleventh Seat of the World Garlic Council presidency - denounced, in no uncertain terms or words or phrases or other words, the irresponsible assault on American children by anti-garlic forces whose only goal was to eliminate a child’s basic right to grow up without bulb bruises.

The disintegration of Heather Skrylbottum’s Presidential Exploratory Committee came after garlic-industry beat reporters were tipped off to Morris Kraptost’s scheme by children in his own neighborhood whom Morris Kraptost had been pelting with garlic as he “hid” behind a small spruce in his front yard.

This was exactly what Ron Hagglesoap had been hoping to hear. Morris Kraptost was the kind of leader who could bring together an effective Presidential Exploratory Committee. More importantly, Morris Kraptost had the experience to be able to find some kind of presidency for which Ron Hagglesoap could form an exploratory committee.

Ron Hagglesoap threw a fist in the air. Rock ‘n Roll-a! he said. He’d never said Rock ‘n Roll-a! before, and he wasn’t quite sure where he’d first heard it. But things were coming together for his Presidential Exploratory Committee, and it felt great to yell Rock ‘n Roll-a! as he threw a fist in the air. It was energizing and it gave him the kind of morale boost he’d need to make it through what was sure to be a brutal campaign.

At that moment, Ron Hagglesoap determined that Rock ‘n Roll-a! - with not one, but four fist throws (one for each syllable) - would be the official motto/arm movement for his Presidential Exploratory Committee.

Since veteran political consultant Morris Kraptost was sitting right there, Ron Hagglesoap consulted with him on the motto/arm movement idea. Morris Kraptost said he loved it, especially the throwing of the fists straight up in the air, above one’s head, rather than straight out in front of one’s chest - horizontally, parallel to one’s shoes. Or parallel to, say, a bottle of Galliano tipped on its side on the Sheepe’s floor and in danger of being stepped on, it’s long, delicate neck shattered and all the syrupy, golden liqueur seeping into the months of grime, vomit residue and dried urine coating the floor to the right of the bar next to the Golden Tee Golf coin-operated video game.

One wouldn’t want to throw one’s fists straight out in front of one on the campaign trail - lest one punch a baby, or a member of a minority group in the head, Morris Kraptost said. The support of mothers and Buddhists is crucial in the exploration phase of any presidential run, he explained to Ron Hagglesoap.

Ron Hagglesoap was uncomfortable with all of Morris Kraptost’s talk about Hindu fist babies, and he was really weirded out when Morris Kraptost started in on how “one” would do this, and “lest” this happened. What was he, Dutch?

So Ron Hagglesoap fired Morris Kraptost on the spot and determined he’d turn spilled milk into lemons by basing his first Presidential Exploratory Committee television ad on the bold move of firing Morris Kraptost. Better the devil you know than bark up the wrong tree, he figured. A house divided against itself paints a thousand words. And then he asked Morris Kraptost to pay the $6.95 for the fancy grapefruit he’d just eaten at Froederich’s Fancy Cafe while listening to Morris Kraptost’s pitch.

I totally understand, Morris Kraptost told Ron Hagglesoap after his job had been eliminated from Hagglesoap’s Presidential Exploratory Committee after recent streamlining. It would be difficult for the American people to get beyond the fact that in my past I fired hard-necked rocamboles at children for political gain, he said.

But Morris Kraptost had become a believer in Ron Hagglesoap’s cause. You need help. That’s much is clear, Morris Kraptost said. Let me introduce you to my Presidential Exploratory Committee network. They’re good people.

The list wasn’t long, but it was gamy. It was nosey. It was all sun-boiled tartar sauce and cigarette butts. Morris Kraptost kept that list hidden under the passenger seat of a ‘03 Suzuki Sheol that had been abandoned - windows down - by the overpass at Interstate 41, near the airport. The two men walked out of Froederich’s arm-in-arm to retrieve the document, and to make a dream come true.

Ron Hagglesoap, Ron Hagglesoap thought, was on his way in the zippy, kaleidoscopic world of Presidential Exploratory Committees.

Hejji Rammelkhark
EXPERIENCE: Selection of Indiana’s first Presidential Exploratory Committee in 1978, when his son’s Little League team - the Palmyra Phantoms - was absent a coach. Refused to be called “coach” because of his aversion to “faux-thority,” but embraced the prospect of exploiting his new position to bang Rose Marble, shortstop Richie Marble’s divorced mom, who came to all the games in a black Corvette with a white rose painted on the hood. Yes, Sir!
DRIVES: ’88 Subaru Parousia

“Spaghetti” John Cazzpouge
EXPERIENCE: Gathered members of the famous Rensselaer Riggle Piggle Six carpool team together before the 2007 decision to name Rita Schweart coordinator (ie. president) of all Riggle Piggle carpool schedules for the 2007-2008 school year.
DRIVES: ’06 Honda Chrysostom

Camille Horfle
EXPERIENCE: As the first female butcher in Indiana to win three of the five competitions (stunning, exsanguination, dehairing) at the annual Indiana Great Slaughter of Animals Festival in North Vernon in 1996, Horfle led the search for the next head of the state’s Hot-bone Slaughterhouse Oversight Board.
DRIVES: ’85 Buick Jebusite

Richie Sbuk
EXPERIENCE: Consistently decided who would go first in shuffle board during a family Puta Hermosa Cruise Lines vacation from Panama City to Cancun.
DRIVES: Mom’s ’99 Ford Apostasy

Sue Corkenflap
EXPERIENCE: In 1993, voted Most Likely to Fall Over Because She’s So Dumb by her sisters at Alpha Epsilon Theta Delta Epsilon at Indiana University.
REDEMPTION: First woman in Indiana to sit on fourteen Presidential Exploratory Committees, including for Youth Cigar Team in Covington, Hop Scotch and More Scotch Club for nurse practitioners at St. Vincent Catholic Hospital in Terre Haute, and Radial Rotations Day at the Tire Rack in Elkhart.
DRIVES: ’04 Lincoln Ecclesiastic

My second humor piece in Esquire landed in this month’s (Nov. 2010) edition. If you didn’t catch the first one, it’s here.

Here are the ones included in the magazine - followed by a few that didn’t make the cut.

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Why Print Still Matters

A sampling from our new catalog of hard-to-find titles. 

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• Barbara Eden
  My Story, 1989
  First edition, first printing of Eden’s classic take on the challenges of being a television genie in love with an astronaut in the 1960s. Boldly inscribed: To Willie von Straat, who has changed the coagulant-membrane-filtration industry, by Eden’s coauthor, Guy Erikson. $6.95

• C. Fortenz Milloy
  It Is So Interesting, 1837
  “Behold in the light borne of the Lord, that which we find, shall be left unfound in time immutable when the night flees daybreak. It is in this morning light when Truth will shout, shout, shout.” Fine three-volume edition of Milloy’s landmark nonsense work, handsomely bound in nineteenth-century iguana. With engraved portrait. $9.50

• Trish St. Hammerapple
  What We Talk About When We Talk About Talking So Much All the Time, 2007
  One of only four copies printed on the Xerox machine at S&A Metal Forming Machinery, Inc., in New Brunswick, New Jersey, by St. Hammerapple. Late example of the most controversial and important masterwork by this winner of the Constantin Pudârma-Dresleaba Prize for Moldovan-American Violent Science Fiction. One of St. Hammerapple’s only known signatures. On anything. Folio. $5.69

• Reginald Kipple
  The Works of Reginald Kipple, 1999
  Only copy of Kipple’s 894-page spiral-bound thoughts about everything from the trash-collection districts of unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia, to why women are allowed to wear pants these days. A seminal turn-of-the-century volume, recently found by his son Roland under some sheets near a fondue set in Kipple’s basement. $2.50

• Ben Vereen
  I Was Tenspeed, 1986
  Important contribution to the Vereen canon. The best, most complete volume, which also includes “I Was Pippin” and “I Hate Jeff Goldblum.” First edition, one of only twenty-nine copies, illustrated and signed by Robert Guillaume. Includes thirteen copper-engraved folding plates. $12.49

• Wilhelm von Straat
  Coagulant Membrane Filtration & Me, 1989
  If there’s one name most people think of when they think of coagulant-membrane filtration, it’s Kyle Sommersheld. This book, by Sommersheld’s onetime assistant, tells the “true story,” in von Straat’s words, of the coagulant-membrane-filtration wars of 1982. In the scarce original first-issue dust jacket, warmly inscribed by him: Hagman, you seriously have to give me Barbara’s number. $0.99

• Aleksei Alekshaskin
  The Horrid, Immoral Life and Grisly Butchering of Pyotr Petrovin, 1956
  A children’s classic; first trade edition, among the earliest issues of Alekshaskin’s lovely first book, with color illustrations by him. A beautiful copy in the bright original dust jacket. $11

• Ron Toofhart
  Make Cheese in Your Shoe TODAY! 1994
  A title perennially at the top of the American Cheese Society’s “must buy” list, this lavishly illustrated volume remains an influential statement on making cheese in your shoe. $2.95

• Greta Schurrd
  The End of Books, 2009
  First edition of the first volume of Schurrd’s dystopian fantasy, set in a frighteningly realistic - and eerily immediate - future when the written word has been completely digitized. In Schurrd’s darkly comic telling, all information is conveyed through a personal screen called the Pad. As the author’s towering devil figure, Jobs, tells his slaves: “All that you need, the Pad will give you. Trust the Pad. The Pad knows you. The Pad loves you.” Extremely rare presentation copy; full Moroccan-gilt binding with woodcut illustrations. $1.29

• Scads McMartin
  She’s a Hag, Man, 1977
  “In so many ways, she was joyous, and in so many others, she might as well have been a gimp.” So begins the title essay in McMartin’s Fapper Prize - winning collection. Exceptionally fine first edition with striking sepia-toned photographic plates. Includes “You Didn’t Hear It from Me but Eden’s Got Scabies,” “If You’re Really Giving Me a Choice, I’ll Have a Shasta Lite,” and the surprising “Low-Concentration Phage Ms2 Flocculation Pumps and You” (regarded by some as the “greatest piece of membrane-filtration literature in existence” - Lawrence Hagman), none of which appeared in subsequent editions. $4.99

A few that didn’t make the cut…

• Hal Sork
  How to Manage a CiCi’s Pizza Buffet Restaurant, 2004.
  “It sounds bad, but honestly? First thing you do is hire hot teenage girls.” A timeless management classic with Sork’s signature tipped in. Finely bound and inscribed by Sork while he served two years of an eight year prison term for arson to Cindee for all your support and also for all your top(less)ings. $3.75

• Cassandra Bolinpuck
  Lithographs, 1967.
  First edition of the first volume of the catalogue raisonné of Bolinpuck’s lithographs. Earliest obtainable edition richly illustrated with 12 original lithographs, signed and inscribed by Bolinpuck during a time when she was going through some serious shit with White Crunch meth (”respect”). With folding maps. $14.95

• Chester Arthur
  Beans to the Pendleton Act, 1883.
  The 21st president supported the Pendelton Act, which established a bipartisan Civil Service Commission, forbade levying of political assessments against officeholders, and provided….Who’s asleep? Everyone? Yes. This timeless tract by Arthur shows heartfelt frustration with his incredibly boring presidency. Extremely rare presentation copy; includes full 15-line text of “Chinamen and Lunatics Get Out,” Arthur’s poem detailing his immigration stance. $16.00

For O’Callaghan Awards, another group of…ummm…iconoclasts?

By Sage Warlockheart
Herald Staff Writer

NEW YORK - A chef who whimsically combines scraps of used latex yoga mats with benzocaine to feed out-of-work circus podiatrists; an Austrian poet based in Brazil who uses dental floss to suspend live bullfrogs over pools of ketchup; and Lucy from “Peanuts” are among the 14 recipients of the $385 “abstruse grants” to be announced Tuesday by the Lochlan P. and Marta P. O’Callaghan Foundation.

     While no one has ever heard of most of the fellows, a few are so obscure it was difficult to confirm whether they were even real people. They include Pishel Hoal, a 66-year-old former gemologist who lives underground near Coober Pedy, Australia, and who occasionally surfaces from his hole to wander about.

     “Four of the kings have been beheaded and the rest have followed me here,” Hoal said in an interview conducted via Skype from the Opal Blossom Hunan Buffet in Coober Pedy. “If I tell them we have the goats, they’ll be still. They’ll be still.”

     This year’s O’Callaghan fellows range in age from 6 to 93 and are evenly divided between men and women. As in past years, most either have struggled with emotional problems or have been in prison. This year’s judges stuck to the O’Callaghan awards tradition of naming fellows whose accomplishments square with the foundation’s stated mission to “shine a light upon work that seems unimportant to the rest of the world, only because it is unimportant.”

     All 14 fellows will receive $27.50 a year for five years, and must use the grant to purchase either playing cards or cat food. Since the inception of the program in 2007, 18 people have been named Lochlan P. and Marta P. O’Callaghan fellows.

     Besides Mr. Hoal, other winners this year include retired lepidopterist Belinda Pandoe-Crapht, 56, whose study of the Common Blue Morpho, the Red Admiral and the Camberwell Beauty butterfly species has informed and influenced her music as lead singer of the punk-metal outfit Ass Typhoon; Trisha Bloorkie, 23, a Sacramento prostitute who also serves on the board of the Santa Clara Valley Water District; Robert Simpote, 44, who enjoys US Weekly and is thinking of subscribing; Maladraiga Hernandez-Mushi, 78, a pioneer in the Electric Boogaloo, Popping and Crazy Legs movements of the 1970s; Maxim Dityatev, 49, a mixed-media artist who works mainly with Sour Apple Berry Bubble Yum, ejaculate and chicken skin; Jennifer “Zothecula” Miller, 15, a Goth teenager known for cranking up The Sisters of Mercy and wearing eyeliner to bed; and Herbert Rae-Boney, 48, a protégé of Dutch physicist Gerardus ‘t Hooft, whose theoretical work on gauge theories, quantum gravity and black holes earned him the Nobel Prize in 1999.

     Mr. Rae-Boney left Mr. ‘t Hooft’s laboratory ten years ago to study circumplanetary dust physics, but instead has spent much of the last decade managing Ron’s Do-Nuts at the corner of Vineland and Conroy in Orlando with his wife, Cathy Rae-Boney.

     Another fellow who failed to live up to his promise, Gillie St. Warche - an entrepreneur whose idea of putting “a professional water polo player in every home” has yet to pan out - said he would use the money to buy either playing cards or cat food. “I don’t have a cat, so I guess I’ll buy some playing cards,” said Mr. St. Warche, who was named a fellow because of his “extraordinary ability to read Proust while simultaneously lighting squirrels afire,” according to the judges’ notes. “Or I guess I might buy some cat food, because I have a friend who has a cat. And she could give the cat food to her cat.”

     While all of the fellows do pointless, inexplicable or boring things with their time, the O’Callaghan grants are distinctive because they reward the truly inane. “I think it’s real fun,” Teague O’Callaghan, the foundation’s president, and grandson of Lochlan P. and Marta P. O’Callaghan, said of discovering and naming the fellows. “It’s fun, and it’s also funny. Both.”

     As examples, Mr. O’Callaghan cited Sharon Haavish, 93, who has a different colored track suit for every airport she visits, and Kyle Ballantone, 28, a liquid helium salesman from Alfalfa County, Okla., whose cross-stitch embroidery designs of Grand Duke Leopold I and other members of the House of Baden-Durlach have captured the hearts of Swedish people everywhere, though mostly in Sweden.

     Mark Sixypotch, who, at the age of 19 has already translated several seminal herpetological books into English - including (from the original Marathi) “The Snakes of India and Pakistan,” by K.G. Gharpurey; “Japanese Venomous Snakes,” by Seiichi Takahashi; and (from the original Azeri) “Amphibians and Reptiles of Azerbaijan” by A.M. Alekperov - is so gay.

     “I have no idea what to think about winning this award because I’ve never heard of it and I’m quite sure no one else has either,” said Mary von Pahrtenfur, a junior at SUNY New Paltz who is well known on campus for her notion that a new pan-global alphabet could bring about world peace and get people to finally realize that Alan Thicke is the devil.

     Wayne X. Hashago, 55, a familiar figure in journeyman tool and die making circles, called the award a “piece of shit.” Hashago has six fingers.

     Similarities can be seen in the work of three fellows: Annette Fordol, 42, who has walked in circles around her own house in Lapeer, Mich. continuously for four years; Jaishree Dhurvasula, 29, whose musical compositions transcend classification, but range somewhere between Cambodian trip hop and traditional oom-pah; and Sebastian Pelicago, 81 who fashioned a popular line of pre-school toys out of used tattoo needles, carbolic acid, shards of glass and meat.

PHOTO: Maxim Dityatev: Mixed-media artist

First Lady Michelle Obama recently outlined her initiative to eliminate childhood obesity within a generation. In her kickoff speech for what the Obama administration is calling the “Let’s Move” campaign, Mrs. Obama said “the physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake.”

“This isn’t the kind of problem that can be solved overnight,” she continued. “But with everyone working together, it can be solved. So, let’s move.”

The administration has been putting the “Let’s Move” campaign together for over a year, and dismissed several other possible projects for Mrs. Obama along the way, including “Let’s Dance,” an appeal to resurrect post-disco, synthesizer-driven dance music from the early-to-mid 1980s; “Let’s Seriously Get Way Baked,” which was deemed too close in substance to Nancy Regan’s “Just Say No” appeal, and “Let’s Get It On,” a challenge to elderly Americas to don their rain coats more speedily.

Mrs. Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative continues a long tradition of U.S. presidents’ wives taking up a social or political cause. Some of those efforts were either rejected by administration officials, or have simply been lost in the annals of presidential history.

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• Martha Washington never lived in the White House, but some historians have claimed that her hobby - and later commercial enterprise - of crafting dental implants from cherry wood was the first cause, of sorts, promulgated by a First Lady. Owing to an unspecified, but profound childhood trauma, the taste of cherry wood, gave President Washington an intense rush that allowed him to concentrate more fully on matters of state. Mrs. Washington realized that she’d stumbled into a money maker, and was soon peddling the inexplicably popular, “Martha’s (Splinter Free!) Cherry Bomb Chompers,” in Battery Park.

• Despite the rechristening of the Red Room as the Goofy Foot Room in 1809 when the Madison’s moved into the White House, few in Washington knew about Dolley Madison’s fascination with surfing. The “Bro, That is Perilous!” campaign sought to improve surfing etiquette on the increasingly crowded east coast shoreline. “I’ve inquired about promised sick big water off New Symrna Beach, for my plans are to depart on the morrow by carriage and I don’t mind reporting to you, Brosef, that I am so amped,” Mrs. Madison wrote in an 1802 letter to her friend, Margaret Rawlson Pauling. “And yet when last I was there, I spent the better part of sunrise turning my spy-glass in every direction, watching with unwearied aggro, hoping to discover the approach of some epic crunchers. But, alas! I descried only dick draggers in all directions. When those ass clowns get worked, they can cause full on dings in my stick and - Heaven forgive me - I pray a rip the size of a Redcoat regiment will take them far to sea.”

• Elizabeth Monroe became a foodie in France where her husband James had been named U.S. Minister by President Washington in 1794. Twenty-three years later, when the Monroes moved into the White House, Mrs. Monroe had become addicted to red meat. In 1821, she discovered a sublime steak sauce created by the head chef of England’s King George IV, and secretly began importing cases of it into Washington for her own consumption, and for presidential dinner parties. When the king found out about Mrs. Monroe’s fixation with his steak sauce, he ordered her supply cut off, partly in retribution for his father’s defeat in the Revolutionary War. In response, Mrs. Monroe founded an initiative promoting American-made steak sauce and called it, “Are You Fucking Kidding Me? British ‘Food’ Is Fucking Disgusting Anyway. Go Fuck Yourself, King Whatever Fuck Your Fucking Name Is.”

• When Sarah Polk and her husband James arrived in Washington from their native Tennessee in 1845, they brought with them a style of southern charm to which the White House has since become accustomed. But Mrs. Polk was wary of big city ways, and bristled at whispered insults about rural life in the south. To combat what she considered northern ignorance, Mrs. Polk undertook an educational campaign called “My Kinfolk Is Your Kinfolk.” The campaign highlighted the achievements of backwoods cornfed yokels to sophisticates in Philadelphia and New York. A favorite of Mrs. Polk’s was a poster depicting a young hillbilly, half his overalls unbuckled, urinating in a jug while shooing away a critter, and the tagline: “See? A American Did That.”

• Abigail Fillmore - “Who Doesn’t Love a Poached Egg?”

• James Buchanan, president from 1857 to 1861, is still the only president who never married. As First Lady, he chose Harriet Lane, his favorite niece. The two had been inseparable during Buchanan’s years as minister to the Court of St. James, where Queen Victoria gave Ms. Lane the rank of ambassador’s wife. Soon after Buchanan (or “Nunc,” as Ms. Lane called him) and his niece moved into the White House, Ms. Lane became the toast of social Washington, and launched “It’s Not Weird!,” a campaign aimed at de-stigmatizing intimate uncle-niece relationships across America.

• Lucretia Garfield was First Lady for only six months before her husband James died in office after being shot in 1881. While Mrs. Garfield did not have much time for causes during her husband’s presidency, she had always had two, unrelated, joys in life - lye and sad clowns. In the middle of June, three months after moving into the White House, Mrs. Garfield asked her husband if she could embark on two social crusades as First Lady - one to be called “Lye!” and the other to be called “Sad Clowns!” “Sure,” President Garfield responded, but then it never came up again and then he got shot and died.

• Epilepsy was a constant in the White House life of Ida McKinley, and her husband William. Perhaps because her own serious illness was such an obstacle to a normal, healthy life in Washington, Mrs. McKinley focused her public attention on an issue she believed would boost the spirits of Americans saddened by the plight of their First Lady. But Mrs. McKinley’s crusade promoting tiny shower caps to protect babies’ hair-dos, called “Keep Her Pretty,” was met with befuddlement rather than approval, and it was soon scuttled by President McKinley who called his wife’s idea “looney,” “batty,” “zany,” “moofie,” “shaapie,” “truggly” and “garbanzo.”

• Her years as an Army wife in a variety of posts around the world prepared Mamie Eisenhower for the many heads of state she and her husband Dwight would receive at the White House in the 1950s. But it was Mrs. Eisenhower’s concern for a domestic crisis that would lead her to declare her own personal war on the Chordettes. The songs “Mr. Sandman” and especially “that goddamned annoying ‘Lollipop’ shit,” were enough for the First Lady to create, The Whoredettes, a group of four slutty teenagers with terrible voices and worse hygiene that toured the country parodying the Chordettes and spreading rumors on stage about the original group members’ sexual dalliances with old women, donkeys and Mao Zedong.