A Very Special 'In Depends' Day Episode of 'Blair ❤️s Michael' (A Little Fourth Play): 'To Camp, by Gamp, or, Darling Dearest Wants YOU! 🫵, General Sweetie, for First Baby!

 

Now With Celebrity Cameos - and Links!

And featuring Henry Harris as The Dog

As a grateful nation prepares to breathe a great, full sigh of national relief after having managed, with the aid of a Constitution, 5,042 nuclear warheads and the television remote (look under the cushion), to survive two hundred fifty years of red battlefields, White Christmas Sales and the Black-and-Blue Fridays that precede them, we join those adorable punning newlyborns Sweetie (Blair, one-named like celebrity guest Cher, below) and Darling Dearest (Michael Harris, new brand spokesman for Goodpop) as after several days strapped in the back seat of the Harris Family successor to the wood-paneled station wagons commandeered by Michael's "Gate-Gampy" sixty years ago they commence to enjoy a week's peace, tranquility and mosquito-slapping in the

little house in the big woods on the even bigger lake the late Chippewa/Ojibwe and the much later Gordon Lightfoot called Gitche Gumee.

Cliff and Eden, Michael's father and mother, respectably, staying down the road as chaperones at America's Best Value Inn, pull up with fresh groceries for tbe two from the Store Formerly Known Back as Jack's ("Back", i.e., at the Bicentennial in 1976).

Eden: Michael, Daddy and I bought a 12-pack of Goodpop freezer pops, your favorite - perfect for a hot day like today! Mommy loves them, too: we saved one for you - you and Blair can split it! Don't worry - we got a coupon for next week's 12-pack - and rumor has it that in next week's flyer, Meijer has them on one of their signature BODDGOHoOaTPO (Buy One Dozen Dozen, Get One Half of One at Two Percent Off) specials!

Michael: Oh, boy, Goodpop - "with electrolytes," as they say! What do you say we start a "Goodpop" band - we could call it "The Electrolyte Orchestra", or ... ELO for short -

Blair: - if not for long -

Bob Dylan (cartwheeling across the woods, like a rolling stone, if not quite "a complete unknown"): - or for you -

Blair: - I think that name's already been taken (looks up at the receding storm clouds and commences singing like it's 1977) "🎶 Mr. Blue Sky/Please tell us why/You had to hide away for so long/So long, where did we go wrong? 🎶"

Jeff Lynne (ELO frontman, popping shaggy Louis XIV head out from behind bush from which it was previously indistinguishable): Hey, I resemble that lyric! - it didn't just come to you from Out of the Blue ... er, hold on, I guess it kind of did: memory! - "🎶 what a terrible thing to lose 🎶..."

Toulouse-Lautrec (roundhousing up toward camp like a pint-, or half-liter-, sized John Wayne): Somebody call, mon cher?

Cher (flicking tip of tongue across lip, and wearing Land O' Lakes headband with feather and Sonny's hippie fur vest, she takes Toulouse for one win in an impromp-"tu" duet): I got tu, bébé! Monsieur-Lautrec, did I ever tell you "🎶 I was born in the wagon of a travelin' show/My mama used to dance for the money they'd throw 🎶 -

Graham Chapman (from Monty Python's Flying Circus, as the stern mustachioed Colonel): - "🎶 Papa would do whatever he could/Preach a little gospel/Sell a couple bottles of Doctor Good! 🎶" ... (regaining rectitude, embarrassed) Sorry! There is entirely too much Pop of the Tops, I mean Top of the Pops, silliness going on in this sketch ... right, as you were, back to business, chop-chop ...

Commencing to chop serial vegetables for their salads, Blair deposits each portion into their respective bowls.

Blair: Tomato, you, tomato, me, onion, you, onion, me, olive, you -

Michael: - and olive, you, too, Sweaty, I mean Sweetie, from the heart of my bott-, bottom of my heart!

After their lunch, and after Gate-Gamp shuts off the water to replace the pump and fix the well after a trip to "save big money at Menard's" on the equipment, the two head to the lake for water to wash the dishes.

Michael (panting and dragging pail across steep sand dune en route): Sweetie, why is it taking us so long to go up the hill - when all we want to do is fetch a pail of water?

Blair: Because, Jack, I mean Darling Dearest, no disrespect to your recent and literally two-stepping FacePlants, crash landings an' all, over FaceTime, but we still have to crawl up the hill rather than walk: "Took a whole lotta ta-wry-in'/Just to get up that hill," to recall a sitcom dry cleaner - named, what are the odds? - after him whose Declaration we today celebrate. Say, did you remember to pack the mosquito spray? 

After a second of telltale buzzing, she slaps his tiny pudgy forearm as, commencing his trademark lightning turn from smiling to pouting, he bites his quivering lower lip upon seeing a pinprick of spattered 'skeeter, mingled with Harris, blood 

Michael (scowling at Blair): Pray, get off a' me!

Blair: WHAT?

Michael: I said, "spray that OFF! on me!"

Blair: That's more like it - the only cold fish I want to hear about this week are in Gate-Gampy's creel out on the Chocolay; and the only Independence I want to hear you Declare when I am around is the latest fishing report from the local lake of that name ... by the way, is it okay in our first year of married life as newlyborns, only a few days shy of our fiftieth-week anniversary - who knows where the time goes? - if I call him "Gampy", too?

Michael: As opposed to what ... Gampys One and Three? ... Hey, the more I merried her, I mean married you, the merrier: since it's our country's 250th an' all, and almost Gampy's (17)87th, I like to think of him these days as "AMERICA'S Gampy":

He pulls from the pocket of his size XXS Oshkosh B'gosh overalls a photo of DEL and DSL., aka David Lahti the Elder and David "I go b(u)y Scott and then return me to the store under warranty 'cos my porcelain bottom has a crack in it" Lahti the Younger, Photoshopped side by side after the WWI recruiting poster above the slogan "Uncle S(cott and G)am(p) Want YOU! 🫵 at Camp!"  

Blair: Where did you put the sparklers?

Michael: Sweetie, just looking at your sparkling ... hairs - all five of them now - I'd say I'm all ... sparkle doubt! And then there are your little white choppers still coming in ahead of mine: as I was just axing - speaking, I cannot tell a lie, of cherry trees-  the Father of Our Country™ this morning while counting the dollars and quarters we got from the ComeFundUs for gas for Daddy to drive us all from Lakeland to Land O' Lakes, "wooden chew, Mr. First Precedent, like to have teefus like Sweetie's, or, Don't cha wish your Martha was sweet(ie) like Blair?"

Blair: And what did The President Formerly Known as "General" Washington say to that?

Michael: He said "it was too many ... 'Sweeties' long before my inaugural ascension to the White (Teeth) House wot made me have to get my wooden teefus in the first place, 'Darling Dearest'!"

Blair: I ... wooden doubt it ... say, did he really call you "Darling Dearest"? No disrespect to the uniform or the men shivering in their long johns back at Valley Forge, but that's my term of ... endarlingdearestment! General Washington owes me a ... quarter, at least!

Michael: Maybe a dollar, what with inflation since 1776: "For a higher rate we can get this time/Go to The General and get in line!"

Blair: As long as his "face" value and his USA-IOU are "on the money" somewhere: and no disrespect to our Revolution against that other George, The King the IIIrd, and all the Founders Landing on these shores - and (flourishing arm toward the lake) these, too - in colonial/Indian times, but to those of us with trademarks to protect, Darling Dearest, royalties still matter!

Begging your pardon, Miss - sorry, "Sweetie" - and no offense to either you or The General on this patriotic day, but if it is a matter of credit for "Darling De[e]rest", we think the true royalties are due rather a bit further down the tree of life, where dwell those of us who love not wisely but fawnedly

As an incandescent flurry of fireworks explodes over the lake, a panicked Henry, Declaring an Independence all his own, races toward the woods, whimpering -

Blair: If he keeps running away from camp at the slightest crackle on the beach I'm going to start calling him "Yellow Dog" - like the River up Big Bay way that feeds Lake - speaking of which -Independence! 

- before Michael, shaking Henry's jar of Pup-Peroni, summons him back to a joyous heart-tugging tail-wagging homecoming and a therapeutic donning of the dog-calming ThunderShirt.

Henry: Arf! Arf! ("Puppy Fourth to All, and to All, Puppy Fourth")

We hope you enjoyed our one-act Independence Day drama right before the brats hit the grill: for if  "A Little Night Music" takes the puns à la former and saw such à la latter, "A Little Fourth Play" makes the buns all the warmer and the sausage all the fatter.