MPnormaleye
A Good Start
Ralph Waldo Emerson — you probably didn’t know this about him — he played the ukulele. Honest! I wouldn’t make that up. He played the uke and liked to go around barefooted. Sure, in public he was the noted essayist and transcendentalist and poet. But when he shucked off his coat and tie, Emerson was a wild man.
He was arrested twice for breach of the public peace. Honest! The first time he drunkenly disrupted a lecture (Thomas Carlyle speaking on Irregular Polygons in Norse Mythology) by singing rude songs about Thor and Loki breaking wind in Asgard. The second arrest apparently involved a dwarf and a tub of lime Jello. Honest! Lime Jello! Both affairs were hushed up, of course, and Emerson was required to pay compensation to the dwarf’s husband — a dentist from Waltham.
Emerson took up the ukulele after Thoreau set fire to his accordion, which he’d won playing grobhäusern with an infamous Lascar merchant sailor. He drank his afternoon tea with a shot of vodka, except on Sundays when he skipped the tea. Emerson was banned from boxing after his bout with Irish bare-knuckle pugilist Simon Byrne (honest!) during which it was revealed Emerson had a petrified raccoon pizzle concealed in his left fist.
He died in 1872 of pneumonia — which he reportedly caught after exiting (sans-culottes) the window of Marlene Ness, whose grandson Eliot would lead the prohibition era crime squad known as the Untouchables. Honest.
Really.
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