12.  Vaugn Meader.  Everyone knows about how Lenny Bruce took to the stage that night, the audience holding their breath wondering how the ever irreverent and controversial comedian would address the day’s news, and how — after a long dramatic pause — Lenny Bruce opened by saying, “Man.  Poor Vaugn Meader.”  But has it ever occurred to anyone, that maybe, just maybe, Vaugn Meader was looking for an out?  Because Vaugn Meader suffered indignities that other less successful Kennedy Impersonators did not know, and that the Truman and Eisenhower Impersonators that came before him could never even dream of.  When someone approached any of them on the streets, and shouted, “Hey!  Do that Impersonation!” — the equivalent of “Be My Monkey”– they could always say “No.”  But with Vaugn Meader, things were much different.  For Vaugn Meader so duplicated John F Kennedy in appearance and manners, and John F Kennedy was so much the popular culture icon, that he never even had that option.  Vaugn Meader’s very presence was a John F Kennedy Impersonation.  So it was never so much “Be My Monkey”, as it was “You are my Monkey”.  And this was a nightmare that followed Vaugn Meader wherever he went, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  So the small fortune that Vaugn Meader was earning from his Kennedy routine — originally just a way to make the most of a crappy situation — was increasingly only exasperating the desperation — locking Vaugn Meader into this pre-determined identity that had oh so cruelly been foisted upon him, and trapping Vaugn Meader into a one sided dependency.  Because what was Vaugn Meader to John F Kennedy?  Nothing!  And what was John F Kennedy to Vaugn Meader?  Everything!  And for Vaugn Meader, this imbalance was an equation that needed to change.  If there was one lesson from the field of Metaphysics that Vaugn Meader has learned, it was this:  that Vaugn Meader and John F Kennedy could not long co-exist on the same physical plane.  And one or the other was going to have to go.  And it sure as Hell wasn’t going to be Vaugn Meader!  So, as the years rolled on, and the albatross grew tighter and tighter, the ball and chain heavier and heavier, with each White House game of touch football with the Kennedy kids and each game of Nuclear Chicken with Khrushchev twisting that knife in further and further, what had started out as short fleeting thought bursts inched their way into the status of epiphany, and then snow-balled into a concrete plan of action.  What had began as a whisper heard on tour in the corn fields of Iowa, had echoed and swelled into a chorus of voices in states North and South, East and West — voices that could no longer be ignored; no longer be denied, and which arrived at its cacophony and clearest enunciation during the Presidential Caravan in Dallas, Texas.  Voices telling Vaugn Meader, “Yes We Can.”

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