Oh yeah, I know, I know, Dr. Dann’s New Year’s resolution was to limit himself to just two Masquerade posts per week – a manifesto on Tuesdays and a local whimsey on Fridays, but Spring’s the mischief in me and it’s April Fool’s Day to boot, so can’t a boy just play?!

You know how it goes: you hear a word, and, either because that word is new and unfamiliar, or for some serendipitous reason it just happens to catch your attention more than usual, and you look into it a little. . . whereupon, Lo & Behold!, that single word opens up into multiple, marvelous, magnanimous worlds. It has become – as all words are – a portal to human consciousness, spirit, and soul.

Will you permit me, dear reader, to narrate here the exact sequence? Yesterday, while we were making dinner, Cathline sang out a few of her favorite words: serendipity, parsimonious, petrichore, perspicacity, crepuscular, cacophany, kaleidoscope, calliope. Dr. Dann replied with a few of his own: gossamer, propinquity, extravagance, riparian, turbulence, thigmotropic, carnivalesque, silhouette. How very serendipitous, then, that this morning at the top of my inbox there should be an email from my new friend Alex Harvey, inviting one–and–all to his Sea Songs, Street Ballads, and Shenanigans musical foolery at Buttonball Barn in Egremont.

Shenanigans!? How is it that I have promiscuously used that word my whole life, yet I don’t know the first thing about it. And so, to the dictionary I went, to discover it first appeared in print in the San Francisco newspaper Town Talk in 1855, and that most scholars agree that it was born (as sionnachuighm – pronounced ‘shinnuckeem’ – Gaelic for “I play the fox’) from Irish immigrant tongues – of which there were more than a few in that decade following the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill. Wanting to track it into the Gilded Age, I found help from the dynamic editorial duo of Transcendentalist George Ripley and Gotham editor/journalist extraordinaire Charles Anderson Dana and their New American Encylopedia: A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge, where they perspicaciously note, under the entry for SLANG, that shenanigan was but one of a kaleidoscope of words – along with caboodle, calithumps, contraptions, highfalutin, hunkydory, spondalicks, skedaddle, scaliwag – sporting America’s tendency to coin new words for new conditions.

Knowing that Mark Twain had employed the word (in the singular) in 1862 or that it had made its first American appearance in the plural in Edna Ferber’s Show Boat in 1926 was not enough for this voracious vocabulary gobbler, and so I turned to Google Images, to see how the delicious word might have inspired (or just merely titled) paintings and drawings in the century since its San Francisco invention. What!? Nary a single historic image!

Well friends, I decided it was high time to wish my not–so–parsimonious, gossamer, crepuscular, silhouette of an ally, Rover, a Happy April Fool’s, and ask him to conjure a carnivalesque scene to fill the bill. . .

Happy April Fool’s Day, dear readers, and may it be filled to the brim with Shenanigans!