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Creating and circulating glurge (sometimes true, sometimes fabricated) is one of our cathartic ways of dealing with tragedy. For example: The 1995 bombing that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 people was a tragedy with which America struggled to try to come to grips, especially in the wake of the 2001 execution of the man responsible for it, Timothy McVeigh. In this case it appears someone has simply dusted off and refurbished an old glurge to suit the circumstances. We don't yet know the original source for the piece reproduced below (it is often prefaced as being a story told by Bob Richards, the former pole-vault champion), but it's been circulating on the Internet since at least 1998, and in lyric form it was a sappy 1975 hit for David Geddes (infamous for the teenage gun tragedy song Run Joey Run) under the title The Last Game of the Season (A Blind Man in the Bleachers): Notice the similarities between the following (also anonymous) piece and the Mildred Hondorf version quoted above: Both involve boys with single parents, both boys are not very good at the recreation they've chosen to pursue yet work hard at it, neither parent can appreciate his or her boy's efforts due to a handicap (blindness or deafness), and both boys beg for a chance to perform in public over their teachers' objections so that their recently-deceased parents can experience their sons' artistry and skill for the first time: It's the same story, just told in a different way. For yet another version, see Michael Aun's The Coach Lou Little Story. In it, another aspiring football player spending his time as a benchwarmer (this time a tackle at Georgetown University rather than a fellow playing an unspecified position on a high school team) gets pulled aside by the coach four days before the championship game and told that a telegram has come that announces the death of the young man's father. On the day of the big game, the lad gets the coach to agree to put him in for one play. The young man performs extremely well on that one play, prompting the coach to leave him in, with said decision amply rewarded by continued stellar performances by the bereaved boy. However, a different spin is placed on the yarn in this recounting via one small change in the story: the coach always knew the boy's father was blind, therefore the tale's usual ending (which calls upon that being a revelation) gives way to a new ending and a new moral: It does make a difference when those unseen eyes are watching. We don't know why Mildred Hondorf can't spell Des Moines, why a music teacher would use the word virtuoso as if it were a tempo, or why someone would be playing the piano in a federal building, but we do know that Robby's piano teacher should indeed have been surprised when he announced he had chosen Mozart's Concerto #21 in C Major for his recital piece: It's one of the most technically demanding of all Mozart's concerti, it's a half-hour long, and it requires an orchestral accompaniment — yet young Robby, the diffident piano student, so well mastered this challenging piece in only several weeks' time (without the benefit of a teacher) that he was able to perform it at a recital, sans orchestra, in a mere six and a half minutes. Quite a prodigy, that Robby. No Desert Storm veteran named Robbie (or Robby, Bob, Bobby, Robert, or any other form of the name) was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, says the Communications Director for the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, who has often been asked about this particular urban legend. Also, in her discussions with the family members of the adult victims, none of them has ever identified their loved one as Robby.
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