Why Jitterbug?

I knew this would be a curiosity, so let me explain the meaning of “Jitterbug” right up front. I’m borrowing the phrase from Tom Robbins and his book “Jitterbug Perfume”, which I read many years ago. For the uninitiated, Robbins is a uniquely trippy writer, with most of his books emitting a strong whiff of 60’s counter culture at their core, certainly in regard to his various protagonists. Robbins’ uses an impressive dexterity with words together with a wildly unrestrained imagination to create truly one-of-a-kind characters, such as “Turn Around Norman”, “Woodpecker”, “Boomer Petway”, the “Bandaloop Doctors”, the “Reverend Buddy Wrinkler”, a philosophizing Campbell’s Soup Can, and even a man with a helmet of swarming bees named “Bingo Pajama”. When it’s all mixed together, his books can be a wild ride. They read like something akin to a possessed shaman dancing naked under a full moon, hurling defiant revelations back at the gods, daring their rebuke……this is a compliment.

To drive home my point here, “Jitterbug Perfume” begins when an ancient perfume bottle turns up in New Orleans, and when it’s last remaining contents are inhaled, the secrets of the god’s suddenly become known and bestow a euphoric sense of enlightenment on anyone who smells the scent. From there, the story follows the wild search for the perfumes “secret” ingredient. And what is that secret ingredient, you may be wondering? The distilled juice of a beet. Yes, a beet….a vegetable. But let me allow Robbins’ to explain this curious metaphor for himself.

“The Beet is the most intense of vegetables. The onion has as many pages as War and Peace, every one of which is poignant enough to make a strong man weep, but the various ivory parchments of the onion and the the stinging bookmark of the onion are quickly charred by belly juices and bowel bacteria. Only the beet departs the body the same color as it went in.

Beets consumed at dinner will, come morning, stock the toilet bowl with crimson fish, their hue attesting to the beet’s chromatic immunity to the powerful digestive acids and thoroughgoing microbes that can turn the reddest pimento, the orangest carrot, the yellowest squash into a single disgusting shade of brown.

At birth we are red-faced, round, intense, pure. The crimson fire of universal consciousness burns in us. Gradually, however, we are devoured by parents, gulped by schools, chewed up by peers, swallowed by social institutions, wolfed by bad habits, and gnawed by age: and by the time we have been digested, cow style, in those six stomachs, we emerge a single disgusting shade of brown.

The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown.”

In other words, the key to an enlightened, self determined life, in Robbins view, is to maintain an authentic innocence of heart and purity of mind, our ‘Devine blush’, yet support it with a fierce strength of character and purpose that will protect against anything the world may hurl at us. It’s for this reason that when I began considering a name that would embody my intentions here, ‘Jitterbug‘ was the only word I considered.