God bless you, Dr. Kevorkian (22 page)

plays and poems for which he'd been given credit.

"That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," he said. "Ask Saint Peter!" Which I would do.

I asked him if he had love affairs with men as well as women, knowing how eager my WNYC audience O O

was to have this matter settled. His answer, however, celebrated affection between animals of any sort:

"We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk in the sun, and bleat the one at the other: what we chang'd was innocence for innocence." By
changed
he meant
exchanged:
"What we exchanged was innocence for innocence

has to be the softest core pornography I ever heard. And he was through with me. In effect, he told your reporter to go screw himself. "Get to a nunnery!"

he said, and off he went.

I felt like such a fool as I made my way back to the blue tunnel. An enchanting answer to any question I
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might have asked the greatest writer who ever lived could be found in

Familiar Quotations.
The

beaut about exchanging innocence for innocence was from
The Winter's Tale.

I at least remembered to ask Saint Peter if Shakespeare had written Shakespeare. He told me that nobody arriving in Heaven, and there was no Hell, had claimed authorship for any of it. Saint Peter added,

"Nobody, that

who was willing to submit to my liedetector test." This is your tongue-tied, humiliated, self-loathing, semi-literate Hoosier hack Kurt Vonnegut, signing off with this question for today: "To be or not to be?"
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