On Christmas Day, while the family was opening gifts, Sierra and Jackson told me, “You will have to wait for your present, it isn’t ready yet, but the wait will be worth it.” Of course, I didn’t mind, I didn’t care if they were just telling me that because they didn’t get me anything and figured I’d forget that they didn’t get me anything within a day or two, because, as most of us eventually figure out, just being together when being apart is the norm, is plenty.

A few days ago, a package arrived, and although I haven’t been skeptically counting the days with suspicions of deceit and gift betrayal, the wait was indeed worth it. The kids had a figurine of myself and Mortimer Snerd made. Who is Mortimer Snerd? As I wrote several years ago in my column entitled “Mort”…

Mort and I go way back many years. Our paths first crossed Christmas of 1982, when my parents entertained my dreams of becoming a ventriloquist and gave me Mortimer and the Edgar Bergen album “Laugh and Learn! Lessons in Ventriloquism with Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd”. A dream, that thanks to The Twilight Zone episode 98 “The Dummy”, soon became a nightmare.

From that point on, Mort and my relationship was a bit tense and tempestuous. I’m 52-years old, but I still have an occasional nightmare involving my pal Mort not being so pal like. The nightmares subsided after I hired Mort on as the night watchman at the Gashole (my garage bar). We all need a purpose in life.

Mort’s factory issued rubber loafers were lost years ago, so I outfitted him with a pair of cowboy boots I wore when I was a wee toddler. He looks snazzy, and I figured that the “clip and clop” of cowboy boots would make it harder for him to sneak up on me. A win-win.

My Edgar Bergen album has been lost to time as well, I have suspicions that Mort, who was always second fiddle to Charlie McCarthy, smashed it in a fit of jealous rage, but he has yet to admit to it.

The album is available on the internet, and if you take a gander at it you will understand Mort’s misgivings. The album cover shows Charlie McCarthy sitting smugly on Edgar’s knee, both dressed in tuxedos and top hats, while Mortimer looks on, grinning and bearing it, perched on a chair beside them in a ratty straw hat.

To further fan the flames, Charlie performed for royalty in England and Sweden, for two U.S. Presidents, and “received an honorary degree of Master of Inuendo and Snappy Comebacks from Northwestern University.” What did Mort get? He got stuffed in a box and exiled to North Dakota to sit on the bony knee of a 12-year-old boy, who soon got distracted by baseball and girls, grew a mullet and failed to give him the voice he yearned for. I dashed his dreams, so he haunted mine. So it goes.

The album cover also talks of how Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy first became famous by performing on radio shows in the 1920s. Ventriloquism on the radio?

Maybe Mort didn’t get exiled? Maybe he was tired of the dog and pony show, tired of listening to Charlie clack his yap, tired of Edgar’s sweaty hand. Maybe his little rubber loafers carried him to North Dakota in search of a little peace and quiet? I see the figurine the kids got me as a representative of “what could have been” if Mort and I had been more dedicated disciples of Mr. Bergen. What could have been if the three horsemen of our ventriloquism apocalypse, baseball, girls, and mullets, hadn’t mercifully interceded. Oftentimes, one never knows of the bullets they’ve dodged in life…I now have a figurine to remind me of one such grazing shot fired back in 1982.

Charlie McCarthy has resided in a case on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History for the past 45-years. Mort…he’s among friends…he’s part of a family. Who’s the dummy?