In honor of the fine people at the USA Film Festival, who have been kind enough to invite Joel, J. Elvis, Trace, Mary Jo, and myself to Dallas this week (Kevin, alas, is sick and will not be able to attend; get well soon, Kevin!), I would like to submit for your approval a new account of events that happened in that city on November 22, 1963. We all know that this was an historic date, and those of us of a certain age all remember exactly where we were on that chilly November day when we first heard that Aldous Huxley had died (just as the subsequent generation all remember exactly where they were when they first heard that Kennedy had become a VJ on MTV).

But besides Huxley’s death, there were other events that happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963 that also made the papers (it was kind of a slow news day).

“I’m just a patsy,” Lee Harvey Oswald announced as the police transferred him to his jail cell. But he wasn’t just a patsy, he was also a stooge, according to new details that have come to light thanks to the Freedom of Information act.

In the fall of 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald had moved to Dallas and was ready to make a new start in life. He had been having trouble finding new friends, having sadly discovered that his whole “I betrayed my country and defected to the Soviet Union” story was not the icebreaker he had hoped it would be. But Oswald had not yet turned thirty, and as far he was concerned he still had plenty of marginal insignificance left in him. He wondered if maybe a big metropolitan area like Dallas might have a place for a creepy, indigent drifter like himself.

At first he had a hard time finding employment. He wanted to find work that suited him, but the thing he was best at – standing around in silent awkwardness while making everybody else uncomfortable – was not considered a marketable skill – at least not at that time. He decided to aim high and pursue a career in menial labor, and luckily for him there was a small employment agency that was hiring.

The man who interviewed Oswald, a somewhat testy bloke named Moe Howard, told him, “We have an opening because a guy named Curly Joe just left us in a dispute over workman’s comp. Before him, we had a partner named Joe Besser, but his sensibilities were just a little too delicate for us. Before him, my brother Shemp worked here, and before him, my brother Curly.”

“So,” Oswald said sheepishly, “Your whole business is based on nepotism?”

“Oh, wise guy, huh” Moe said, and then promptly threw a large hammer at him. Oswald somehow had the presence of mind to duck, and the hammer flew past him and hit Moe’s other partner, Larry Fine, right on his noggin. Larry screamed out in pain, but then just passively rubbed his forehead. He seemed used to this sort of thing.

The fact that a carpentry tool had been lobbed at him in the midst of the interview gave Oswald the impression that maybe he wasn’t going to get the job, but then much to his surprise, he was hired. The next morning, Moe, Larry and Lee Harvey began a new job at the Texas School Book Depository.

Things got off to a shaky start when Larry somehow got his head caught between a labyrinth of pipes in the bathroom. This had always happened when Moe, Larry and their previous partners went out on plumbing jobs, but nobody could figure out how it happened this time. Larry was unable to move his head, which was no doubt going to have an adverse effect on his productivity, but Moe’s solution to this workplace snafu was to repeatedly hit Larry on the head with a wrench, slap his face back and forth and up and down and every which way, and pull out his hair with impunity. Oswald could not see how this was a rational business decision, and when Moe took note of Oswald’s glazed, far-away expression, he flapped his hands in front of his face and Oswald followed the pattern of the flapping with his eyes, until with sudden alacrity Moe smacked him hard across his cheek, then dragged him by his nose across the room before giving the order, “Get to work, numbskull!”

It wasn’t long before Oswald learned that whenever Moe said “Why you…” it was a sure sign that extreme physical pain was in the offing.

But things got even more disorganized when early in the afternoon, while the three of them stacked boxes of heavy scholastic text books, a predictable morass of punching, kicking and nose grabbing became the order of the day, Eventually they knocked over a whole stack of books that fell on and rendered unconscious a person that they hadn’t seen or noticed yet.

The knocked-out guy had been crouching by the window and holding a high-powered rifle. To this day, this mystery man’s name is not known. What is known is that he was a part of the F.B.I./C.I.A./A.F.L.C.I.O./Mafia/Cuba/Marilyn Monroe/Diner’s Club/Allen & Rossi/Every-Branch-Of-The-US-Government conspiracy to kill JFK.

Oswald picked up the rifle and Larry immediately tried to grab it from Oswald, and then Moe tried to take it from Larry. Somehow, in the midst of their struggle, the rifle went off, sending a bullet zooming out the window just as the President’s motorcade was driving by.

The three of them all immediately realized that they were in big trouble (Moe and Larry were used to this; they got into hot water on just about every job they took). But in the moments when they all should have been making a beeline for the door, they wasted valuable time by panicking and tossing the rifle back and forth to each other like a hot potato. It wasn’t long before the rifle went off again and a second bullet shot out the window, once again hitting the passing motorcade.

Throughout Dealey Plaza there were now screaming and crying and traumatized bystanders, not an unusual state of affairs for Moe and Larry, although this case was a bit unusual in that there didn’t seem to be any pastries being hurled across the room. Still, they both reacted as they always did when all hell broke loose (and hell seemed to always have a way of prying itself free whenever they went to work), they screamed and flailed their arms and ran like babbling ninnies towards the emergency exit.

Oswald, not as experienced in crisis management as his co-workers, nonetheless sensed that vamoosing was a sensible course of action. He left the Book Depository though a different door than Moe and Larry because he had pretty much decided then and there that he wasn’t going to work with them anymore. It occurred to Oswald that he would prefer to be associated with people who were less prone to disaster – like for instance the folks who planned the Bay of Pigs invasion.

The events of the next few days are well documented. The who and the what of it are well known, but the why remains murky: Why was Oswald arrested and not Moe and Larry? Why did Jack Ruby shoot Oswald when throwing a pie in his face would have made the same point? Why was Officer Joe Bolton the only law enforcement official to investigate this aspect of the case? These and many other questions remain unanswered, and deservedly so.

Soon after the tragedy in Dallas, Curley Joe rejoined Moe and Larry and they never spoke of November 22, 1963 again. They tried not to even think about it. The Three Stooges were from an earlier, simpler, gentler time. The Sixties left them bewildered. They just didn’t understand how the world could become so violent.