The 5th of July
One Day After the Signing in Philly
It was the day after the Declaration of Independence, the 5th of July.
The younger and lesser known offspring of the Founders gathered in the woods outside Philadelphia for their own declaration of independence. Jonah Adams (John Adams' truant middle child) crooned in a slightly tipsy and falsetto Tiny Tim voice "I'm a Yankee Doo Doo Dandy" while sticking turkey feathers in his tricorn hat worn backwards.
They were teens, after all, and if their parents wanted to emancipate themselves from the domination of the English Grand Poobah, then they wanted to emancipate themselves from their parents. They toasted marshmallows, cooked hot dogs on sticks and somebody - everyone knew it had to be George Washington's ne'er do well kid brother, Dan - sneaked in a donkey cart with a keg of cream ale (bought with false ID at the back door of Sam Adam's brew pub in Boston), several jugs of bootleg rum and a bottle of Madeira lifted from his mother's "medicine chest."
Danny Washington was the life of any party, but he clearly wasn't the brightest candle on the dining room candelabra. It was Danny Washington, after all, who cut down his dad's cherry tree -- several of them, as a matter of fact -- because, you know, it was lots easier to pick the cherries from ground level off the fallen trees than climbing up a creaky old ladder. You could fall off that ladder and kill yourself, George laughingly had told his kid brother Dan, why don't you just cut them down and be safe about it?
So that's what Danny did. But even though Dan had done the cutting, George ate a whole lot of the cherries along with Dan. So that's why, in a cowardly panic, Dan immediately ratted out his older brother, George, when their father came roaring out of his Mount Vernon man cave, stinking drunk, and threatened to thrash whoever had axed the cherry grove. George tried to lie his way out of it, blaming British or French or Iroquois or Hessian terrorists or whoever, but the red cherry juice on his lips and fingers was a dead give-away. And besides, if Danny W. wasn't as smart as his older brother, George Washington, he certainly could run faster.
Clyde Hemings Jefferson, Dan's best friend and the third bastard son of Thomas Jefferson by Lord knows which slave mistress at the time, was also there at the gathering in the woods. Clyde Jefferson took a swig from Danny Washington's mother's bottle of Madeira and offered him, in return, a puff on his meerschaum pipe that was sending up blue curls of smoke from some slightly psychedelic herb that Clyde had bought from a medicine man at the Indian casino a week earlier.
Gerald "Jerry" Gerry was there, too, the nephew of Elbridge Gerry. Jerry, unlike his uncle, was a spendthrift and a gambler. And a pacifist, too. If a war was going to break out with England, Jerry Gerry told anyone who would listen, then he was going to hoof it over to Russia where there weren't so many rabid war-mongers as there were over here.
Nancy Ross, Betsy Ross's oldest daughter, had sneaked out to the woods along with her best friend Molly Madison.
Molly had baked some special cookies with the same herbs that Clyde Jefferson was smoking. Molly Madison, wearing a "Thee/Thou/Thine" button expressing her preferred pronouns, gossiped with Nancy Ross about how she had met at a soiree last Fall the positively super-fugly Prince Melvin, Duke of Worcestershire Sauce (the 239th in the succession to the British throne) who had just gotten back from a weekend carousing on Lord Jeffrey Epstein's notoriously decadent party barque sailing around in circles in the Caribbean.
As for Nancy Ross, she chatted with Molly about Nancy's mother, Betsy Ross, who had contracted to sew a flag for the newly independent whatever, and Nancy had made some suggestions that Nancy thought were really, really cool even if her mother, Betsy Ross, didn't; like, you know, black and red and white stripes with a bunch of multi-colored hammers and sickles and corn cobs on a green background, or whatever, kind of like to represent industry, labor, farming, stolen Indian lands and African slavery, you know, which were all kind of based on the same political economics of class, imperialism, war and colonialism, as Nancy saw it, until such time as the proletariat rose up and had a real revolution, you know what I mean, not like this freaking political theater of throwing snowballs at the soldiers on Boston Commons and sending a meaningless emailed petition IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS so the King could read it without his spectacles, I mean, hey, Clyde! Are you going to drink that whole bottle of Madeira without sharing with the rest of us, nu? Nancy said.
Jacqueline Hamilton aka "Jackie," Alexander Hamilton's daughter, showed up later along with her high school beau, Bobbie Burr, Aaron Burr's fourth child and notorious as the high school BMOC and best dressed dandy in the Thirteen Colonies. Unlike the senior Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, Jackie and Bobbie were best of friends, even to the extent of exchanging and wearing each other's clothing and high heel buckle boots, which everyone thought was a little odd, but, hey, they could identify as whatever they liked because it was going to be a free country, even if the country didn't yet exist and wouldn't actually ever be free, except as in "free beer."
Jacqueline Hamilton, in any event, after eating a few of Molly Madison's special cookies dipped in some Boston hot rum and tea, got a little loopy and boasted that her dad, Alexander, was going to become Secretary of the Treasury one day and establish a new currency for the new American kingdom, a crypto-currency based on a digital derivative of Pound Sterling with no backing whatsoever, just full faith, smoke and flimflam that Alexander Hamilton wanted to call BritCoin, or maybe BitCoin, or something like that.
About this time, Fred "Freddy" Franklin, wearing blue tinted Maui Jim sunglasses designed by his uncle, Benjamin Franklin, tootled up in one of his uncle's newfangled inventions: an electric horseless carriage powered with Leyden jar batteries charged by lightening bolts striking metal keys hung on kites flying high in the sky. Fred Franklin was also pretty high at the time. He twice squeezed the rubber bulb horn on his electric carriage, HONK HONK, as he motored up to the gathering in the woods touting the Leyden jar battery vehicle as environmentally friendly.
"Hey, look, guys, no horse manure!!" Fred shouted just as a lighting bolt struck one of the high-flying kites attached to his uncle Franklin's quick-charging battery-powered EV and gave Fred's powdered wig some extra curl.
Freddy Franklin was a bit of rogue who was making a few farthings secretly hacking and distributing on the Dark Press Web anonymous lampoons of his uncle's Poor Richard's Almanac. "A penny saved doesn't buy anything," Frank mumbled as he shared a jug with Calvin Hancock, John Hancock's half-brother. "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man boring... and then he dies," slurred Calvin as he wiped his lips on his frilly lace sleeves.
After a few too many drinks, Mike Madison, James Madison's problem child, sauntered around the campfire offering to fight anyone who wasn't descended from someone else who came over on the Mayflower. "We're the only true Americans, ain't we?" spluttered Mike Madison stumbling around in an alcoholic stupor as he dared anyone to contradict him.
Molly Madison did. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, or whatever,” she said, “and we're all equally a bunch of mutts related to everyone and everything else, pursuing life, liberty and happiness, and we all evolved from the same blue-green cyanobacteria. And, anyway, we all have the same maternal mitochondria from the same African Ur-mother, so like it or lump it."
Molly, who held a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, then leaped up and deftly kicked Mike Madison into a blackberry bush where he started to giggle and then fell asleep.
Suddenly, Carl Revere - you know, the not so famous or revered step-son of Paul Revere - came galumphing around the bend and, short of breath, he yelled, Our Parents are coming! Our Parents are coming!
So everyone at the 5th of July kegger in the Philadelphia woods tossed the rest of Molly Madison's special cookies into the fire, knocked over the barrel of ale, and then scattered and ran (led by the fleet of foot Danny Washington, of course).
And the rest, as they say, is just Revisionist History.
Notes:
All names are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is positively coincidental and unintentional. Except when it isn’t.
End photograph: A photomontage of fireworks from a Guy Fawkes Night display at Roundwood Park in Harlesden, London. 5 November 2007, between 8:10pm and 8:23pm. Artist: Billy Hicks, Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.