October 9, 2002 6:12 PM

I’m inclined to knockwurst.

Mozart for the Mind is the name of the CD that I picked up at a thrift store today for $3.95. A steal? More than likely for the owners of the thrift. As I waited in line for people with gads of clothes, stripping them madly from the hangers, as clerks tallied yellow and green and red and purple tags marked with thick magic marker numbers that blurred into a large ink blot that caused no end of bickering, I read the liner notes.

The University of California at Irvine, I paraphrase, the document lies far away and to the North on my desk at work, discovered via a survey (and who was it that (you really have to ask) formulated such a study?) that people who listen to Mozart for ten minutes prior to an examination were brighter by a marked degree than those who managed some relaxation exercises or those who merely sat I silence for the measured time.

I rushed back to my work station and placed the CD anxiously into the player high above my desk. Ahh, the marvelous strains of Wolfgang wafted over the office and immediately I could see the effects. I finally understood E=MC2. Several others began recited Shakespearean soliloquies, the Gettysburg Address (552 Lincoln Way, sorry I just couldn’t….), A listing of all the Supreme Court Justices in order of their birth dates, astounding Stock Market prognostications, Cordon Bleu recipes, need I go on? (I hope not because they are becoming strikingly less original and most certainly less funny.)

Alas, I did not wait in the line long enough to read all the liners notes for several paragraphs later it is revealed that the effect is as temporary as the azalea blooms in spring or mosaic of turning leaves in autumn. I am playing Symphony No. 41 C-Major KV 551 “Jupiter” at this moment to try to retrieve my earlier insight into the Einsteinian Universe. But it is lost!

Damn that Mozart!

It did start me to wondering. Why, I said, Mozart. Why not for example Ina-Gadda-Da-Vida? Or The Three Liddle Fisheeze that thwam and thwam all over the dam? Or, for those who like lighter fare, The Ten Thousand and One Melanchrino Strings’ version of Eleanor Rigby?

There is no obvious answer as to why a Mozart opus trims and straightens our brain waves. The final paragraph of the liner notes explains that this survey developed a theory that has become known as The Mozart Effect. Stunned, I realize that there are probably millions of Americans, deep in the hollars and back woods that still pronounce Mozart Mose-art. I will lobby Washington. A funded project aimed at educating those in the deep dark piney forests soused on moon alcohol. Traveling trucks with large speakers atop, like you see once in a while in 50’s science fiction epics, dedicated to playing the Overture to the Marriage of Figaro or dare I say it, Serenade in G-Major KV 525 Eine Kleine Nachtmusick.
My mother’s boss at the Mayflower Coffee Shop (As you ramble on through life, dear Brother, whatever be your goal. Keep your eye upon the doughnut and not upon the hole!) where she worked (downtown next to what is now Heinz Hall that spews out more classically than just Mozart on a Friday night, you betcha), when I was just a young whipper snapper, used to tell me he loved classical music.

“Why just last night,” he would say, “I was listening to Beethoven’s Refrain from Spitting!”