Going to the closet of his apartment, Ian Duncan bent down and carefully lifted a cloth-wrapped object into the light. We had so much youthful faith in this, he recalled.

Tenderly, he unwrapped the jug; then, taking a deep breath, he blew a couple of hollow notes on it. Duncan & Miller and Their Two-man Jug Band, he and Al Miller had been, playing their own arrangement for two jugs of Bach and Mozart and Stravinsky. But the White House talent scout -- the skunk. He had never even given them a fair audition. It had been done, he told them. Jesse Pigg, the fabulous jug-artist from Alabama, had got to the White House first, entertaining and delighting the dozen and one members of the Thibodeaux family gathered there with his version of ‘Derby Ram' and ‘John Henry' and the like.

‘But,' Ian Duncan had protested, ‘this is classical jug. We play late Beethoven sonatas.'

‘We'll call you,' the talent scout had said briskly. ‘If Nicky shows an interest at any time in the future.'

Nicky! He had blanched. Imagine being that intimate to the First Family. He and Al, mumbling pointlessly, had retired from the stage and their jugs, making way for the next act, a group of dogs dressed up in Elizabethan costumes portraying characters from Hamlet.

The dogs had not made it, either, but that was little consolation.

‘I am told,' Nicole was saying, ‘that there is so little light in the ocean depths that, well, observe this strange fellow.' A fish, sporting a glowing lantern before him, swam across the TV screen.