It was so vivid, I could almost swear it really happened," said Littlehead City resident Wyatt Touchdowne about his recent dream involving prominent musician David Byrne. "I mean, we were hanging out together just like we'd been friends for a long time. It was really cool."

Touchdowne, 32, a systems analyst for a California software firm, admitted that in reality, the two have never met.

"But in this dream I had the other night, not only did I get to meet David Byrne, but we spent what seemed like a whole lot of time together, just talking and doing things and stuff. First, I was just kind of walking along this beach, and I realized there was this guy right beside me, and when I looked, it turned out that it was David Byrne, former leader of the band Talking Heads. So we were just walking along, and we were talking and everything, and then pretty soon we were riding in a car together. We got to this house, and I realized in the dream that it was the house I had lived in when I was a teenager. And then David Byrne came into the house with me! He was actually in the house I used to live in!"

"I remember we talked about music and all kinds of stuff, and he was really friendly, just very low-key and casual, and it was just a really very pleasant encounter. At one point I told him that sometimes when I listened to his music, either the things he said or the way he said them just made me laugh. I couldn't help it, I said, I just laughed. He thought that was pretty funny, and he told me in the dream about this part of one song that he sang by calling over the phone and then holding the receiver up to the microphone. That part was really amazing, you know? I mean, how many people get musical tips like that in their dreams from someone like David Byrne?"

"Anyway, so there we were in the living room, and then my mom and my sister came in the room, and then I think they asked me to go to the store or something, because the next thing I knew, the dream kind of shifted, and I realized I was at the mall, but I was standing there naked in front of the Hickory Farms store, and everyone was looking at me. So of course David Byrne was gone by then, but still, it was pretty cool that we got to hang out together."

Asked if it was common for him to have dreams about celebrities, Touchdowne admitted that he had also had dreams involving personalities such as Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Richard Nixon and Cameron Diaz, among others.

"One of the strangest ones was where I was hanging out with Harry Nilsson," Touchdowne said. "Harry was really cool and everything, but I kept remembering in the dream that he's really dead in real life. So in the dream, I kept saying, 'But aren't you dead? You're dead, aren't you?' He never answered me, but that particular dream never seemed as real as most of the others. Because how can you hang out with a dead guy, you know?"

When this reporter pointed out that Richard Nixon is also dead, Touchdowne replied, "He is? Really? Wow, when did that happen?"

Despite repeated calls to his publicist regarding Touchdowne's dream, Mr. Byrne was not available for comment.

resident George W. Bush was protected from physical contact with a member of a minority group thanks to the efforts of the secret service Wednesday.

Alfredo Garcia, a lawyer of Hispanic descent, attempted to embrace the president in a gesture of greeting Wednesday afternoon before he was wrestled to the ground by secret service agents who intervened. A visibly shaken President Bush was then rushed into a limousine and transported away from the scene.

Garcia is being held and debriefed by the secret service. His wife, Marta Garcia, claims her husband is a lifelong Republican and campaign contributor who just wanted to hug the president, despite all warnings to keep his hands at his side and away from Bush as he passed through the area.

"We're not certain Mr. Garcia intended the president any harm," said secret service commander Dick Gautier. "It's entirely possible it was a misunderstanding or severe breach of protocol. What's important is that the president is still sheltered from contact with ethnic people."

Many in the Republican party are asking how this could happen? How could the secret service allow such an obvious Hispanic get so close to the president to nearly embrace him?

"Obviously we'll be reviewing the case to see if anyone here dropped the ball," Gautier said. "He was a very American-looking man, dressed nicely, a campaign contributor and Republican party supporter. I don't think anyone expected him to be ethnic in any way. Clearly we have to instruct our agents to be more observant in the future."

President Bush has released no official statement at this time, though he is reportedly resting comfortably and watching "The Lawrence Welk Show" reruns to forget the incident.

It's a question that I get asked on a nearly daily basis, and understandably: just what in the hell was wrong with American music in the 1950's? History has it that the 1960's were the decade of recreational and experimental drug use, citing such examples of delusionary flakery as Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, The Beatles' I Am the Walrus and Gregg Allman's hair. And while I wouldn't argue against these as prime examples of pharmaceutical excess, they pale mightily in comparison to the near-psychotic mutant trend of late-50's doo-wop music. John Lennon may have envisioned Mean Mr. Mustard dripping from a dead dog's eye, but even this game of Clue gone horribly wrong looks downright pedestrian next to a jabbering psychopath questioning who exactly put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong.

Like a drugged-up visitor from deep space, doo-wop appeared seemingly out of nowhere, holing up in the chests of America's great pop stars in the late 50's and early 60's. From this parasitic enclave it communicated with the world through a bewitching combination of di-dits, bompa-bomps, ding-dangs, shooby-doos and doh-dohs. Why did it come, and what was it hoping to communicate to us? Nobody knows, though our best guess is that it had to do with seeking therapy for a stuttering problem.

The earliest known recording of the mutant doo-wop style was the Orioles' 1948 tune It's Too Soon To Know. During the recording of what was, by all reports, a fairly normal song, lead singer Sonny Til suffered the massive variety of nervous breakdown and began singing rhyming gibberish vaguely related to his ex-wife winning custody of their home and the recent transmission failure of his Oldsmobile. Fearing for their own lives, the band continued to play and discovered to their dismay that when they had finished the take they were at the end of their studio time. As was a common practice at the time, the record company had only secured them ten minutes of recording time to record and mix the song, and they'd had to sell bass player Johnny Reed's virginity in the process as they were obligated to pay for the studio time themselves.

Low on options and wary of bat-wielding record company thugs, the band played it cool, acting as if the recording session had gone fine. The record was released as-is by record company execs who were so outside of the loop that they once released a recorded armpit fart as a single, snookered by an engineer with a sense of humor. Back in that day all of the record companies were so desperate for a hit they would release anything, sometimes even recordings of other records held up to a microphone, as the execs in charge all listened to marching bands and had no clue what the record-buying teens of the day were into. They seldom listened to the records they put out, which led to the infamous "My Ding-a-Ling" scandal of 1972.

It's Too Soon To Know wasn't a huge hit, but it sold surprisingly well considering the totally bugshit nature of the vocals. It also proved to be heavily influential for a young aspiring songwriter named Richard Lewis, who crashed his car into a grocery store the first time he heard it on the radio. Many say Lewis never recovered psychologically from the incident, but he did go on to form The Silhouettes, and pen the 1957 mega-hit Get a Job. That song introduced the stuttering, nonsensical vocal stylings that came to be known as doo-wop to the world.

Some purists and historians have argued that Get a Job was only a hit because Lewis' uncle owned the Junior Records label and made sure the song was played on Dick Clark's American Bandstand, which guaranteed it would be a hit among the easily-led youth of the day. Others might disagree, but the success of the 1959 hit Dog Barking in the Back Alley seems to lead credence to the theory, since the rare sound-effects single likely would not have reached #1 if it had not been featured on American Bandstand earlier that year.

Whatever the reason, Get a Job was a smash single, and Americans were quick to concede that if it's what everyone else was listening to, then they were into lyrics like "Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma" and colossally embarrassing bass singers, too.

Other bands smelled the money train and were quick to follow, solidifying doo-wop as a legitimate musical movement and a bad name for a hair salon. Not long after, The Marcels released the doo-wop manifesto Blue Moon in 1961, daring America to make sense of their statement of purpose: "Bom bom ba-bom ba-bom ba-bom bom ba-dang a lang lang a ding a dang ding Blue Moon…"

But by late 1961 doo-wop was beginning to lose it's luster, beginning with Barry Mann's hit Who Put the Bomp?, at which point fans began to suspect that the magic was gone and that doo-wop artists were just bullshitting them now. What began as a street movement had been exploited to the limits of credibility, and all of the bomps and sha-na-na's had begun to ring hollow.

By 1964 doo-wop was a mere ghost on the American musical landscape, as record-buyers turned away from the bubblegum of their youth and embraced the British Invasion of more vital artists, replacing their embarrassing Shep and The Limelites platters with the more mature pleasures of Manfred Mann's Do Wah Diddy Diddy. The rest, as they say, is history.

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