[Douglas G. Brown]

Rather than perform surgery on Father Arnold, I'll try an apology by the infamous Lizzie Borden

(Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

- Schoolyard rhyme popularized during the double murder trial of Lizzie Andrew Borden, of Fall River Massachusetts, in 1893.) ...

An Apology

Miss Lizzie Borden, on the stand
Declared “I took an axe in hand,
To chop up both my Ma and Paw;
Since that’s what they’d been asking for.

“I hate this Massachusetts town.
Despite my murderous renown,
I’ll make a good Manhattan-ite,
Where I can party through the night.

“I’ll be the idol of the day,
The empress of the Great White Way …
Where Stanford White and Diamond Jim
Will grovel to my slightest whim.

“I trust a jury of my peers,
(You gents well past your middle years),
Will not allow a sweet young thing
Like me, from hangman’s rope, to swing.”

(In reality, Miss Borden was acquited, so legally was not a murderer. She was ostracized from local society, and quietly lived to old age in a new house, in a better part of Fall River.)