Newt Gingrich and Rudolph Perz

That night in October 1994 Dan Thorpe was playing his guitar at his dining room table and sharing his reefer and beer with Bill Madigan. At one point Dan said "there is something inside Stone Mountain."

Bill felt like he had been given a mild electrical shock. It was hard to believe that someone else thought the same as he did about Stone Mountain. Harmonic convergence? Was going to the center like going to God, stepping outside of the flow of time and process, getting off the carousel, the Ferris wheel, the spinning planet?

Years later Bill envisioned a baseball stadium inside Stone Mountain with Newt Leroy Gingrich throwing out the first pitch of the 2019 World Series--only it wasn't the 2019 World Series but a make up World Series for the year 1994. No World Series that year due to a player's strike.

1994 was a good year for Newt Gingrich, the Pillsbury Doughboy who offered a Contract with America after spending a little more time in the oven than he wished.

Due to exfoliation, it would probably be difficult to carve a baseball stadium inside Stone Mountain, but then Gingrich once complained that his wife was a Jaguar and what he needed was a Chevrolet.

Rudolph Perz, who created the Pillsbury Doughboy in the 1960s died on Thursday in a Chicago hospital at age 89. He too might have thought he had been in the oven a little longer than he wished. Happens to us all.