Dickie Van Dyke
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No one knows exactly how or when Dickie van Dyke arrived in this world. Some observers speculate Mister van Dyke was actually born Percy Sheldon Victor von Fitzgerald to a mister Sherman Donald Albright, a local farm hand, and a misses Frances Electra von Fitzgerald, a local mad scientist with a weakness for farm hands.
Rumor has it that upon the realization of her pregnancy, Ms. Fitzgerald decided that her babe would be the perfect platform for an experiment in mutating genetics to produce a race of super humans, impenetrable by disease and virus and eager to fill her army designed for world domination. Throughout her pregnancy, Ms. von Fitzgerald routinely injected her fetus with concoctions and potions she had mixed and distilled out of essential oils derived from exotic plants she grew in the greenhouse of her underground laboratory.
On the night of the birth, a raging storm with hail and tornadoes roared through the small town inhabited by the crazed scientist. As Frances Electra von Fitzgerald awaited delivery, lightening struck the table sending an electric current through the mother and child. The young babe was expelled from the mother's body in to the arms of the midwife. Unfortunately, the unbearable magnitude of the electrical current was too much for the mother to survive and she died shortly after when a giant meteor fell to earth and destroyed the laboratory and all who inhabited it except for the young babe. Percy Sheldon Victor von Fitzgerald was soon adopted by wolves and spent his life roaming the forests and hills along the banks of the St. Lawrence River.
At age 13, a lumberjack named Jean-Philippe LeRoi
discovered Victor. The man felt pity for the young lad and took him in as his son. He taught Victor to hunt beaver, chop wood and ride motorcycles. Being
a fast learner, Victor became skilled with an axe and won many local and regional lumberjacking events. While Jean-Philippe focused on developing the boy's physical prowess, his wife, Vivian, taught Victor to read and write.
This sparked a deep love in the boy's mind for the theatre and playwrights like Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett. Instead of wrestling with the other boys, Victor could be found producing plays with the neighborhood girls, always landing the male counter part to the young female love interest.
The luck with the ingénues in town became a source of jealousy with the other boys and succumbing to animosity, they would often gang up on Victor in the dime store parking lot. At age 17, Victor left the St. Lawrence River and went to New York and worked as a carpenter and stage hand in a small off -Off Broadway theatre house. There, Victor was discovered by Las Vegas mob boss, casino tycoon, and little known member of the Rat Pack, Carmen Ottavio and moved to Las Vegas as Ottavio's personal bell hop and comic relief. An assassination attempt on Carmen Ottavio's life left the man crippled and his empire overturned. He and Victor and the remaining loyal members of the organization fled to the bayous of New Orleans where Ottavio died 3 months later, on Victor's 21st birthday. Victor landed a job with the railroad as a performer in the dining car of their passenger lines. The job yielded lots of travel and a fair amount of money to save. During a layover in Memphis, TN, Victor attended the circus and fell in love with a sideshow contortionist named, Zelda. He decided to leave the railway and travel with Zelda and her brother and silent comedian, Ferris Hilton.
A year later, Zelda had an affair with the lion tamer and left Victor to roam the streets of Atlanta. Ferris, tired of traveling with the circus, decided to stay with Victor in Atlanta. Ferris and Victor met two local performers, Barbalicious and Sadie Hawkins, who grew enamored with Victor's girlish masculinity and aspirations to be the Break Away King of the Universe and Ferris's strong silence and Clark Gable good looks. They invited Victor to change his name and the duo become the newest members of Blast Off Burlesque.
Thus Dickie van Dyke was born.