Yes, yes, you think you've come up with something clever and new. You'll invent a
time machine and travel back to July 29, 1947, when
Marilyn Monroe had not long since turned twenty-one, still only a year removed from having been "Mrs. Norma Jeane Dougherty" (nee Baker), a
divorcee struggling for bit parts and willing to pose
nude for $50. When "
Jackie K-O" was still Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, who'd turned eighteen only yesterday and had never set eyes on that
Kennedy boy. You'll use your
wit and your
wiles and your Twenty-First Century
mind control technology to collect the two of them into your rented cottage in
Nantucket (a location selected primarily for its
limerick potential) and
seduce them into a
bed built for three, filming the entire thing on the
camera in your
cell phone for future reference. Naturally, they won't know what you're up to. Cell phones hadn't been invented then, indeed would be inconceivable to denizens of this
era.
Spare yourself the
congratulations for your originality. Do you really think that you of all people are so special as to be the
one person to come up with the idea of time travelling to July 29, 1947 to have a threesome with Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy? Do you really think that
Isaac Asimov and
Robert Heinlein,
Roger Zelazny and
Douglas Adams and
Piers Anthony, that none of these folks ever conceived of doing precisely that? Do you imagine, in your arrogant assumptions, that
Spider Robinson has not in fact
already done exactly that? More likely he's got pictures of the event framed and mounted in his
study.
So before you go patting yourself on the back for coming up with this ingenious plan, study your
history, and perhaps you'll be surprised to discover that this temporally improbable saucy peccadillo you've dreamed up is hardly a new invention, but is instead an idea every bit as old as the notions of
time travel, mind control devices, and
threesomes.