He is the architect of his own living dream world in which love and romance beckon at every turn. Call this dream world tinyland and picture it as a mental amusement park floating around in Tiny Tim's mind; without this dream world, there is no Tiny Tim. Allow me to elaborate.

Having worked with Tiny since 1982, I have come to know and appreciate the workings of his mind to the degree that I can state with absolute confidence that I consider Tiny the Man to be a product of Tiny the Dream, not the other way around.

My lengthy experience with Mr. Tim allows me the authority to tell his story with depth and detail, while the details eventually come to a point of including my efforts to revive his career. Of course, the odds dictate that Tiny will languish in obscurity, forever remembered as the greatest has-been of them all.

This oddball persona is sometimes rightfully deserved. There is his deep and abiding love for and obedience to his Savior, Jesus Christ-if pressed, Tiny can expound with the best (and worst) of the televangelists. Two of his favorite topics of conversation are U.F.Os and Depends adult diapers. Tiny believes that the Earth will be invaded by space creatures in the early 2000s: "Flip a coin, it might be friendly." And since 1984 Tiny has said he "depends on Depends. While I don't have a problem, they keep me clean every day. I prefer their extra-absorbency brand, not regular."

Just to set the record straight his cleaning and makeup regime totals about two hours each day. "I clean my face four times before shaving, and twice afterwards," he informs.

Despite the eccentricities, I hope my efforts aren't in vain. He was born Herbert Khaury to parents of conflicting religions in New York City sometime around 1930. Official documentation of his birth has yet to surface. Quite early in the game, his parents were shocked; their young son displayed no interest in working or growing up. Instead, he seemed determined to fantasize his way through life. He dreamed of fame and fortune, but most of all he dreamed of love, perfect and pure, telling his handful of friends that he would never stop searching for his Eternal Princess, the one who would possess a perfect natural beauty and house a heavenly essence. As a teenager, he would usually search for her among the boroughs of New York, as if he were in a magic forest. Later, as a renowned troubadour, he would search across the very globe itself, finding near perfect loves as far away as Australia, and marrying an all-American girl on TV in New York, but none of these would be the Eternal Princess.

As urgently as Tiny sought talent, luck, and fame, urging himself to "never give up" the driving force in his journey has always been romance. To hear him speak of the perfect beauty of women and his 50 years of romantic pursuits is to realize that the romantic ballad of the early 20th century has always been his calling card, his elixir, his magic bouquet of flowers. Women born in the '70s can be swayed by his gift for recalling songs from the '20s, it turns out. I've seen it happen time and time again: a young girl will approach him at a shopping mall and introduce herself, and he, in front of whoever is passing by, will sing a song featuring the girl's name in the title or chorus as if she is the only woman on the planet. The girl, usually awestruck, will never again be as easily impressed by, "Hey, I've got Nine Inch Nails tickets-what's your name?" These songs, old and forgotten by the general populace, can paint an alluring, even intoxicating, picture of a perfect and waiting love, if delivered with confidence and mastery by the right troubadour.

Herbert grew up in awe of the romantic crooners of the late- 19th and early-20th centuries. Men like Bing Crosby and Rudy Valee were his heroes. In their primitive 78-format recordings, full of dust and scratches, he could find the words which sang of his dream world. Maybe if he heard, learned, and sang enough songs, he could somehow sing his way to his Eternal Princess.

In his early adulthood he tried and failed, never in vain, to find success as a singer. Entering one contest after another, Tiny sang for years without ever winning. He grew his hair long and began wearing facial makeup-white, to represent purity. Finally, in a moment of prayer to Jesus Christ, Tiny received a divine inspiration; he felt the call to try a falsetto approach on certain numbers. Almost immediately, he won a talent contest for the first time. There would be no turning back. But there would be a name change or two.

Tiny entertained Greenwich Village audiences in his pre-fame years. In 1952 he chose the name Vern Castle. From 1954 to 1960, he was Larry Love. He then switched to Darry Dover through 1963, after appearing at a club called The Third Side with legendary folk singer Phil Ochs. At the suggestion of George King, his manager at the time, the alias Tiny Tim was used occasionally beginning in 1960, and was chosen as front-runner around 1964.

In the '50s and early '60s, the only other white males on earth wearing makeup and long hair were the Three Stooges. Tiny whiled away his pre-fame years by singing, and romancing girls as he met them (with trophies being awarded to the best "classic" each year), and believing that each step was inching him closer to Hollywood.

What is remarkable is that someone as unappealing to the general public as he would carry on so determinedly. He wanted the big-bang show-business career, a room-service lifestyle with all the trimmings, and, most important, pure love with the Eternal Princess. As the world laughed louder, Tiny dreamed harder.

He didn't just accidentally stroll onto center stage in the late '60s; he dreamed of a miraculously better life than the one he was handed, and spent every waking hour endlessly exploring the vast maze of his path. A million dead ends did not deter him; he eliminated every possible disappointment one at a time, until the last remaining possibility was a fabulous and glorious success.

How many younger, more talented artists of today's jaded mall-ternative scene would survive two decades of utter rejection before unexpectedly achieving an elusive victory? There is a fairly obvious life lesson here, but I digress.

In 1966, after winning several small-time talent contests in seedy bars, Tiny was given a regular slot at Steve Paul's Scene, a legendary club in New York haunted by the likes of Pete Townshend, Mick Jagger, and the Velvet Underground. As more and more rock stars began to discover Tiny Tim, word spread, and Tiny became a cult figure, actually enjoying a small degree of popularity and notoriety. Eventually, Mo Ostin of Warner Bros. Records was tipped off and attended a show. Soon after, Tiny was signed to Reprise, home of Frank Sinatra. Recording sessions began in Los Angeles, TV appearances were booked. Reality, already on wobbly legs from the jarring effects of the love and war movements of a deformed decade, was about to receive a severely blackened Third Eye, courtesy of Mr. Tim's well-swung ukulele. It would be a blow from which neither party could ever hope to fully recover.

When Tiny finally beat the odds, he beat them completely senseless. It was as if the world cracked open and offered itself up as a piece of rich, fattening dessert. Suddenly, after years of indifference, Tiny was experiencing success at its biggest and wildest. Reprise Records released the God Bless Tiny Tim album and its single, "Tip-Toe Thru The Tulips," became a worldwide smash. Tiny was suddenly making regular appearances on The Tonight Show and Laugb In. A public that had finally learned to accept the Beatles as somewhat normal by the end of the strangest decade of the 20th century suddenly had someone (or something) even stranger to deal with. In retrospect, Tiny seems the absolute zenith of '60s weirdness, the ultimate shocker in a world gone mad. It's easy to assume, if you weren't there at the time, that Tiny got famous because he seemed eccentric, had a hit single, got married on TV, and went away when the curtain fell. It was much more intense and amazing than that. Tiny was nothing less than a planetary phenomenon. His every move and utterance were reported in wire stories. Hundreds of one-panel magazine cartoons featured his likeness, as if he were the living universal symbol for Oddball Peacenik On Wrong Planet. The counterculture embraced him, in spite of his fuddy-duddy, family-values approach in interviews. By appearance he was an aging pro-America hippie trying to bring back the '20s in an era when the Past was an endangered species. He played the Fillmore East and appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. Just as it seemed he could go no further on the fame scale, he announced on The Tonight Show that he was engaged to marry a young lady he had met at a book signing, a certain Miss Vicki. Johnny Carson, seizing the moment, asked Tiny if he would have the wedding on The Tonight Show. Tiny accepted, and on December 17, 1969, 45 million viewers succumbed to the event. For one evening only, crime in New York was almost nonexistent. Now Miss Vicki was a household name as well. Did we really cram this wedding, the moon landing, and the Woodstock festival into the same year? Before there was a Michael Jackson, a Boy George, or an Alice Cooper, there was Tiny Tim. And for two years, 1968 and 1969, he was arguably the most talked about person on the planet. Almost as soon as the '70s caught their first breath, Tiny Tim's illustrious crown of luxurious fate unexpectedly slipped from his head, rolled swiftly down the sidewalk, and made a slight clinking sound as it disappeared forever in to the gutter. There was no scandal, no apparent reason for his sudden downfall. It was as if everyone's curiosity became satiated at once. The fame police quickly cleared the career wreckage and the crowd thinned as normal traffic patterns resumed. It was that simple, that quick. Tiny Tim simply ceased to matter to anyone but the landlord and the light company. Reprise informed him that there would be no fourth album, the phone stopped ringing, and Tiny Tim began 1971 as a has-been. It was as if an alarm clock sounded and instantly erased his perfect dream.

The Parker Brothers' Tiny Tim board game said it all. Intended as the latest piece of hot-selling Timorabilia, it sat collecting dust on department-store shelves everywhere. The wave of Tinymania had now officially crashed on reality's rocky beach. About this time, Miss Vicki suffered a miscarriage. The unborn child, whose sex at the time was undetermined, was buried in a Houston children's cemetery beneath a tombstone inscribed "IT. Born to Herbert and Vicki Khaury."

While Tiny still made appearances on TV, he was increasingly relegated to the status of a curious oddity, a leftover circus clown from a previous decade's bad dream. A National Enquirer clipping from the mid-'70s depicts Tiny being evicted from his Hollywood apartment, Miss Vicki and their daughter, Tulip, nowhere in sight. He moved back into his parents' New York apartment, back into the bedroom that had spawned his dreams of fame. It was seemingly all over for Mr. Tim, but fate had forgotten one thing; Mr. Tim is not a quitter.

The '70s, while not exactly kind to Mr. Tim, yielded some interesting fruit. Tiny released a handful of singles on his own VicTim label. When VicTim failed as a business venture, he crowned his next label Toilet Records "because that's where my career went." He became mentor to a hopeless mess of a songwriter from New Orleans named Isador Ferrel, whose greatest dream was to make enough money in show business to afford a sex-change operation. Next to Isador, Tiny still seemed hugely famous. Scads of small-time producers approached Tiny and released dozens of forgotten 45s in pressings of 500. Miss Vicki found work as a go-go dancer and posed nude in Oui magazine. A 1978 performance of "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" on The Tonigbt Showwas apparently so pitiful that Carson finally rolled up the well-worn red carpet forever. Like Elvis, in the '70s, Tiny gained considerable weight. Unlike Elvis, Tiny survived to see the '80s.

On September 12, 1982, I saw my first Tiny Tim performance. At a trendy Dallas nightclub named Confetti, I witnessed Tiny's entrance to both applause and catcalls. It seemed that much of the crowd was there just to remind Tiny that he was no longer wanted. Tiny persevered, belting out a 40-minute medley of every song ever written. Between sets I snuck backstage and asked Tiny for an interview. His wallet was a bulging ecosystem of scribbled notes and tattered business cards competing for space with a plastic crucifix. He handed me a hotel's card and said, "Meet me in the lobby at 3 a.m." At precisely that hour he entered the lobby and escorted me to his room. For two hours I underwent a rather intriguing session of psychic brain surgery. Here was a genuine '60s icon giving me the time of day in the middle of the night and singing my song requests into my tape recorder. He tends to treat his interviewers as if they are the celebrity. I most vividly recall the magnificent sight of his purple hair and cartoon-strip tuxedo clashing with the floral-print curtain behind him.

As our surreal visit receded, he handed me an LP. "Here's my new album, recorded in Australia," he said. Chameleon was the title. A diverse collection of songs ranging from "Stayin' Alive" to the "Mickey Mouse Club March." The cover was a stark black-and-white closeup of Tiny's face drenched in thick white pancake makeup. He is grinning deliriously.

"It was produced by a fellow named Martin Sharp, a very famous artist in Sydney, Australia, who designs my clothes and puts out my records," Tim said. The copy of Chameleon that he handed me that night is still the only copy that I have ever seen. Only about 20 copies are believed to have been shipped to the States. As it turns out, Mr. Sharp had previously designed covers for Creem and illustrated England's infamous OZ magazine.

I kept in touch with Mr. Tim. In 1984, he headlined, with Joe Ely and T-Bone Burnett, my ill-fated Edstock music festival, a tribute to the famous talking horse. The show, a somewhat lavish if naive extravaganza, lost $25,000, and cast me into a debt from which I have not been pulled. That same day, I released a 45 recording of Tiny singing the "Mr. Ed" theme. Tiny had just married his second wife, Miss Jan, after almost marrying Miss Dixie in Australia in 1983.

In 1988, I produced an event called Ed A Go Go. Ed A Go Go followed by mere hours the first recording session between Tiny Tim and the Texas-based polka band Brave Combo. The two entities conspired on remakes of "Stardust" and "Stairway To Heaven." We planned to release the material that summer.

Before and after the show that night, I took numerous friends backstage to meet Tiny. Among them was an attractive friend, Miss Stephanie, who asked Tiny to sign her ukulele. Tiny looked up and gulped. Infinite panic set in, and he signed the ukulele.

The club disappeared. Everyone on earth disappeared but her. Before him was the most beautiful and elusive feminine creature of all, his beloved and mythical Eternal Princess. The same girl he had searched for as a youth throughout New York was now standing before him in a nightclub in Dallas, Texas.

Fate usually works a little differently than we would like. Fate finally brought Tiny face to face with the Eternal Princess, The same girl he had searched for but not one who was looking for a long and happy life with Tiny Tim. Miss Stephanie, as it turns out, did not fall madly in love with Tiny. A romantic involvement never happened, but the two did keep in touch, and in 1990 a second recording session took place. Stephanie explained the Eternal Princess thing to her boyfriend as best she could, and paid Tiny a visit.

Still married to Miss Jan, in spite of their frequent arguments, Tiny furiously dreamed of a perfect life with Miss Stephanie. How could fate be so cruel as to deliver the Princess without a heart to love him, at a time when he was married? In spite of such unanswerable questions, the '90 sessions with Brave Combo went very well. I'll never forget overhearing Tiny tell band leader Carl Finch, "Mr. Finch, I believe the Lord is a moody guy."

It would seem that Mr. Tim is very familiar with the mood color chart himself. Shortly after his return to New York, I was excommunicated without explanation. Three and a half years later, my phone rang.

I listened in disbelief as Mr. Tim attempted to explain his disruptive and unusual silence, which had ground the recording and our friendship to an inexplicable halt in 1990. Since Tiny could not have his Princess, I could not have my Tiny Tim album. I did, after all, introduce the two. It seems that I was, in his words, "a sacrificial lamb" of unfortunate circumstance, now paying a price for my accidental forcing of a strange, confounding destiny.

Fortunately, Tiny accepted my invitation to talk face to face and in August he flew to Dallas and stayed in Denton, the last town in which he had seen Miss Stephanie. I arranged a series of meetings between her, Tiny, and myself in a string of events worthy of Technicolor film processing, the entire situation was miraculously restored to a position of workability. While now is not the time or place for that particular recollection, I will say that I think I understand the construction of the great pyramids of Egypt a little better now; there's nothing like inching that last heavy stone perfectly into place. By the end of the visit, Tiny was back in the studio with Brave Combo, finishing songs begun in '88 and '90, and starting new ones. Miss Stephanie even added vocals to the old Steve and Eydie hit "I Want To Stay Here," creating a delightful duet with her unlikely Eternal Prince.

It took two more years to complete the Tiny Tim project. In that time, I produced a separate CD documenting Tiny's original compositions, Songs Of An Impotent Troubadour, released in early '95 on English label, Durtro. A flurry of Tim projects have surfaced in '95 and '96, and the Girl album, which took exactly seven years and ten months to complete and release. In an era of unprecedented reunions (Page and Plant, the Beatles, and the Sex Pistols), is it finally time for Tiny Tim to reclaim his unlikely spot in the limelight? Even if he is never again to stalk the planet as he once did, Girl indicates that with the right projects and a little dash of that famous luck, his legacy will continue to expand in exciting directions, regardless of any reaction or reward the world has to offer or deny.

I ask you: if Tiny Tim can find his Eternal Princess, and come to terms with her unattainability after a lifetime of searching, if Tiny Tim can withstand 25 years of desolate obscurity after two years of the zenith glare of white-hot success, if Girl found life through worldwide release against all odds, might I be allowed to believe, just a little, that this is an age of strange, pleasant miracles?
         Let us pray.