I have tried both ways, setting up the notification and using Plain text, setting the values that I want to report on the notification as displayed above in my initial question under the Message body section AND NOT under Message HTML section.  

I also created a template and leveraged the section of the template that says Message Body AND NOT Message HTML, then on the notification I pointed to utilize the template.

Both result in an email that is viewable in our logs as blank message AND we have our DEV environment pass the email notification through Exchange into a dedicated mailbox we use for testing.  The message body there also comes up blank.

So any other ideas?