When good people do bad things for good reasons

and by good people I mean all people. We're all good, and when we do bad things for good reasons, we're not bad, just misguided, by family, by friends, and by eternal rivers of crap from the media.

Someone stole my son's laptop. Yeah, it was at least half his fault for leaving it outside on the back patio, but the other half of blame must certainly be bestowed upon the one who lifted it, whom I am tempted to call a scumbag just because it feels good.

A plan had to be worked out to get it back, and for that you need a little back story.

For the first ten years of his life, my son Max (now 15) was raised far from civilization, beyond the reach of even city buses. He absolutely had to take the school bus home or he'd be stuck in town, so he never got to hang out after school and make friends. This hermit-like existence was fine for me, I just wanted peace and quiet to write, but it was bad for him, especially if you believe that half what they teach in school is YOU MUST OBEY, so social educational is half the reason for attendance. Max missed out on the social.

Now that we've moved to an actual city, Seattle, not just a city but a GREAT city, he's going out of his mind on the social end. He's never been able to simply invite friends home after school. Now he can't stop, there are lots of them, and since we moved into a pretty cool place, they keep coming back. Many of the regulars I've gotten to know, and I've ended up enjoying the social life too, making friends with teenagers, what's not to like.

Then Buster came back from a one year journey to Louisiana. Can't blame him. I myself must have left home at least two or three times till it took. He's 21, I've missed him, good to have him around, and he too has been marveling at the quantity and quality of the new friends Max has made.

In my new role as manager of a community center, I've had to lay down guidelines, no smoking in the house, everyone gone by 10 on schooldays, when I'm in the living room, I'm in charge of the TV, no eating from our refrigerator, that sort of thing, but it's become complicated by some friends who turn out to be homeless and want to crash on the patio. I've said no, not because I'm heartless, but because once that snowball gets rolling, it could turn into a landslide that buries us. There simply isn't enough room and neighbors have already complained.

Then Buster's laptop was gone. Yeah, one thief can ruin the whole thing. I consider shutting the whole thing down. I told Max "Someone wasn't just walking by and happened to come onto the patio in our backyard. Since everyone here has been invited, that means someone has invited a thief. You might not know who did it, but you know who invited them. Here's your assignment. We will either get the computer back or I will get an apology from whoever invited the thief, and I have no problem calling the cops."

The next day, a whole bunch of people from school showed up, some invited, some not, all hanging out in the backyard. I asked Max who they were. He said some of them he specifically DIDN'T invite. I said "Invite all the people you're sure about, your actual friends, into the house." He invited them in and I knew them all, good kids, glad to have them around. The rest were outside. I opened the door and told them "You guys have got to split, and don't come back unless you're invited," purposely not mentioning the computer, letting them figure it out by themselves.

It must be pointed out the computer is completely useless to anyone but Buster. There's nothing on it but music, retrievable, and his personal writing, irretrievable. It has no bottom, the CD drive is busted, and the fan doesn't work, so it can only be run while sitting on top of another full sized fan or it gets too hot and turns itself off in one minute. No pawnshop on earth would touch it and worthless to whomever took it, that's how theft goes, the stolen item worth more to the victim than the thief trading on their misery.

This morning, the laptop was there on the doorstep. I presume I will never know who took it, though Max might. I also presume this was some sort of game or power trip and not the work of an actual thief. Somebody convinced them to give it back. They did a bad thing, then a good thing. Maybe they had a good reason. Maybe they had a bad reason. Maybe they would have kept it if they could have sold it. I only know I must have sent out the right messages because this is the right ending.

Type away, Buster, type away.

Ode to the Bathroom at the YWCA

Oh bathroom at the YWCA, why do you treat me this way?

            Downtown Seattle

            Up the block from the McDonalds

        In all your splendor

You know I just want to use you in all your normality

            Your two toilets

            Your two urinals

        It makes me quiver just to think of them

I look forward to our liaisons with tender anticipation

            Why do you make me wait so long?

            Why do I have to give you my Washington State driver's license  before you let me tinkle?

        You've got room for four.

Surely there' s room for me at urinal #1

            While someone used toilet #3

            Why will you only let in one at time?

        Creating a constant line

Waiting for someone to come out

            Someone who may be doing something wrong in the bathroom

            We understand

        Junkies shouldn't use drugs in public restrooms

            We understand

            You used to be open and free

        Fulfilling your function

            A facility for four

            For a busy office

But now we've got to get a key attached to a piece of plastic

            To let ourselves in

            And while we are in you

        No one else may enter without the key they possess

In tribute to the minds behind this Bizarro World policy

            If you don't want people to do drugs in the bathroom

            What you DON'T do

        is let them lock the door

A policy

            meant to stop something

            it actually ends up encouraging

        Where've I heard that one before?

 

MD

 

Good social workers

Sarn Saechao is a prince. He' s my DHSH social worker and he has gone out of his way to help me out. When the times were tough, when I faced homelessness, he performed above and beyond the call of duty while adhering to the rules precisely, providing genuine social service and doing nothing less than his job. He's a social worker of the highest possible caliber.

Henry Gillon is fantastic. He was my first worker with WorkSource. He got a look at my résumé, realized it was a special case, and helped me work my way through a system that was completely foreign to me. Knowing what I was capable of, when he combed the job listings as part of his daily job, he would always let me know if there was something up my alley. He never talked down to me, was completely sympathetic, and did his job professionally and compassionately.

I tell you this in case you think I've got it in for social workers. I don't. Every social worker I've had contact with in Seattle has been helpful, courteous, and professional.

All but one, the hideous atrocity, Hazel "Mussolini" Borjal, the pathetic imitation of a social worker written about below.

Seattle's Most Incompetent Social Worker

Hazel Borjal

The bureaucracy. A social worker half my age on a power trip. The impossibility of explaining things to the unintelligent. That's what life has been like. Thanks for asking.

In order to get cash aid from the government these days, you've got to jump through hoops, I know that, but my current hoops are so asinine they boggle the mind.

My social worker, Hazel Borjal, a swarthy toad of a woman with a loathsome air of superiority, works for the community jobs program out of the downtown YWCA. Through this program, I have a superb community job refurbishing computers at InterConnection. But there's a glitch. She says she will throw me out of the program if I don't also attend classes. Education is part of the program. I must attend. The classes they offer are no more advanced than beginning typing. How to use a keyboard and mouse. How to conduct yourself at a job interview.

Beginning internet. She could get me out of this. She won't. The nicest thing I can say about Hazel Borjal is that she is not a douchebag since, after all, she does not make your girlfriend taste better after using her.

Here's how my "education" has gone so far.

My first class was with Aziz. It was about how to find work. He's smart and funny, a journalist and publisher with a day job. When he found out I was a publisher and journalist who knew more than he about what he was teaching, he threw the class open to question and answer with me and the class. It was actually fun. Everyone learned something but me.

My next class was beginning keyboard. The teacher couldn't help but notice I wasn't paying attention and was pissed off. [a deliberate split infinitive for you grammar geeks] I asked the teacher to please just give me the final exam and leave me alone. They showed me some sort of typing program they had on the computer. I immediately started typing at my standard 60WPM, clickety clickety clack, and people in the class who were struggling to get past phase one of learning f, g, h, and j, got up to stand behind me like they'd never seen anyone type that fast before. It was a curious experience to be entertaining people with my typing, not my writing, which I'd always considered to be pretty much the same thing.

The teacher asked me what I was doing there in a typing class I obviously didn't need. I told her my social worker said I had to attend. "Why?" they asked. "Because she's incompetent?" I said. I blurted out a little of my history. "You know more than me," the teacher said. "You could teach this class." They complained about the social worker wasting both their time and mine. I spent the rest of the class in the back reading a newspaper.

My next class was beginning internet. The teacher couldn't help but notice I wasn't paying attention and was pissed off. [IBID] I asked them to please just give me the final exam and leave me alone. There was no final exam. I opened up a browser on one of the class computers and showed her one of the dozens of websites I've designed. "These are pretty good," they said. "Why are you in this class? You obviously don't need it." I told her my social worker said I had to attend. "Why?" they asked. "Because she's a sadist?" I said. I answered a bunch of questions from the class, and from the teacher, who asked me to fix their computer. The teacher complained about the social worker wasting both their time and mine. I spent the rest of the class in the back reading the newspaper.

In order to attend these classes I have to take a bus from my home to downtown Seattle. Takes an hour. From there I have to take another bus to InterConnection where I refurbish computers for five hours in order to get paid by the program. If I go to InterConnection without going to the class first, I don't get paid. Then it's another two busses to get home.
"Just use the computers in the class to do your work," I hear you scream. Can't happen. The computers have filters that won't let through any blogs. You can only do online job search. I looked through the list and there wasn't a single one I had any experience in. I applied for every single one. What the fuck.

When I got home, I checked my email. One had written back, asking me some question about my experience, but I couldn't reply because I didn't know which job it was or what kind of experience they were looking for. I only knew my credit writing Animaniacs probably wouldn't help.

Of course Hazel, Miss Brain Glitch 2009, doesn't care as long as it looks like I'm looking for work, no matter how futile. I try to explain to her that I can only look for work from MY computer, where I've got all my email and archives. She doesn't care. She thinks I'm lying, that I just don't want to go to school, like all her other clientele of crack addicts and pregnant teenagers. She complains I'm asking for some sort of special treatment, but I think everyone should get special treatment. There's no cookie cutter solution to everyone's problems. Yeah, many people on Welfare need to get their GEDs and education is important, but my 40th high school reunion is coming up, I'm a professional with a serious 30 year career who's hit hard times like everyone else, and my problems can't be solved by teaching me to type.

There are other people at InterConnection who don't have to go to class, but the Glitch absolutely refused to explain why they're getting special treatment.

Got a book in the mail this week. It's a textbook from the University of Mississippi, Jonathan Demme Interviews, that includes my LA Weekly interview with him in 1984 for the film Stop Making Sense. The book didn't pay anything but I can put it on my résumé and honestly say from now on that I've written part of a college textbook. I showed her the book. She wouldn't even take it and look at it. The first words out of her mouth, I swear to God, upon being confronted with a client who writes college textbooks, she asked me if I'd considered another career, and repeated her claim that I needed to take a typing class.

Next month Microsoft is laying off 5,000 workers. I can only assume that upon being confronted with one of them, she'll insist they take computer classes. Next month, the local daily paper the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is going under and thousands of journalists like me are going to be out of work. I can only assume that upon being confronted with one of them, she'll insist they take courses in how to use a keyboard and mouse.

Those journalists, upon being confronted with such idiocy, would be pissed off. Chances are they would write about it. Chances are someone would print it. This could be a PR nightmare. Good idea.

So I'm thinking about vengeance. Vengeance is good. I'm a journalist. I'm willing to be a nightmare.

I once met the grandson of Daryl Zanuck, a famous Hollywood mogul. Andre Hakim Zanuck ripped me off to the tune of at least $25,000. In order to prevent anyone else from being taken in by him again, I posted his picture to my website with a warning, saying don't get involved with this guy, he's a liar and the biggest asshole on earth.

Something mysterious happened. It went viral thanks to DIGG and STUMBLEUPON, which had interesting results. To this day, if you type "biggest asshole on earth" into Google and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky," Andre's picture comes up.

Cool.

Now I know how to do it.

So I'm thinking something like "world's most incompetent social worker." Oh sure, there are probably social workers more incompetent but who gives a shit, this is vengeance we're talking about and I feel devious. For the rest of eternity, if she loses her job, applies for a new one, and they Google her name, up will pop my story of what an incredible idiot she is. I can make it happen. I can fuck her up like she's fucked me up. You can do it too, to anyone you hate, especially if it's someone with a weird name. I've looked up Hazel's name and the only thing that comes up is a six-year-old rape victim in the Philippines who probably won't be Googling themselves any time soon.

Okay, she's an incredibly minor league asshole, bossing around street derelicts and the homeless without a care in the world for their actual needs, just pushing paper, a brainless automaton, not even worth writing about if she weren't taking out her idiocy on me. And she's not even as incompetent as Chief Justice Roberts, that MAJOR league asshole who blew Obama's oath. Maybe she's only the most incompetent social worker in Seattle, but I'm too lazy to go up and change the subject.

My goal? Anyone who goes to Google, looks up "fucktard," clicks on "I'm feeling lucky," Hazel Borjal comes up.

Or I can tidy up this splendid piece of spicy vindictiveness, remove all the slander and fucks and such, submit it to her superiors and request an administrative hearing. The only other person in the program who doesn't have to go to class, the one Hazel refuses to talk to me about, is a black woman who is just as puzzled as I am at Hazel's irrational behavior. I can claim racial and sexual prejudice since race and sex seem to be the only differences between our two cases, other than the fact she hasn't written any college textbooks.

Yeah, it's a fucking rant, I said I could type 60WPM but no, you wouldn't believe me. It's the only thing I can do about the situation. Thank God I'm a writer or I'd kill somebody.

Chapter one: Proving I'm Me

I'm gonna just write this and worry about putting it in the right order later. I know that some parts go before other parts, like you've got to know my wallet was stolen the instant I moved from Palm Desert to Seattle, and this rudely constructed sentence is the only way I could work that fact in early, but I've got to get things down in the order they occur to me, not the order they happened, otherwise what have you got? Reality, and no one's looking for that. Reality is what happens to you. Fiction is what happens to others. So let's just say this is fiction, from your point of view, and leave it at that. You can believe or disbelieve anything I'm about to tell you, knowing full well I've previously written fact, fiction, and gonzo hybrid. That's what's cool about writing. You can start anywhere and show everyone how your mind works, never mind taking into account how their minds work and what a jerk you might look like for stubbornly sticking to ridiculously twisted and obscure points of view, no matter how subtle, just to show off how easy it is. Since I am, in fact, indulging myself in the pleasure of capturing thought as it happens, right in front of you, measuring the milliseconds in the treasure of typing, you are forgiven for thinking me self indulgent.

It is also, I've found, the most effective way of proving I'm me, which has become an issue lately due to the aforementioned lack of papers that are still the inhabitants of the wallet that's no longer in my possession. Someone other than me, a me with ID, could be trying to pass themselves off as me right now, which explains why nobody totally believes that I am who I say I am. I might be someone else. Who could I be? That's the problem.

The only way I can REALLY prove I'm me is to do what I'm doing. Who the fuck else writes like this? Not me.

As proof that I'm the Michael Dare I say I am, I can do nothing but construct sentences only Michael Dare would write, like this one, too many commas, going on long past the point of common sense and into the Infinityland Wax Museum and Old Age Home for Thoughts You'd Thought Long Extinguished. Yeah, I know, it's obnoxious, when am I going to shut the fuck up and get on with it, and the only excuse I've got for linguistic leaps of the spastic kind is the task set before me, to prove who I am, fact or fiction, who the hell is writing it, why are you reading it, what do I mean by WHAT, what do I mean by DO, what do I mean by I, and what do I mean by MEAN, it's up to you, believe me.

The World Premiere of the Stage Version of Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

I Was There and You Weren't #3

The World Premiere of the Stage Version of Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
By Michael Dare

The new Seattle production of Even Cowgirls Gets the Blues hits the same cosmic gong of enlightenment the book did, making you laugh and think in equal proportions. It's out of the ballpark, never less than outrageously entertaining while remaining extremely faithful to the anarchic spirit of the original book. This was especially true of the world premiere at the Seattle Center, right there under the Space Needle, next to the 60's amusement park that stands as an everlasting tribute to amusement technology gone by. The attendance of Tom Robbins, inserted into the play - very much as he inserted himself into his novel - brought the whole thing into startling 4D perspective.

The Book-It Repertory Theatre Company accepted an incredibly specific and arduous task when they decided to translate the counterculture lunacy of Robbins' 1976 novel to the stage. He once described his novels as pomegranates, you don't wolf them down like an apple, you savor each morsel, each sentence, the kernels are too strong to take all at once. A Robbins novel deliberately slows you down as he takes unimaginable tangents from whatever you thought the plot was. As soon as the first amoeba dripped down the reader's leg, it either pissed them off or astonished them. Who knew there were so many rules of writing yet to be broken. Robbins took you places no novel had gone before, places impossible for any other medium to follow.

Surely you remember Chapter 100 of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, in which the author simply offers an imaginary toast between you and he, two glasses of champagne, in simple celebration of the fact that together, you've made it all the way to the 100th chapter of this absurd book, in which the fact that it is a novel is merely an excuse to celebrate the written word in all its manifestations, as though Chapter 100 had been waiting in the wings for every novelist to discover but none had the audacity to come right out and allow it to happen, for the novel itself to be self-aware and proud as hell of having made it all the way to triple digits in the chapter department.

Tom Robbins makes you aware of the act of reading while you're reading in order to promote the entire idea of self awareness, to give higher and higher perspectives upon relative absurdities of plot. He never takes anything more seriously than his desire to enlighten, like Penn and Teller, two other magicians who deliberately undermine their own magic tricks just to increase your perspective on reality. If you're reading a Tom Robbins book and someone interrupts asking what the book is about, your answer would be completely different chapter to chapter, page to page, paragraph to paragraph, even sentence to sentence. Cowgirls was completely original and hilarious, always playing tricks on you, never letting you be satisfied by simply sitting back and watching the plot go by, as if the plot itself were an afterthought, something to be gotten back to after tripping out about the nature of the moon.

It took a while for Kurt Vonnegut Jr. to reach the same stylistic conclusions Tom Robbins embraced from the get-go. Vonnegut's early novels were straight-forward sci-fi, and it wasn't until Slaughterhouse Five and the incredible Breakfast of Champions (another cinematic tragedy worthy of the Book-It treatment) that he broke down the fourth wall with the same fervor Germans used to pull down the one in Berlin. Other than Stephen King inserting himself into The Dark Tower, it's a technique few novelists have dared to gamble with, and for good reason. Readers of novels don't really want to be reminded they're reading a book, any more than watchers of movies want to be reminded they're watching a movie. They want to get so involved they forget where they are.

That can't happen with a play. You can't be so involved in a theatrical production you forget you're sitting in a theater watching actors and sets and costumes that are live right in front of you, so this production takes that foregone conclusion and runs with it, constantly talking directly to the audience, letting us know they know we're here, acknowledging right up front that the whole production is for us. The novel does the same thing with words, so Cowgirls turns out to be the perfect book to exploit this theatrical technique to its fullest.

Even so, there are parts of the book that can't possibly be translated into any other medium, amazing literary tricks that can only be appreciated through the written word.

There's a character in the book named the Countess, and you, the reader, presume the Countess to be a woman until suddenly and mysteriously, halfway through the book, the author drops the word "he" in reference to the Countess and the reader goes "huh?" and rereads the entire book again up to that point, realizing a magic trick has just been pulled, that the author cleverly never used the pronouns "he" or "she" in reference to the Countess, that the author was counting on you to assume it was a woman, to force you to face your own sexual prejudices by springing upon you the sad fact that the whole movie you had going on in your head concerning the Countess and their relationship with Sissy Hankshaw was dependent upon the author using the word "their" instead of "his" in endless sentences such as this.

There's really no way to put that in a play or movie. As soon as the character of the Countess is introduced, you're pretty much going to know he's a "he," but in the book that wasn't so.
It's a subject I know way too much about, so as you can guess, I was prepared to hate this version of Cowgirls even more than I detested the film version by Gus Van Sant. Somewhere in the effort to translate Cowgirls to the silver screen, someone decided this heterosexual paean to female sexuality needed a gay director, mysteriously deciding upon the brilliant but utterly humorless Gus Van Sant. You can take all the laughs in every Van Sant Film, fit them in a flea's navel, and still have room for a hard cover copy of Infinite Jest. Van Sant systematically stripped the book of everything whimsical in a misguided attempt to give the whole thing an impossible sense of realism, forgetting there isn't one realistic moment in any of Robbins' magical books.

But this production pulls the rabbit out of the hat, finding just the right quirks of theatricality to match the quirks of the book. If you don't like this production of Cowgirls, chances are it's because you don't like the book in the first place, it's that faithful a reproduction.
As far as I'm concerned, as soon as Cowgirls is an over the top comedy, a flat out farce, everything fits in place. This production, superbly adapted by Jennifer Sue Johnson and directed by Russ Banham, combines a variety of theatrical techniques, including vaudeville, commedia dell'arte, and most importantly, Paul Sill's Story Theater, which allows them to simply read the book to the audience while acting it out.

It's so simple, it's become commonplace, you've seen it a million times, the theatrical device whereby each character narrates their own story and the stories of others on stage, while simultaneously becoming the people they're talking about, going in and out of character at the drop of a hat, much like a Greek Chorus in which each chorus member gets to play the lead once in a while. No one had done it before Paul Sill's Story Theater, which told tales from the Brothers Grimm. It was simply the most economical means of storytelling the stage had ever seen, appearing first at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1971, moving from there to Broadway, where it was just as big a theatrical revelation as Tom's books were literary revelations years later. Ovid's Metamorphosis followed, proving the technique would work with just about anything, even in 1980 in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby where they did the whole book, every character, every chapter, every sub-plot, every nuance, over six hours, seen on two different nights, in Story Theater fashion, just reading the book to you while acting it out.

Following in this classic tradition, this production of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues sets the record straight, letting the story go its goofy and ridiculous way with a style in between commedia dell'arte and cosmic circus, letting us know the universe is a funny place where serious things happen, or a serious place where funny things happen, a quirky point of view with every nuance perfected. Story theater lets them incorporate everything from standard Greek chorus to vaudeville, whatever the story calls for, a comedy with plenty of time to get seriously philosophical in between the yocks. This is just the right way to do Tom Robbins for the stage, and everyone involved should be proud as hell.

What's it about? The nutshell? When you try to boil it all down, you're left with FBI agents, whooping cranes, big thumbs, and the first amoeba, not to mention the nature of time and space and everything in between, but mainly Sissy Hankshaw. She's the spokes-model for a feminine hygiene deodorant spray with phallic thumbs who gets involved with a bunch of cowgirls fighting for the rights of whooping cranes, who teach her that the scent of a woman is nothing to be embarrassed about, indeed, it's one of their finest points, which they have no problem sharing with the world, leading to an incredibly funny nude scene in which all the cowgirls chase off the Countess in horror at the sight of their unscented bushiness.

Two narrators play guitar and violin, the perfect accompaniment, Barbara Lamb and Jo Miller, like Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye in Cat Ballou, telling the story through song, underscoring all the ridiculous events that ensue.

Kate Czajkowski plays Sissy goofy and innocent, not an obvious choice, but the right one, keeping the laughs coming as her big thumbs set her life on the road. The set is an old truckstop, the type hitchhikers get stuck at, with hubcaps and license plates covering the walls, and an ice machine that doubles as a cave for The Chink, played to lunatic perfection by Wesley Rice as a variation on Dr. Pangloss from Candide, a looney philosopher horndog who can't keep his hands off the cowgirls, and who can blame him.

Ellen Barkin would make quite a cowgirl, and so does Hilary Pickles as Bonanza Jellybean, a wacked-out R. Crumb caricature of a character, the cutest button of a cowgirl at the Rubber Rose ranch who plants a smack on Sissy's mouth that changes her life.

The rest of the cast is just right, Brian Thompson a hilarious Countess, and every cowgirl a potential Lucille Ball, and that might seem a strange way to go with it but no, comediennes is precisely what this story needed. They're not really "lesbians," a word that doesn't show up till halfway through, and not in a nice way. Sissy ain't no lesbian, she just can't turn down sex from both the Chink and Bonanza Jellybean, regardless of their stereotypes, they both get her off.
The premiere provided the actual presence of Tom Robbins, who hadn't read the book himself in 33 years, which made it all the more entertaining for him, constantly reminding him of lines he'd forgotten he'd written. Tom appears as a character in the book Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, so seeing him sitting down the row from you when one of the characters says "Hey, who wrote this book?", a moment in which he appeared in the play as himself, very much as he appeared in the book as himself, was a genius moment just for that audience, right then, gone forever, unrepeatable, and I wish you could have been there, but don't let that stop you from seeing it without that moment. If you can see it, see it. If you can't see it, read it.

This production doesn't make the big mistake of the film, turning Robbins' hilarious fantasy lesbians on the range into serious politically correct spokesdykes for the righteous homosexual cause. These cowgirls are all perfectly ludicrous, individual characters that add up to a comic book whole, and a Zapp Comic at that. The play has a lusty and zestful fixation on the female crotch, which could be one reason the book is such a classic, the clearly visceral response the author has towards the commercial exploitation of feminine hygiene, which was just getting started at the end of the '70s, when the airwaves were mysteriously full of ads for different spray products for women, as ubiquitous and strange as the current spate of ads for boner pills for men. Cowgirls is as far away from the guilt ridden gay cowboy angst of Brokeback Mountain as humanly possible, putting the gay back in the word gay, leaving out none of the feminist rhetoric, but coming from these ridiculous characters, right out of a Coen brothers or Tim Burton film, in which TONE is everything.

The Book-It Repertory Theatre is a non-profit organization dedicated to "transforming great literature into great theatre through simple and sensitive production and inspiring its audiences to read." It's been going on for a miraculous 19 years I'm sorry I missed. If they were all as good as this, they're one of the most important theatrical companies in the country, translating hundreds of pieces of untranslatable material through the sieve of the perfect theatrical device for translating just about anything. They've got it down, completely perfected, I can't imagine a book I wouldn't want to see their production of.

Of course I could be wrong. This is the only production I've ever seen from the Book-It Repertory Company. Maybe they do EVERYTHING like this, appropriate or not, and I just happened to catch the one where it fit, in which case their upcoming Moby Dick is going to be very interesting.

"A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised."
- Tom Robbins: Jitterbug Perfume -


Tom Robbins' EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES
Playing September 16-October 12, 2008 at the Center House Theatre

Book-It Repertory Theatre

206-216-0877, ext. 100

www.book-it.org