Come on in to Captain Kendrick’s Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve and meet:
Amanda, the Earth girl, devoted to butterflies, magic, mushrooms and motorcycles – sweetness incarnate and owner extraordinaire of a flea show…
Traveler John Paul Ziller, clad in feathers and hides, fantastic drummer, eccentric dreamer, artist, musician, unrivalled lover and owner of Mon Cul, the incredible baboon…
Plucky Purcell, part-time monk, full-time nutcase, who follows the magic flute of life into distant paths of religion and eroticism…
Marx Marvelous, a former scientist, think-tank dropout and skeptical towards mysticism…
Baby Thor, child of a storm…
Tom Robbins is an American writer born on July 22, 1936, in Blowing Rock, North Carolina.
His novels are known for their intricate, often fantastical storytelling, with a strong satirical undercurrent and a dense layering of unusual, quirky, and carefully researched details.
Tom Robbins’s novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was adapted into a film in 1993 directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Uma Thurman.
In 1954, Robbins enrolled at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, but left due to disciplinary issues. He later moved to New York City intending to become a poet, but eventually enlisted in the Air Force under the threat of conscription and served for three years in Korea.
While stationed there, he studied meteorology and became involved in extensive black-market trade of goods such as soap and toothpaste. He later joked that he “helped Mao get his toothpaste.”
After returning to civilian life in Richmond, Virginia, in 1960, he attended the Richmond Professional Institute (later Virginia Commonwealth University), where he served as editor of the student newspaper and worked at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
He later pursued graduate studies in Eastern philosophy at the University of Washington in Seattle, working for both The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Since 1970 he has lived in La Conner, Washington, and received the Golden Umbrella Award at Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival in 1997.
Let yourself go on a long, strange trip to another time and place, back when life was a carnival, back when all our days were golden and all our nights were fanned by the breeze of butterfly wings.
Have a hot dog, have some juice and prepare your karma – because when the body of Jesus Christ (himself!) shows up in a box, things are going to get outrageous…