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Four Reasons “Three Billboards” Falls Flat

07 Wednesday Feb 2018

Posted by ghosteye3 in entertainment, media, movie reviews

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academy awards, frances mcdormand, Martin McDonagh, missouri, three billboards outside ebbing, woody harrelson

With less than a month to go until the Academy Awards, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri appears to be the favorite to win “Best Picture” and several other categories.

That’s surprising, because it’s not that great a movie.

I watched Three Billboards on Saturday, filled with hope and anticipation from the glowing reviews I had read about the film. I don’t make it out to very many “adult” movies these days, so I’m selective in what I go see. Three Billboards, buoyed by all those Golden Globes and plaudits from film festivals, had been on my “to-watch” list for a while.

Sorry to say, I left the local multiplex disappointed and a little confused on Saturday night. What was it I had just witnessed? Was this story about a grieving mother’s battle with the local authorities a comedy or a drama? What was this movie trying to say, and why was it getting raves from vaunted quarters like The New Yorker and The Atlantic?

After taking some time to think it over, I believe Three Billboards doesn’t deserve the Oscar buzz or the 93% reviewer rating on RottenTomatoes.com. Here are four reasons why (warning—some spoilers ahead):

It is About Everything—and Nothing

Three Billboards touches on a lot of issues—child murder, race relations, cancer, domestic abuse, sexual predators, alcoholism, religion and, I guess, the decline of small town life. That’s an awful lot to cram into a two-hour movie. As a result, Three Billboards only glosses over most of these topics. A cop is accused of torturing an African-American suspect, but it’s only mentioned in passing. A priest is quickly shamed for the Catholic Church’s sex scandals, and never shows his face again. There are a couple of musings about human existence and the afterlife, but nothing deeper than that.

This everything-but-the-kitchen sink approach by screenwriter Martin McDonagh makes it hard to discern what the movie is about. If Three Billboards is supposed to be such an important film, as many have claimed, what message is the viewer supposed to walk away with, other than life is chaotic and often tragic?

The Hero is Completely Unlikable

It should be easy to empathize with Frances McDormand’s character, Mildred Hayes. She’s a hard-working single mom who’s suffered an unspeakable tragedy with the murder of her daughter. The problem is, Mildred is so angry, so confrontational and so crass, she inspires more fear than sympathy. She’s not just mean because of her child’s death, either—a flashback reveals that Mildred was just as thorny and abrasive before the murder happened.

Despite her take-no-prisoners approach, Mildred is also weak. She cowers during a scary encounter with a predator who may have been her daughter’s killer. She doesn’t even report the incident to the police. In fact, Mildred does nothing throughout the entire film to help solve the crime. Ebbing is a small town—wouldn’t Mildred have some theories about the killer’s identity? Rather than spend all her money on those three billboards, why not hire a private sleuth to investigate the case? Instead, Mildred takes the approach that will draw the most attention to Mildred. That makes her a colorful character, and provides a clever premise, but it doesn’t make Mildred the least bit relatable.

There is No Sense of Place

As one New York Times writer put it, Ebbing, Missouri is every bit as fictional as Narnia. It’s an Ozarks town with the buildings and landscape of western North Carolina (where the film was shot). The police force works in an old, storefront station house straight from The Andy Griffith Show. Police Chief Willoughby and his cohorts strut menacingly around downtown like Hitler’s stormtroopers, and everyone in Ebbing cusses like the sales team on Glengarry Glen Ross.

As someone who grew up in a city of less than 25,000, I see very little in Ebbing, Missouri that seems like an authentic American town. People in small towns have their problems and their prejudices, but don’t tend to wear them in on their sleeves like the denizens of Ebbing. Most small-town people are not dull-witted yokels, as many of the Ebbing folks are portrayed. Also, a lot of people in small towns attend church and go out of their way to be polite. They don’t swear nonstop like sailors, and they tend to think less of people who do.

The Characters are Often Out-of-Character

Woody Harrelson’s Chief Willoughby is a smart cop, a decent man and the best-drawn character in Three Billboards. For some reason, though, he has placed his faith in Officer Dixon, one of the most bumbling, corrupt lawmen to appear onscreen since The Dukes of Hazzard was canceled.

That’s one example of the inconsistencies almost all the key characters display. Officer Dixon, a relentless bully for 90 minutes, makes an about-face and becomes a hero in the film’s final half-hour. Mildred, so nasty in almost every other scene, presents an old tormentor with a bottle of champagne instead of hitting him over the head with it. Finally, and most absurdly, a local ad man who’s pistol-whipped within an inch of his life shares an orange juice in the hospital with the guy who beat him up.

When Hallmark moments like these pop up from the crude and deeply flawed people of Ebbing, it makes me wonder what kind of film Three Billboards is trying to be. Is it a darkly comic, free-wheeling romp, like some of the best works of Quintin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers? Or does the movie aspire to make an Important Statement about America?

The serious moments of the film, so jarring in their earnestness and sentimentality, make me believe Three Billboards aims for something lofty. That is why, in my opinion, it ultimately fails.

What Clint Eastwood Knows About Trusting Your Gut

05 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by ghosteye3 in author, entertainment, humor, my life, observations

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clint eastwood, every which way but loose, missouri, show-me state, university of missouri

Clint + Monkey = Cinema Gold

Clint + Monkey = Cinema Gold

In the late 1970s, when Clint Eastwood read the script for the movie, Every Which Way But Loose, all of his business advisors urged him to turn down the role.

“My lawyer begged me not to do it,” Eastwood recalled in a recent interview with Esquire. “’This is a piece of shit. It’s not the kind of thing you do.’ And I said, ‘It’s not the kind of thing that I’ve been doing—all these pictures where I’m shooting people. I want something you can take your kids to.’”

Eastwood ended up doing the move, of course. And while Every Which Way But Loose was hardly a cinematic masterpiece, it became a commercial hit. It did not ruin Eastwood’s acting career. While the decision to do the movie seemed risky at the time, Eastwood liked the story about a rough-and-tumble trucker and an orangutan named Clyde. It was something different.

“If you make a couple decisions where your instincts worked well, why would you abandon them?” Eastwood said.

I remember one night in the fall of 1988, walking to the mailbox and pulling out a brochure from the University of Missouri. I was a high school senior at the time, and I was looking at different colleges to attend. Missouri wasn’t on my radar at all. I had never been to the Show-Me State, and didn’t know much about it beyond Harry Truman and Mark Twain. In fact, I still have no idea how the people at the University of Missouri got my contact information.

Nevertheless, as I sat down at our kitchen table and flipped through the glossy brochure, I got excited. Something about the place just seemed right. I filled out the application that night and mailed it the next day. Ten months later, I was a freshman in Columbia, Missouri, more than 700 miles from my hometown.

I had practical reasons for choosing my college—I wanted to go to journalism school, and Missouri had a good one. Mostly, though, my decision was based on instinct. It just felt like the right place for me.

I think it was a good decision, and it has directed almost everything that has happened in my life since—my career, the woman I married, the city we live in, most of my friends. All of that would have been completely different had I chosen to attend, say, the University of Georgia.

I am grateful for following my instincts that night in 1988. The life that has unfolded since has been a good one.

As we get older and pick up more responsibilities, it becomes harder to act on a hunch. Often, we choose the safer route because we have so much more at stake than when we were young. We aren’t high school seniors anymore, and we certainly aren’t movie stars who can afford to take a chance on making a goofball truck driver flick.

But our instincts are still there. When is the last time you listened to yours? How did that decision work out for you?

Sometimes, our instincts lead us to do strange things.

Sometimes, our instincts lead us to do strange things.

A Book Club for Pridemore

19 Friday Feb 2016

Posted by ghosteye3 in A Plot for Pridemore, author, fiction, humor, stephen roth, Uncategorized

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a plot for pridemore, amazon, mercer university press, missouri, southern fiction, Stephen Roth

Over the past few months, I have been delighted to speak with a couple of book clubs that took the time to read A Plot for Pridemore. The most recent engagement was conducted via conference call with a friend’s club in North Carolina. The ladies drank wine and peppered me with questions about the book while I paced around my basement trying to summon intelligent-sounding answers. As far as Saturday night conference calls go, it was a lot of fun, and I was flattered that the book club would want to talk with me about my novel.

If you have a book club, or are thinking about starting one, let me provide you with five compelling reasons why A Plot for Pridemore would be an excellent selection:

1. The book is funny.

2. The plot is fast-moving and engaging.

3. The characters are colorful.

4. There are some dark, chilling moments that should spark interesting conversation next time your club gets together.

5. I would be happy to talk with your group about my book, whether you are in Kansas City or Kathmandu. Obviously, if you are based in Nepal, we might have to converse over the phone.

These books aren't going to sell themselves.

These books aren’t going to sell themselves.


Want to know what the book’s about? Here’s a summary:

For five heart-churning days, the world turns its attention to tiny Pridemore, Missouri, where rescue teams work around the clock to free a mentally challenged man from a collapsed cave.

That’s how Mayor Roe Tolliver envisions it, anyway. Weary of watching the town he’s led for more than forty years slide into economic oblivion, the mayor hatches a devious and dangerous plan-trap a local man in the bowels of nearby Dragon’s Ice House cavern, start a massive rescue operation, and prompt a media vigil that puts Pridemore on the map for decades to come.

Over the course of a year, the mayor and his cronies carry out the convoluted scheme, which involves everything from bilking state money for a bogus tourist attraction to hiring a militia “ballistics consultant” to detonate the limestone cavern. Their success hinges on unassuming pawn Digby Willers, whose simple-minded likeability provides human interest in the made-for-television crisis. As events unfold, however, forces beyond even the mayor’s control turn Digby’s rescue into a real, life-or-death drama.

Get ready for a fast-paced romp filled with quirky characters, hilarious twists and turns, and a small town that just might get its fifteen minutes of fame.

You can find more information about A Plot for Pridemore on the Mercer University Press website, as well as Amazon. If you’re interested in reading the book with your club, please send me a comment and let me know.

The Pain Factory that is Mizzou Basketball

21 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by ghosteye3 in my life, observations, sports, stephen roth, Uncategorized

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author, frank haith, kim anderson, mike alden, missouri, missouri basketball, mizzou, norm stewart, quin snyder, Stephen Roth, tigers

Something sad is happening this winter in Columbia, Missouri.

University of Missouri basketball has never been great, but it is usually pretty good. Most seasons, the Tigers will knock off a couple of highly ranked teams and contend for a berth in the NCAA Tournament.

Kim Anderson doesn't have much to smile about these days.

Kim Anderson doesn’t have much to smile about these days.

This year, Mizzou basketball is terrible. The Tigers stand 7-20, having lost 13 straight games in the mediocre Southeastern Conference. Some of those losses have been heartbreakers, but most of them have been by double-digits. The team has looked overmatched against mighty Kentucky, and overmatched against less-than-mighty Alabama, Vanderbilt, and Mississippi State. The only suspense left to this season–Missouri’s worst in almost 50 years–is whether or not the Tigers will manage to chalk up another win. That scenario is starting to seem more and more like a childish fantasy.

This is the first season for Tigers coach Kim Anderson, a former Mizzou big man from the 1970s whose first game leading the team in Columbia was a humiliating 69-61 loss to a directional school, the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Everyone expected 2014-15 to be a tough season for Anderson. Previous coach Frank Haith left very few experienced players before bolting for the Tulsa job last April. Still, the roster has a few freshmen and sophomores who were top-50 recruits. There was reason to expect a young, energetic, competitive team.

That hasn’t happened. Some games, the Tigers play hard but make a ton of mistakes. Other games, they seem lethargic and make even more mistakes. Anderson has benched players and suspended players. He has lectured them about sitting up straight and looking people in the eye during post-game press conferences. He has talked about gutting the program in order to build it back up. Hopefully, these tactics will work, but it will take some time. Most people expect some players to transfer out of the program at season’s end. Next season could be just as bad as this one.

For long-time fans of Tigers basketball, it is just another chapter in a long story that even a Russian novelist would find too depressing to believe. When Missouri fans complain about the pain and anguish of being Missouri fans, they are mostly talking about hoops. Mizzou football has had a couple of famously devastating defeats, but the gridiron Tigers have been reliably good for more than 10 years. Tiger basketball, meanwhile, has been as volatile as a tech start-up’s stock price on the NASDAQ.

Norm Stewart's teams were good, but not great.

Norm Stewart’s teams were good, but not great.

I don’t want to bore you with too many details, but here’s what has basically happened with Mizzou basketball over the past 15 or so years:

1999

Athletic Director Mike Alden mishandles the firing of legendary Tigers coach Norm Stewart. Missouri hires Duke assistant and all-around pretty boy Quin Snyder.

2000-2003

Snyder takes the Tigers to four straight NCAA Tournament appearances, including an Elite Eight run in 2002.

2003

The arrest of point guard Ricky Clemons and subsequent jailhouse tapes of him divulging some dirty laundry eventually lands the Tigers on probation for a couple of years. The program goes into decline.

2004

Missouri’s new basketball palace opens and is named Paige Arena after the daughter of “anonymous” booster and Walmart beneficiary Bill Laurie. The building’s name is changed to Mizzou Arena a few days later, after news breaks of a college cheating scandal that involved Paige Laurie.

2006

Athletic Director Mike Alden botches the firing of Snyder. Missouri hires Mike Anderson from UAB.

2006-2011

Anderson leads the Tigers to three straight NCAA Tournament appearances, including an Elite Eight run in 2009. He then bolts for the head coaching job at Arkansas.

2011-2014

Under new coach Frank Haith, the Tigers shock everyone by going 30-4 and winning the Big 12 tournament. They shock everyone again by losing a first-round game in the NCAAs to 15th seed Norfolk State. Haith sticks around for the Tigers’ first two seasons in the SEC, then bolts for Tulsa.

Which brings us to 2015 and the Tigers’ second Coach Anderson in less than four years. When Kim Anderson took the job, many fans had hopes of him returning Missouri to the glory days of Norm Stewart, when they recall the Tigers always playing hard and beating Kansas on a regular basis.

The thing is, even Stewart, over the course of 30 years, could not lead the Missouri Tigers to greatness. His teams won a few Big Eight championships and gave Kansas some headaches, but Stewart also lost a lot of first-round games in the Big Dance, He never reached a Final Four. His teams were talented but often suffered the same confounding lapses that have marked all Missouri basketball teams.

Throughout their history, the Tigers have never quite been tough enough, deep enough or big enough to achieve true college basketball greatness. George Mason, Virginia Commonwealth, Western Kentucky, Indiana State, Seton Hall, and the University of North Carolina-Charlotte have all been to a Final Four. The Missouri Tigers have not.

Yeah, this happened, too.

Yeah, this happened, too.

Maybe they will get there someday. Maybe 2014-15 is Kim Anderson’s Valley Forge, and he will go on to have a long, storied career in Columbia.

I have my doubts, though. The Tigers just posted another dumpster fire of a loss this afternoon, this time to a feeble, inexperienced but well-coached Vanderbilt squad.

It’s just another low for a program that has had too many of them over the past several years.

Stephen Roth is the author of the humorous novel, A Plot for Pridemore.

Be sure to “like” his author fan page at https://www.facebook.com/StephenRothWriter

A Strike Against SIDS

18 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by ghosteye3 in my life, observations

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baseball, kansas city royals, Kansas City T-Bones, major league baseball, missouri, SIDS, SIDS Resources, St. Louis, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

In July of 2011, the Kansas City Royals were stumbling their way through yet another losing baseball season, their 26th in a row without a trip to the playoffs.

In July of 2011, our volunteer board for SIDS Resources Inc. gathered in Columbia, Missouri, for our annual face-to-face meeting. In case you haven’t heard of it, SIDS Resources is an organization dedicated to educating the public about ways to reduce the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and also supporting families that have lost a loved one to SIDS. It is a small nonprofit that serves Missouri, as well as parts of Kansas and Illinois. I started serving on the SIDS Resources board in 2007, and I became its chair in 2010 through 2011.

Strike Out SIDSBecause our board was split between people who lived in Kansas City and St. Louis, most of our interactions were conducted through monthly conference calls. Each summer, most of the board members would drive to the middle of the state and meet for a few hours in a hospital conference room in Columbia. It was a chance to brainstorm new ideas, get to know each other, and enjoy pizza from Shakespeare’s, Columbia’s best-known restaurant. During our brainstorm in 2011, one of our members had a very good idea. Our Kansas City office was lacking in an annual marque fundraising event. St. Louis already had a couple of big fundraisers, including one that involved the beloved St. Louis Cardinals. Why not do a summer event around baseball in Kansas City, the board member suggested. Perhaps it could be one of those events where kids and their families could run the bases, or do batting practice on a real baseball diamond?

That idea became “Strike Out SIDS” which debuted in 2012 at Community America Ballpark, home to the independent league Kansas City T-Bones. The event was fun – kids ran the bases, adults hit batting practice, we had hot dogs, Cracker Jacks and a couple of the usual bouncy houses – but the crowd was fairly modest. Only about 200 or so people attended. I left the SIDS Resources board after 2012, but the nonprofit moved forward with its plans to turn “Strike Out SIDS” into a big event. Last year produced a breakthrough as the big-league Kansas City Royals agreed to host “Strike Out SIDS at the K.” The “K,” in case you don’t know, is shorthand for Kauffman Stadium, where the Royals play. This was a fantastic opportunity for SIDS Resources, and last year’s event turned out to be a big hit.

This year, it will be even bigger. The once-maligned Royals are in the hunt for the American League Central crown. Friday’s “Strike Out SIDS at the K” will be a crucial game against the division-leading Detroit Tigers. It will be a sellout, and perhaps the most important baseball game in Kansas City since the 1985 World Series.

A big baseball game in September represents the kind of exposure and awareness that SIDS Resources has always lacked in Kansas City. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is the third-leading cause of infant mortality in the United States, claiming 2,226 lives nationwide as recently as 2009. While there is no known “cure” for SIDS, organizations like SIDS Resources do important work teaching parents and day care providers how simple steps like putting an infant to sleep on his back on a firm mattress can sharply reduce the risks of SIDS. Despite all the access we have to information, there is still a lot of misunderstanding and mythology about what SIDS is, and how it can occur.

This afternoon, I picked up some “Strike Out SIDS” T-shirts for my wife, myself and our son. We’re looking forward to joining 45,000 other fans at the K tomorrow night and watching the Royals win.

We already know it will be a big victory for our friends at SIDS Resources.

Pridemore Excerpt: Pete Schaefer

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

Posted by ghosteye3 in A Plot for Pridemore, fiction, humor, my life, satire, Uncategorized

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a plot for pridemore, literary fiction, mercer university press, missouri, satire, southern fiction, Stephen Roth

One of the key characters in A Plot for Pridemore is a young, frustrated newspaper reporter named Pete Schaefer. As a journalist, it is his job to peel aware the layers of what could be most scandalous story in the history of Pridemore, Missouri.

This is NOT Pete Schaefer.

This is NOT Pete Schaefer.

There is no reason, however, to believe that Pete is up to the task. He spends most of his time mired in loneliness and self-pity, occasionally summoning the ambition to scroll through job listings in the latest edition of Editor & Publisher.

As a former small-town reporter myself, I can relate to Pete’s anxieties, although he is not a carbon copy of me in my 20s (at least I hope not). Anyway, here is how we first get to know Pete in A Plot for Pridemore…

____________________________

Expelling a long, low groan, Pete Schaefer slapped the facsimile from Edwards Funeral Home on the computer clipboard and started typing:

Naomi D. Elbert of Marshall City, formerly of Brush Hill, died Sunday, May 25, at Truman Retirement Center. She was 81.

Before anything else Monday morning, Pete’s job required him to type the obituaries of everyone who died over the weekend – often a lengthy assignment given the number of blue-hairs in the region. Right now he was on Obit No. 8, his mind so far removed from what he was doing that he’d unwittingly invented two new ways to spell Naomi.

Pete found it hard to concentrate on the obits, or “Oh-bitches,” as his coworkers sometimes called them. After a year at the Pridemore Evening Headlight, the formula was so ingrained that he would merely slap the funeral notice on the clipboard and let his fingers clack away at their 50-words-a-minute pace. This freed him to contemplate the newsroom’s avocado green decor, the fluorescent light that flickered annoyingly over his head and a faded poster that advertised the Affair on the Square arts and crafts show from 1986.

Funeral services will be held 2 p.m. Tuesday at the Edwards Funeral Chapel with the Rev. Edwin Hodge officiating. Visitation will take place prior to services.

Edna Bright fastened one of her Jimmy Carter grins on Pete as she waddled past his desk. It was a rare morning he beat her to work. Plump and cheery as a Christmas ham, she was the Headlight’s society editor and probably the most contented person Pete had ever met. Watching her swing an oversized purse around the back of her chair while singing an off-key version of “Escape (The Pina Colada Song),” he wondered if Edna Bright wasn’t the source of the old notion that all fat people are jolly.

Pete kept his head down, pretending to focus on his work: Survivors include one sister, Maureen Dowell of LaGrange; two sons, John Elbert of St. Louis and Duane Elbert of Wellsville; and a daughter, Yula Mae Lowry of Forest Park.

Edna nibbled a doughnut and slurped her coffee while reading the St. Louis Intelligencer, occasionally clucking an “Oh, my,” or a disapproving “Ewww!”

Then silence. No slurping. No ewwws. Peter sensed her beady eyes, dark as night, watching him.

“Hiya Pete,” she said when he finally looked up. “How’s your morning?”

Slowly turning from his computer, Pete decided to shock her with a smile of his own. Not one of those put-on numbers he gave the cut-and-paste girls in production that even they could see through, but a real, genuine smile.

“How are you, Edna?” he asked so naturally as to make you think he said it every morning.

Edna wasn’t surprised. If anything, she seemed encouraged.

“Say Pete, did you catch The McClusky Files last night?”

“The McClusky Files,” he said, vaguely recalling the show in which an aging actor plays an aging detective. “Is that the one that’s set in Miami?”

“No, you’re thinking of Randy Slaughter, Medical Examiner,” she said. “McClusky Files is in L.A.”

“Of course.”

“I just really love that McClusky, don’t you? I mean, he’s nice and polite like a gentleman should be, but he’s tough, too. He always gets his man and he’s not afraid to call a spade a spade, if you know what I mean.”

Edna smiled. “I can tell that’s probably the way he is in real life, too.”

Pete gave one of those half laughs that most people would read as a sign of disinterest. Not Edna.

“Last night was one of the better ones,” she said. “McClusky and these other people are guests on this millionaire’s yacht, you see. And, almost as soon as they all get on board, the millionaire disappears.”

“Really?” Pete said.

“So all of a sudden, people just start disappearing: the millionaire’s wife, the movie star—”

“—the professor and Mary Anne?” he offered.

Edna giggled to show she caught the reference, and went on.

“Usually I’m pretty good at picking out the murderer before everyone else. But I didn’t have a clue on this one. Jerry thought it was the millionaire, but what does he know? I mean, he’s the only guy in Rotary who thought O.J. was innocent, you know?”

“Right.”

“Just when we’re at to the part where McClusky’s gonna nail the bad guy, I get this phone call from my daughter, Alicea. She’s about your age, you know.”

Edna was shaking now, her banshee cackle filling the mostly empty newsroom.

“So I get off the phone and I rush back to ask Jerry whodunnit. Well, he’s already switched the channel to SportsCenter. Took me six phone calls to find out it was the Portuguese deck hand who strangled ‘em all with a piano wire and threw their bodies overboard.

“Ewwwww,” she said. “I almost strangled someone myself last night!”

“That’s funny,” Pete offered in a tone that suggested he didn’t think it was funny at all. He gave her a tight smile and returned to his computer.

Edna let out a huff and left her desk for another cup of coffee. Peter felt pretty evil for leading her on like that. He could be pretty mean when he was depressed, and he was depressed nearly all of the time lately.

He thought about starting another conversation when Edna returned. But the other staffers were ambling in and he needed to call the area cops to see if there‘d been any overnight car wrecks. Obits and road fatalities – it was some sweet gig he’d scored for himself more than a year removed from journalism school. Woodward and Bernstein had better watch their jocks.

From the corner of his eye he watched Edna settle into her seat. He’d come up with something thoughtful to say to her first thing tomorrow, even if he had to watch network television to do it.

____________________________

The afternoon sun sprayed rivulets of light through the dusty blinds that hung over Pete’s futon. Angela sat up, crossed her skinny legs under the sheet and watched Pete sift through the dirty clothes, old magazines and sports gear that cluttered his bedroom closet.

“What are you looking for?”

He smiled as his fingers grazed the beat-up leather briefcase.

“My soul,” he said, pulling the briefcase out of the closet and opening it.

“Wow,” she said as he pulled out a fistful of typed pages. “You wrote all
that?”

“It’s nothing. Maybe 200 pages in all, double-spaced.”

“That’s nothing?”

“Not for a book,” he said. “You heard of Schubert’s unfinished symphony? This is Schaefer’s unfinished novel.”

“Wow,” she repeated, plopping next to him on the floor. Save for the three-legged recliner that tilted like a sinking ship in Pete’s living room, there were no chairs in his one-bedroom apartment, so the two spent most of their time on the futon or the floor.

“You never told me you were a writer,” Angela said.

“I’m a newspaper reporter. You know that.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know you were a writer,” she laughed, folding her arms across her chest. “What’s it about?”

“Oh, your typical Coming-of-Age, Loss of Innocence, Love Story.”

“Sort of like Great Expectations?” Angela suggested.

“Yeah,” Pete said, and he gave her a soft kiss. “Except with zombies.”

“Can I read it?”

He flicked through the pages before finding a chapter he liked, the one in which Sully and Bart take Bettger down to Creepy Woods for one last bong hit. He ran his hand through her long hair and studied her crinkled brow as she read, making note of whether she smiled at the funny parts. She giggled once or twice, always a good sign.

It was that giggle that reminded him of Angela’s current status on the high school varsity cheerleading squad. Most of the time, Pete thought her comparable to the somber, artistically inclined women he’d dated in college. The crinkle in Angela’s brow gave her a thoughtful look that seemed older than her years and she could quote whole passages of Dickinson or Thoreau. He would almost start to take her seriously until, in a beautifully unguarded moment, she’d relate a fart joke she learned in study hall or clumsily pick the chords to “Smoke on the Water” on his guitar. That’s when the giggle came out and it was suddenly Saved By The Bell time at Pete’s place.

He loved and detested that giggle. Loved its affirmation that he could make someone laugh at a time in his life when he didn’t laugh much at all. Hated how it reminded him that what he was doing with Angela went beyond the bounds of acceptable adult behavior. He’d tried many times to tell her this. Well, once or twice. But Angela would just giggle and kiss him and tell him to shut up, and Pete would mind his manners as they crawled back onto the futon.

They met in October at a downtown festival called Olde Pridemore Days. He’d seen her around town a couple of times, hanging at Truman’s Malt Shop with her high school buddies or passing through the newspaper office to drop off her “Teen Beat” column. But Olde Pridemore Days was the first time they really talked.

He remembered almost every detail of that day: she wore a spaghetti string halter top and a pair of ripped-up blue jeans, edgy stuff for a Sunday in Pridemore. They spent the day walking around, eating Sno-Cones and funnel cakes, making fun of the lame country/western act on the main stage. They talked about books and music, and how cool it would be to move to Paris, just living and writing like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and those other Lost Generation guys.

They made out that night on the courthouse steps, an encounter that soon led to Angela’s afternoon visits to Pete’s apartment when she could slip out of her independent studies class. The first four visits, Pete was able to pull back, throw on his jeans and mumble something about getting Angela back to school before the start of seventh period. The fifth time they reached the precipice, an unseasonably warm February day when Pete was supposed to be covering a livestock show in Hodgeville, Angela straddled his waist, grabbed his shirt with her fists and said in a husky voice, “I’m not taking no for an answer.”

Pete gave in. He hated himself for it, but not enough to stop meeting Angela at his place most Wednesday afternoons. He was weak. He was stupid. But mostly he was bored. She was the only girl he’d met since moving to Pridemore, and he was tired of pretending he didn’t like having her around.

“How long ago did you write this?” Angela asked when she finished the chapter.

“It’s been a while. I haven’t really touched it since college.”

“You ought to finish it,” she said, pulling him close. “I mean, think how much you’ve improved as a writer since then.”

“Really?” he asked. “You think it needs work?”

“I dunno. I mean, this part about the guys drinking and partying, making all the pop culture references – it’s funny, but it’s kind of played out, you know?”

She wiped a strand of hair from her mouth and gave a half-smile.

“It kinda reads like a beer commercial.”

He was still reeling from the blow as they drove to the high school in his beat-up Ford Explorer. Kinda reads likes a beer commercial. This from someone who ate Oreo cookies icing first, who’d only recently shifted her musical allegiance from Beyonce to Taylor Swift. It was a mistake letting her read his book, he thought. Did he expect an educated response from someone who was struggling to maintain a B average in junior English?

Come to think of it, this whole thing was a mistake. And driving Angela to school was beyond dangerous. They were getting very careless, Pete thought. He watched her light a Marlboro while grooving to a pop song on the radio. It was amusing to watch her smoke because she hadn’t mastered how to tap the ash off a cigarette.

“What did I tell you about smoking in my truck?” he asked.

“That I’m allowed to do it except when you’re pissed over something I said about a book you wrote.”

“I’m not mad.”

She leaned across the gear shift and kissed his cheek.

“I’m such a meanie,” she said with a pout that was both cute and condescending. “I guess when you’ve been reading Crime and Punishment for two weeks, everything else reads like a beer commercial.”

“Oh, so now I’m not even as good as Dostoyevsky?” he said, breaking into a grin as they approached their drop-off point near the gym.

She gave him a kiss that surprised him with its deepness. It was the kind she planted on him that night at the courthouse steps.

“I love you,” she said in a throaty whisper. “I know you hate that, but I do.”

“Okay,” Pete said, handing Angela her books as she stepped out of the truck. “Just don’t tell your daddy.”

____________________________

Pete was explaining his premature baldness to a waitress when his buddy, Headlight sportswriter Dave Felton, walked into One-Eyed Willie’s, the only Pridemore establishment left with a liquor license since the Lizard Lounge closed.

“Yeah, my brother’s losing a little on top himself,” the waitress said. “He’s pretty freaked out about it.”

“It’s genetic, you know,” Pete told her after a sip from his longneck. “It’s passed down from your mother’s side of the family.”

The waitress pondered this for a minute.

“My mom’s not bald,” she said.

Felton and Pete exchanged the same weary look they shared in the newsroom whenever Edna referred to the president’s anti-terrorism policy as The War on Towel Heads.

Like two strangers in a strange land, Felton and Pete clung to each other almost out of necessity. They were both about the same age and both St. Louis natives. They both enrolled in journalism school with grand thoughts of someday working for The Washington Post or The New York Times, and they both graduated into a crappy job market with $18,000 salaries at a newspaper they’d never heard of (“This,” Felton said after a couple of whiskey shots one night at Willie’s, “is what is known as paying your dues.”).

Meeting once or twice a week at Willie’s had become something of a social highlight for Pete. He cringed to think what Pridemore would be like without having a friend around.

He nodded toward the baseball highlights on the overhead TV. “Cards took a pounding today.”

“No pitching, yet again,” Felton replied.

Pete ordered a Bud Light and surveyed Willie’s decor of birds, bayonets and batting helmets. It beat looking at the clientele, which this night consisted of two utility workers and a woman with mall bangs dancing alone. The jukebox was playing its usual mix of Three Dog Night, BTO and, in a token nod to the ‘80s, Night Ranger.

“Larry asked about you today,” Felton said. “He’s starting to wonder where you’re spending your Wednesday afternoons.”

“I’m spending them at home,” Pete said with a shrug. “Comp time.”

Felton shook his head and laughed. “You’re an idiot.”

“What?”

“He’s gonna find out.”

“I guess I’ll be out of a job, then.

“It’s kind of like detonating a highly sensitive explosive,” Pete added after some thought. “You never know when it’s going to just blow up in your hands.”

“Don’t romanticize it, Schaefer. You’re screwing your boss’s daughter. Your boss’s 17-year-old daughter.” He laughed as he fished his shirt pocket for a lighter. “You’re just an idiot, that’s all.”

“You said that already.”

The door creaked open, and Felton and Pete glanced back as if they expected Angelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson to drop by for drinks on their way through town. But it was just some grubby guy in a shirt with his name on it. The dancing woman left her spot at the jukebox to give him a lingering hug.

“Done any work on your book lately?” Felton asked.

“Looked at it today, that’s all,” Pete said with a sigh. “How’s yours coming?”

“I can’t summon the muse,” the sportswriter said. “Every night, I sit there, blinking at a blank screen. I end up watching re-runs of Seinfeld and falling asleep on the couch.”

Pete laughed. “It’s this town, you know? It’s sapping our brains.”

“Yeah,” Felton agreed, mashing his cigarette into an ashtray. “I need to get out of this fucking town.”

Pete looked at the TV, which was flashing highlights from the previous night’s Marlins-Phillies game.

“Florida would be nice,” Felton said, reading Pete’s mind.

“I’ve got an uncle in Jacksonville,” Pete said. “We could crash at his place until we found jobs. Maybe we could open a hot dog stand on the beach, or whatever.”

“Felton’s Franks, we’d call it,” Felton said.

“That could give us some cash until our novels got published. We’d open for lunch at eleven and close around two so we could get some beach time—”

“—and watch the sun go down each evening with our beautiful, bikini-clad girlfriends,” Felton added. “When do we leave?”

“Tomorrow,” Pete said instinctively. “How much money you got saved up?”

“About two hundred – give or take a hundred.”

“I’ve got about five hundred,” Pete said, really thinking now. “So we’ve got enough for the drive and maybe a week after that.”

“Should we give two weeks’ notice?”

“In two weeks we’ll lose our nerve,” Pete said. “It’s gotta be now.”

Felton took a thoughtful drag from his Camel and grinned. Meatloaf was on the jukebox now, wailing about how two outta three ain’t bad.

“You don’t even have an uncle in Florida, do you?”

The door opened. Felton and Pete glanced back, in case a starlet appeared.

Pridemore Visits the Southland

31 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by ghosteye3 in A Plot for Pridemore, fiction, my life

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

a plot for pridemore, author, fiction, georgia literary festival, missouri, south, southern festival of books, Stephen Roth

PlotForPridemore (2)I have always considered A Plot for Pridemore to be a Southern novel, even though the fictional town of Pridemore is set in Missouri. A lot of Southerners do not recognize Missouri as a part of the American South, and I can understand their feelings about that. A couple of years ago, when the University of Missouri’s athletic program joined the Southeastern Conference, a lot of SEC diehards took offense. I think some of them still do.

Missouri is one of those states that has a bit of an identity problem. It’s not quite the South, and it’s not completely Midwestern. St. Louis has the style and feel of an East Coast town, while Kansas City looks more toward the West. Springfield, Mo., is like an extension of Arkansas. Branson is its own island of patriotism, homespun values and camp, a sort of Las Vegas for Baptists. In terms of the state’s most famous residents, Mark Twain seems like a Southerner to me, while Harry Truman is staunchly Midwestern. Tennessee Williams was from St. Louis and a frat boy at Mizzou, but I feel like he should have been from Louisiana. Brad Pitt is from Missouri and so is Sheryl Crow, but they both live somewhere else now.

The state can’t even decide if it’s Democrat or Republican. Missouri’s perpetual swing-state status garners a lot of attention come election time, when it gets more visits from presidential candidates than most states not named Ohio or Florida.

Despite Missouri’s vague geography, I see the characters of Pridemore as very Southern in their values, quirks and stubborn sentimentality. Maybe it’s because I’m from Georgia, and I wanted to write the book with a Southern point of view. I don’t know.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that I am thrilled and very honored to be invited to a couple of great book conferences in the South this fall. The first one is the Southern Festival of Books on Oct. 10-12 in Nashville, which features readings and panel sessions with about 200 authors. The next stop is the Georgia Literary Festival on Nov. 7-9 in Augusta, which will feature Georgia authors like Terry Kay, Raymond Atkins and Philip Lee Williams. I do not know what I am scheduled to do at these conferences yet. I will share more details about them soon.

In the meantime, I am also doing a reading from Pridemore at 7 p.m. Friday, August 15 in Kansas City. I will be sharing the stage at The Writers Place with another Kansas City author, Catherine Anderson, and poet Alarie Tennille. It should be a wonderful evening event!

That’s all the news I have about my book at the moment. If you’re interested in learning more, you can find information here, here and here.

A Promo for Pridemore

18 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by ghosteye3 in A Plot for Pridemore, fiction, my life, Uncategorized

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a plot for pridemore, amazon, author, barnes & noble, fiction, georgia, humor, kansas city, literary, mercer university press, missouri, novel, satire, southern fiction, Stephen Roth

As has already been exhaustively reported in these pages, my novel, A Plot for Pridemore, will be released in a few weeks. The book went to press on April 9, so we are right on schedule for publication at the end of May.

If you want to read my book but you aren’t too keen on buying a copy, you can enter a “giveaway” contest right here on GoodReads.com. Just click “Enter to Win” and you will be part of a digital raffle that will determine the winners of six copies of my book, which I will ship out along with a thank you note on June 14.

PlotForPridemore (2)If you ARE interested in buying my book, you can pre-order it on any of the following websites: Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and MUPress.org. Once the book is published, you can order it in digital form as a Kindle book or a Nook book.

If you happen to live in the Kansas City area or you plan to travel here soon, I am lining up a few book signings and readings over the course of the summer. I’m having a book launch party on June 14 at The Writers Place in midtown Kansas City. On June 21, I’ll be signing books at the Barnes & Noble in the Zona Rose shopping center. And on Aug. 15, I will do a 20-minute (gulp!) reading from my book at a special evening event at The Writers Place.

I am hoping to schedule more events soon to help promote the book, including a few gigs in the South this fall. I’ll keep y’all posted. Let me know if you have any thoughts on booksellers that might welcome A Plot for Pridemore to their stacks. I am willing to try anyone and anything (as long as it doesn’t cost too much).

St. Patrick’s Day with Alice

17 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by ghosteye3 in humor, my life

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

1990, alice, college, missouri, mizzou, my life, rolla, st. patrick's day, University of Missouri-Rolla

Painting the street green is apparently another St. Paddy's tradition in Rolla, Mo.

St. Patrick’s Day at the University of Missouri at Rolla, we were told, was a really big deal. The town celebrated with a massive parade. There were keg parties all over campus. For one wild weekend in March, we were told, everyone in the state descended upon tiny Rolla for a raucous green-beer celebration.

“And you won’t believe the women,” said our friend Bennett, who had studied a semester at UM-Rolla before transferring to Mizzou. “There’ll be beautiful women everywhere.”

It didn’t dawn on our college freshmen minds that there were plenty of parties and beautiful (read: unattainable) women where we currently studied in Columbia. St. Patrick’s Day in Rolla, we believed after weeks of hearing about it from Bennett, was on a whole different level. The 1990 celebration would be the biggest one yet. So we made arrangements to spend two nights at the Sigma Nu house in Rolla. Six of us loaded our gear and crammed into a buddy’s 1977 Gran Torino. Since I was the shortest, I had to lie across my friends’ laps in the back seat for the four-hour journey. The car filled up with cigarette smoke while the tape deck blasted tunes from The Cult’s Sonic Temple. Every now and then, I could lift my head and breathe in some fresh air through the partially lowered side window. It was freezing and miserable in the back of that gas-guzzling Ford, but I happily put up with the inconvenience for the wide-open prospects that awaited us in the swinging town of Rolla, Missouri.

Looking back, we should have known better. UM-Rolla, we already knew, was an engineering school with at least a four-to-one ratio of men versus women. Mathematically speaking, it would have required a huge influx of college-age women to even out those percentages. And Rolla hardly had the local market cornered on St. Paddy’s Day celebrations—there were big parades and festivals in Kansas City and St. Louis as well. Looking back, we should have pressed our friend Bennett for more information. If Rolla was so awesome, we should have asked, why did he leave the place after just two semesters?

We arrived at the Sigma Nu house the evening of March 16. The house was filled with nerdish engineering students scurrying about, preparing for the next night’s keg party. After dinner, everyone gathered in the basement to watch the NCAA tournament and, afterward, a couple of adult movies. We were beginning to have some doubts, but Bennett assured us that the next day’s celebration would be completely off the hook.

“And wait ‘til you meet Alice,” he said, a mischievous grin crossing his face. “You’re not gonna believe Alice.”

“Who’s Alice?” I asked. Bennett was coy, saying we would have to find out for ourselves. Lying in my upper bunk that night, the walls of the tiny room spinning around me, I imagined Alice to be an older, wiser, seductive woman who might buy us import beer from the local Schnucks supermarket.

The next morning, we awoke early to a green-eggs-and-bacon breakfast in the Sigma Nu dining hall (the brothers were actually quite good to us that weekend). Then we walked a few blocks to downtown Rolla for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. It was a bit of a let-down, consisting mostly of fire trucks, high school bands, and Shriners riding around on Go Carts. It was a typical small-town parade, which was fine but not necessarily the kind of thing you drive four hours to go see. My friend Bill, clad in ripped blue jeans and a Soundgarden T-shirt, walked up to one of the elderly Shriners and said, “You guys are doing a great job!” The Shriner nodded gratefully. We stood on the curb, snickering at our friend’s boldness.

“Now we’re gonna go see Alice,” Bennett announced. We dutifully followed him a few blocks from downtown, each of us joking nervously about what this mysterious Alice might look like or say to us.

The first thing I remember was the smell, a combination of all sorts of vile aromas that hit us as we walked down the hill toward the football stadium. The stench grew stronger as we each paid $5 admission, walked into the stadium, and found places to sit on the visitors’ side. The stands were jammed with all sorts of people: college students, high school kids, senior citizens, and young families with small children. All of them wore green, and many donned the official T-shirt of the 1990 Rolla celebration (“The Best St. Patrick’s Day EVER”). Everyone on both sides of the field had their eyes fixed on “Alice,” which was an above-ground pool at the 50-yard-line filled to its rim with a putrid green mix of beer, food coloring, and God knows what kind of garbage and bodily fluids that had been collected by the fraternities in the week prior to the celebration. Several students wearing goggles, ponchos, rubber gloves, and other sanitary gear lined up next to the pool. They took turns being tossed into Alice, where they swam a few strokes, climbed out and were immediately hosed down by a brigade from the Rolla Fire Department. The crowd cheered when someone went into the pool, and the roar grew louder the longer they bobbed around in green sludge. This went on for about an hour until Alice ran out of volunteer swimmers and the crowd disbursed. We ran onto the field and kicked around a hacky sack for a while. By then, I guess we were used to the smell.

I don’t remember much about the party that night at the Sigma Nu house, other than to recall it didn’t have very many of the beautiful, available women Bennett promised. Maybe we had picked the wrong fraternity house to party in. I went to bed late and woke up early. My friend in the Gran Torino dropped me off at a bus stop, where I would take a Greyhound to the St. Louis airport on my way home to Georgia for the spring break holiday.

I’ve thought about that visit to Rolla many times, mostly about the bizarre ritual of Alice. Did people really pay admission to see that? What did the money go toward? Did I dream the whole thing up? Do they still do it today? There is very little information about Alice on the Internet, other than to say that she was a St. Patrick’s Day tradition in Rolla that was discontinued many years ago for public health reasons. That is probably a good thing.

Rolla apparently still advertises its St. Patrick’s Day celebration as “the best one ever.” I’m not so sure I believe that. But the memory of that March weekend in 1990, and the time we spent with Alice, is forever etched in my mind.

Why Wait? Pre-Order Your Copy of Pridemore!

03 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by ghosteye3 in A Plot for Pridemore, fiction, my life, Uncategorized

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a plot for pridemore, author, fiction, georgia, mercer university press, missouri, southern fiction, Stephen Roth

As mentioned recently, A Plot for Pridemore is set to hit bookshelves this May. However, if you would like, you can pre-order the book now by visiting my author page on the Mercer University Press website here. You’ll also receive a 20 percent discount and free shipping on your purchase if you hit “like” on Mercer’s Facebook fan page, which can be found here.

PlotForPridemore (2)

What’s the point in ordering a book that’s not coming out for another five months, you may ask. Good question! The appeal of pre-ordering is that you’ll be one of the very first people to read this novel. The publisher will send it out to you even before they ship copies to Amazon, Barnes&Noble.com and (maybe) Oprah’s Book Club (if she even does that anymore).

Not sure if A Plot for Pridemore is the kind of fiction you like to read? Here’s a brief description to give you an idea:

For five heart-churning days, the world turns its attention to tiny Pridemore, Missouri, where rescue teams work around the clock to free a mentally challenged man from a collapsed cave.

That’s how Mayor Roe Tolliver envisions it, anyway. Weary of watching the town he’s led for more than 40 years slide into economic oblivion, the mayor hatches a devious and dangerous plan: trap a local man in the bowels of nearby Dragon’s Ice House cavern, start a massive rescue operation, and prompt a media vigil that puts Pridemore on the map for decades to come. Over the course of a year, the mayor and his cronies carry out the convoluted scheme, which involves everything from bilking state money for a bogus tourist attraction to hiring a militia “ballistics consultant” to detonate the limestone cavern. Their success hinges on unassuming pawn Digby Willers, whose simple-minded likeability provides human interest in the made-for-television crisis.

As events unfold, however, forces beyond even the mayor’s control turn Digby’s rescue into a real, life-or-death drama. Get ready for a fast-paced romp filled with quirky characters, hilarious twists and turns, and a small town that just might get its 15 minutes of fame.

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I am a mother of five active, sometimes aggravating children that drive me crazy, provide me with lots of entertainment and remind me constantly about the value of love and family. I am married to my best friend. He makes me laugh every day (usually at myself). I love to eat, run, write, read and then eat again, run again…you get it. I am a children's author, having published four books with MeeGenuis (The Halloween Costume, When Santa Was Small, The Baseball Game, and The Great Adventure Brothers). I have had several pieces of writing published on Adoptive Families, Adoption Today, Brain Child, Scary Mommy, and Ten To Twenty Parenting. I am also a child psychologist, however I honestly think that I may have learned more from my parents and my children than I ever did in any book I read in graduate school. This blog is a place where I can gather my thoughts and my stories and share them with others. My writing is usually about kids and trying to see the world through their eyes, a few about parenting, adoption (one of my children is adopted) and some other random thoughts thrown in… I hope you enjoy them! So grab a cup of coffee, or a glass of wine, depending on what time of day it is (or what kind of day it is) and take a few minutes to sit back, relax and read. Please add your comments or opinions, I know you must have something to say, and I would love to hear it. Thanks for stopping by. Anne Cavanaugh-Sawan

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