MotherReader

I can’t tell you how much I wanted to have a review of John Green’s Abundance of Katherines. The book came into my library yesterday, and I was drooling over the possiblity of reading it today and posting a review. But instead I have spent the day alternately chasing down parents to get Girl Scout permission forms, looking up hotels in New York City that won’t cost an arm and a leg, and preparing to abandon my real life for two days to make a little movie.

So no John Green today. But I do have a very funny book by Steven Banks called King of the Creeps.

On the worst day of his life, Tommy is going to jump off of the George Washington bridge, but then Bob Dylan saves him. Not the actual Bob Dylan, mind you, but seeing Bob Dylan on the cover of an album with a beautiful woman makes him reconsider. Especially when he hears the two prettiest girls in the class saying they would “go all the way” with Bob Dylan and that the pretty woman on the album cover is his girlfriend. If that ugly guy with the strange voice can get girls, then certainly Tommy can. He decides to get a guitar and become a folk singer.

He hears about a place to get a guitar in New York City, and spends his birthday money on it. He immediately runs into a series of incidents involving the police, a girl, a bunch of Japanese tourists, a photographer, and Ed Sullivan. It could never happen this way, but it doesn’t matter. It’s funny and unpredictable all the way. It is also a great take on the beginning of the sixties, with references to Kennedy’s death, beehive hairdos, and the arrival of folk music on the scene.

I only take up arms at this line:

She looked kind of old, but she was trying to look like a sexpot. She had a ton of makeup on and real bright red hair. If you saw her across the street you’d get excited and think she was really sexy, but up close you could see she was pretty old, like thirty-five or maybe even forty.

Hey now!

While the rest of you read or write or do laundry, I’ll be making a short film for the National Film Challenge. Three sleepless days for an eight-minute movie. Yeah, that makes sense.