Tom Pitching Story Ideas

Welcome to the time machine. These posts will skip around like Billy Pilgrim unstuck in time and with all the regularity of the Clockworks. But at least we’ll mostly eliminate the future. We won’t go there. You’ll see pictures of Tom at all ages like some good-natured Dorian Grey.

Back in September of 2005 Tom Robbins was on book tour for Wild Ducks. In San Francisco, Edward Champion aka Bat Segundo of radio fame, was at Tom’s reading. He wrote about that night.

One startling revelation was that Tom had some interesting ideas for TV shows and Movies. Here they are:

And Robbins said that he had experienced a sudden burst of artistic activity. He had started writing a script entitled Pyrex of the Caribbean, which involved maintaining an oven-ready backing condition on the high seas. His offering for reality television was Fungi for the Straight Guy, whereby the producers would take a conservative Republican and give him a syphillitic mushroom with a camera crew following him around. And he had devised a pitch for a dramatic television show, Helen Keller: Private Eye with the tagline: “She’s blind, she’s deaf, she’s mute, but she can smell a rat a mile away.”

Another item was one I think I knew but forgot. It’s the fact that Switters from Fierce Invalids also appeared in Villa Incognito, not in person but in the conversations of others. He’s the freelance spy that Thomas is trying to contact. In that bit you get the outcome of Fierce Invalids explained a little bit.

SPOILER!!!!
On page 204 the agent is described as having two wives, one European and one American. Sound like any two ladies you know?

The whole article is in The Return of the Reluctant

Tom Talks Sports

A letter to the editor about the Sonics:

Being too harsh toward Walker

In all of my decades of reading sports pages, I’ve never encountered such a mean-spirited rant as Steve Kelley’s vicious verbal mugging of Wally Walker (“Walker’s departure is too little, too late,” Seattle Times, Oct. 27).

Certainly Wally made mistakes (Jim McIlvaine and Paul Westphal being the most egregious) but running a professional sports franchise is hardly an exact science, and can anybody name a general manager who hasn’t goofed up more than once? Isiah Thomas can make more bad decisions in a single afternoon than Wally made in his entire career.

Moreover, his trade of Gary Payton for Ray Allen was brilliant; the moves that brought Earl Watson and Chris Wilcox here were shrewd; Rashard Lewis was a draft-day steal; and during Wally’s tenure a number of unheralded talents (Damien Wilkins, for example) were plucked out of obscurity by the Sonics.

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the probable loss of our franchise, but ultimately the dead horse must be left at the well-shod feet of (NBA commissioner) David Stern. Had Stern and his cohorts acted years ago to prevent players’ salaries from getting so insanely out of hand, there would be no arena issue in Seattle or any other NBA town.

— Tom Robbins, La Conner

Bumbershoot Award Speech

Here in Geoduck Junction

Finding a home among the migrants, mavericks, and mutants of the Pacific Northwest.

By Tom Robbins

Rick Dahms

In 1997, Tom Robbins was given Bumbershoot’s Golden Umbrella Award for “lifetime achievement in the arts.” The following, never before published, is his acceptance speech, which Robbins wants you to know is a piece of rhetoric, not an essay. “Had I intended it to be read rather than listened to, the writing would have been tighter of syntax and less bombastic of cadence,” Robbins says. Nevertheless, it’s an eloquent, full-throated tribute to the writer’s sources of inspiration.

[Read the rest of the article under Pages to the right or click here

We are all jelly donuts

A member posting as marxmarvelous has sent in Tom’s famous Jelly Donut speech.

Among the confections favored by sweet-toothed Germans is a jelly-filled pastry called “the berliner.” Now, in the German language, articles such as “a,” “and,” “the,” etc. are never placed in front of nationalities or other nouns that designate persons according to their place of origin, although articles, quite naturally, are placed in front of pastries. So, strictly speaking, when President John F. Kennedy intoned on that historic day in 1963, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” what he actually said was, “I am a jelly doughnut.”

I’m for writing that is willing not merely to record but to transform, writing willing to wrap itself in the chiffon of dream and the goatskin of myth, writing that cannot be intimidated or usurped by any ideology, writing that has the wisdom to admit that much of life is indisputably goofy, and that has the guts to treat that goofiness as seriously as it treats suffering and despair.

I’m for writing that sings in the shower. I’m for writing that shoplifts lingerie at Frederick’s of Hollywood, and searches the clear night sky for UFOs. I’m for writing that quivers in your lap like a saucer of jello and runs up your leg like a mouse.

I’m for writing that knocks holes in library walls.

I’m for writing that calls its own number, on a telephone line made from the nose hairs of Buddha.

I’m for writing that shall fear no evil, lo though it walk through the valley of the shadow of lit crit.

I’m for salty writing, itchy writing, steel-belted, nickel-plated writing, that attends the white lilacs after the heat is gone.

I’m for writing that rescues the princess and the dragon.

I’m for writing that runs with the women who run with the wolves.

I’m for writing that glugs out of the deep unconscious like ketchup from a bottle, writing that can get drunk on ketchup as well as on champagne, drunk writing, intoxicated by beauty and ugliness alike —but as scornful of mediocrity as if it were a hairball coughed up by a poisoned cat.

I’m for writing that resembles alchemy. I’m for writing that has an
appetite.

I’m for writing that works all year on its Mardi Gras costume, sewing on feathers and bottle caps with a silver thread; writing that hums the notes that Miles and Dizzy and Thelonius hummed, that combines the motorboat scat that babies sing with that ongoing chirping requiem that some attribute to the central nervous system and others to the angels.

And lastly, I’m for writing that slips into hand-tooled Italian shoes, knots a fine Harvard Cravat about its neck, buttons on a heavy black cashmere and wool topcoat, climbs from a bullet-proof limousine onto a privileged podium in a beleaguered city, and with dignity, and with pride, and with compassion, says to an entire planet that is hanging on to every word, “I am a jelly doughnut.”

Tom Robbins