Moon Pies and Movie Stars

Moon Pies and Movie Stars by our own South Park neighborhood gal, Amy Wallen (host of Open Mic here at The Grove the first Friday of every month) takes us back to 1976, when feisty Texas momma Ruby Kincaid pits herself against the Hollywood machine in a laugh-out-loud romp across America.

Moon Pies and Movie Stars

CHAPTER ONE, PAGE ONE

By Amy Wallen; Viking, 308 pages, $23.95

December 10, 2006

Ruby leaned down, pinched the rattlesnake behind the jaw, flipped it over and milked its venom sacs. Its rattler buttons ticked like a Timex gone haywire. She reached for the deadbolt on the back door. The snake's tail flopped and the rattler buttons shook. The slick scales felt loose between her fingers, so she tightened her grip, enraging the rattlesnake even more. Once she got the door open, she flung the rattler with all her might, hoping it would land in Oklahoma. It flailed and flipped in midair, then hit the ground with a thud and a cloud of dust. Like a shot, it took off in the opposite direction, under the barbed wire fence that divided her property from Earl Glidden's back pasture.

Those damn rattlesnakes snuck into the back pinsetter room of the Devine Bowl every chance they could get. The cool concrete in the hot summer was just too inviting. But Ruby didn't have time for that kind of business this morning. She had gone back to that musty room in the first place to collect the cardboard with V&H Wedding scrawled in purple magic marker on the side in her daughter Violet's curlicue handwriting. She found the box up on the top shelf and by climbing onto the mechanical workings of the bowling alley's pinsetters, she was able to lift it down from the shelf and set it on the concrete floor where the snake had previously lay prone.

The alley's dusty inner workings made her nose twitch. As she opened the cardboard flaps, a wad of tulle spilled out and she brushed it aside. Beneath it sat four rolls of pale purple crepe paper, which wouldn't be nearly enough. Luckily, she'd bought more. Rifling through the rest she found ten white, fold-up honeycomb bells; purple satin ribbon already tied into bows, but now flat as an armadillo crossing Highway 90; and an opened package of paper doilies. Piled on the very bottom of the box, in neat stacks, were lavender paper napkins. Picking one up, she turned it over to see the silver embossing:

Violet & Harley
July 10, 1966
True Love Forever

Biggest lie ever told, Ruby said to herself.

You'll love this tender and side-splittingly funny story of indomitable spirit and unstoppable force. Ruby packs a Winnebago with two friends, two unruly grandkids, and a mondo-size package of MoonPies and hightails it to California to fetch her wayward daughter. In a madcap road trip from the dusty flats of Texas to the glittering aisles of The Price Is Right, Ruby survives with a little pluck and some Texas spunk.