It started in 1980...

 n 1980, when I was 23, I did not understand that there’d been a big surge in the novel-publishing business during the past three decades, and that meant that a book could be perfectly terrible and still come out in hardback. I’d bought a novel with a promising title in a second-hand shop, and one Sunday afternoon I tried the first chapter and kept reading, thinking I surely would get to the well-written, interesting part soon.

I said out loud, in my empty apartment, “I could write a better book than this.”

No planning, no fear, no experience. I wrote this novel, Olé, Baby (originally titled Tutti Frutti) over one very hot summer when I lived in a small apartment without air conditioning in Bloomington, Indiana. For reasons too boring to explain here, the book came out many years later as a spiral-bound chapbook, and not many of those, either.

Now here it is, in online form. I see that it lacks polish, but I like it anyway. The plot is simple: in the late 1950s, teenage girls break into the rock-and-roll world by dressing as boys. Neither “Tootsie” nor “Mrs. Doubtifre” had come out in 1980, but “Laverne & Shirley” was on television, and I think the wacky adventure part of the book was influenced by that show. I loved Katharine Hepburn in the 1930s film “Sylvia Scarlett” and Betty Garrett as cabbie Ivy in “On The Town,” but I’d say the biggest influence may have been Lucille Ball in a zoot suit during the “I Love Lucy” episode “The Saxophone.” That’s the one where Lucy says, “Everything I play comes out sounding like ‘Glow Worm.'” The narrator in Olé, Baby plays the sax. Need I say more?  

Ready to begin Chapter 1? You can go to the blog menu on the right to get started or you can click or tap on this link.