Dancing Around the Cooking Pot Query
A coup? A civil war? How did we get here? Why didn’t we see it coming? Could we really be that blind?
“Stop it! Will you people stop screaming at each other? Will you shut up?" The tour guide was trembling with rage. "Who are you idiots? What are you? A rotten empire full of spoiled fools screaming at each other while your country falls down around you! You are a plague upon the world! You are monsters and you don’t even know what monsters you are! How are you different from the Germans, the English, the Turks? You devour the world and then turn on yourself like dirty cannibals! Can you not hear yourselves screaming at each other? A hundred thousand businesses have closed in Greece! A third of my people live in poverty! Hundreds of families are abandoning their children because they cannot feed them! You are garbage! Garbage!! I curse you and your children and the children of your children!” The guide took a deep breath. “The bus leaves the ruins in half an hour!” He whirled around and stomped off.
It’s a couple of years into the Great Recession and DAN, on one last fling after losing his restaurant in the crash shares a cab with LUCIA, a right-wing divorcee who made her fortune in the private prison industry, to Piraeus and a ship embarking on a cheap tour of the Greek Islands. Before he knows it, he is deep in an affair that burns across the Aegean in suites, cabins, broom closets, lifeboats and donkey stables, and this redhead is just his first taste of a ship full of eccentric fellow citizens, each one convinced they know what has gone wrong with their country and what must be done about it. BUCK, a Vietnam vet wallowing in bourbon on the rocks is furious that the IMF and its Wall Street masters, on a practice run for the good old U. S. of A. are working over Greece like a seventy-year-old senator works over a seventeen-year-old intern. BOB and SALLY, a middle -aged couple beaming with the change they can believe in from their first African American president are proud citizens of the greatest democracy on earth that shines democracy like a beacon into the dark, undemocratic shadows of the undemocratic world. GLADYS and NADINE, two wealthy widows are aghast that the little people have put a Communist, Socialist, Nazi, Bolshevik, Kenyan, Hottentot in the White House. This Molotov Cocktail gets stirred and shaken one night at the bar so hard that CESARIA, an octogenarian bedecked in a whirlwind of tribal fabrics proclaims the ruckus sounds like a bunch of cannibals DANCING AROUND THE COOKING POT and entices everyone to join her on a tour of the ruins of Knossos the next day. On the tour bus, COURTNEY and JUSTIN, a pair of millennials accuse DAN and his fellow Baby Boomers of drowning them in college debt and ruining their lives. When JOHN, a widower grieving the recent death of his husband decides that the archeologist who excavated Knossos was gay as a goose, the bell rings for round two. All hell breaks loose and the tour guide snaps. The melee attracts a slimy American politician touring the ruins with his shrew of a wife who is happy to take the stage and make it very clear who is in charge and what is really going on in the greatest country in the world. Then an earthquake collapses a wall and buries them both alive. Suddenly everyone realizes that the only way they can negotiate the rock-strewn roads, slip past the authorities and get through riot torn Heraklion to the ship before it sails is to work as one. A breathless, tear gas drenched escape binds them together. A storm at sea is another matter. The fire is lit, the cauldron is bubbling and it’s time for dinner.
DANCING AROUND THE COOKING POT is an 88,000-word literary novel that relishes the personalities of a tragicomic cast of Americans, offers humor to expose the canyons between them, compassion to bridge them and a glimmer of hope in a dark warning of what is to come.
I am an award-winning artist and have published fiction and illustrations, written a graphic novel, short stories, poetry and commentary.
Thank you for your time and consideration,
Richard Hill rthill13@gmail.com 2110 Jackson Street #602 San Francisco, CA 94115
Instagram: rtill13 - Website: rickhillsf.com - Facebook: Rick Hill SF 415-793-4279
