Bruce Hoppe

The Thomas Ladies Club Bruce Hoppe

Picture Lauderback, a 21st century itinerant reporter, laboring in self-inflicted obscurity for dying country weeklies across the Heartland. He is down...but not out. (The only reason he's not out being it would never occur to him that he's down.) Picture the Thomas Ladies Club, a relic of a building, all that is left of the dust bowl blighted town of Thomas. And its long gone club members, the keepers of high spirits and side-splitting one liners with which they raged against the darkness of their times. There was Fern Sisk, who once met Emma Goldman, the affable Nell "Sissy" Childers, and, former Harvey girl and wing walker extraordinaire, Emmaline Blankenship. Picture Lauderback hearing their voices. And that they can talk, Lauderback and the women. For the Thomas Ladies, those sirens of the steppe, have plans for Lauderback. And those plans have little to do with Lauderback's quixotic quest to revive the Heartland via the much disputed power of his pen, nor with his all time historical hero, the agrarian populist, "Sockless" Jerry Simpson. Picture only these things (The love story? Don't even think about picturing that.) and you will have nibbled at a story as enduring as legend yet as current as the latest Wall Street Ponzi scheme. While this book is about surviving one's own existence, neither a feedlot ecoterrorist nor the fusion band, Rasta Cowboy, neither the southwest monsoon frog wizard nor the antics at the annual Buckaroo Cotillion can deter Lauderback from keeping such weighty pursuits, if only in his view, firmly on the festive side.