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The Order of Oddfish

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Freya’s Lily Larouche Rap

October 14, 2010

Reminder: We’re throwing an outdoor Dome of Doom dance party this Saturday, October 16, at Pritzker Park in Chicago. Details, with raucous video, here!

My protégée Freya is at it again! Check out the ingenious Lily Larouche rap video above. (For those just dropping in: Lily Larouche is one of the main characters of my novel The Order of Odd-Fish. In a perfect world, Helen Mirren would play her in the movie.)

This is via Freya’s blog, which you should all check out. If you can’t see the video, here’s the lyrics. Extra points for rhyming “movie star” with “Côte d’Ivoire”:

Lily Larouche was a famous movie star
She vacationed in Tahiti or on the Côte d’Ivoire
She was the tabloids’ favorite, caused a rumor a week
But Miss Larouche’s style was always quite unique.
She got busted twice for reckless hot air ballooning
But she didn’t mind; no, she found it quite amusing
The President Dwight Eisenhower loved her from afar
One quiet Christmas Eve, he sent his eyebrows in a jar!
Then suddenly the great Larouche was gone, right off the map
This vanishing was big, it left the tabloids in a flap
They swore, “We won’t forget her!” but as the years wore on
Detectives and search parties had naught to build upon
Her memory just faded from everybody’s mind
Until, forty years later, Lily awoke to find
She was in her Ruby Palace (her giant crimson home)
The sobs of a small baby said she wasn’t alone
She followed to the laundry room where she was shocked to see
A baby in her washer, pinned to the cloth a plea:
Please take care of Jo, but beware: DANGEROUS baby!
Lily thought the unknown note-writer to be crazy
For Jo seemed just as dangerous as a glass of milk
But Lily, she got older, lost her grip, wore gowns of silk
That she used to use in movies she filmed in days of glory
And little Jo grew older – well, that’s another story!


Fantastic work, Freya! She also just wrote a similarly awesome Nora McGunn rap; I’ll post that video too when she’s done. Freya’s en fuego lately!

Other news, briefly: there was a great article by Sean Callahan in the Notre Dame alumni magazine about my attempts to publicize Odd-Fish, and other alumni writers’ attempts to publicize their books. The magazine photographer, Matt Cashore, turned out to be the husband of a college friend, Maria Rogers. (He also turns out to be a distant cousin of Kristin Cashore, the author of the acclaimed Graceling and Fire. The world of young adult fantasy can be surprisingly small!)

Anyway, when the time came for us to take a picture for the article, we made a day of it at my wife’s family’s cottage on Lake Michigan. We decided to take the pictures down on the beach. The picture they eventually used was of me obliviously rowing a kayak on dry land (a stinging metaphor for the futile, quixotic nature of book publicity, I suppose). It’s a good picture, but it’s not the most interesting.

We found a elderly, nearly dead bird on the beach. It was so feeble I could pick it up without it flying away. I thought it would make for a great photo, in a Mary-Timony-by-way-of-Gob-Bluth way:

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Fly, bird of literary ambition! Fly!