A GREAT COMING OF AGE STORY
"Jesus In Cowboy Boots" is an eccentric story about an imaginative teenager growing up in a dirty, dusty backwater community along the Texas/Oklahoma border. Vallie Sue lives in a peculiar trailer park built on a deserted drive-in movie lot nicknamed Tardust, after the rusty sign still standing near the entrance, but missing the first letter of STARDUST Drive-in.
Vallie Sue's mind is a bubbling stew of fictions and fantasies, including her imaginary alter ego and favorite cinematic star, The Cowboy. She converses with him in her sanctuary, the run-down playground in front of the weathered movie screen. From a distance, it appears she's talking to herself. But she's imagining The Cowboy on the screen or riding across the Great Plains with her shootin' the breeze.
She's got a heap to ruminate on, being surrounded by a curious collection of characters, like her ravenous self-absorbed 31-year-old mother, Tammy; her feisty, slow-witted brother, Pleasant; her wild and wicked friends, Loretta and Francine; a mysterious Indian caretaker named Tenkill; and two lowlife neighbors up to their eyeballs in evil ways, Mickey and Old Ray.
Vallie Sue struggles for purpose in this shoal of contrary currents, pulled between the spiritual ministrations of church revivals and the temptations of young bucks at the Two-Kiss Drive-up. She's puzzled by the opposing forces of her mother's distaste for Tenkill and her brother's fascination with him. And she's oppressed by a barren environment that subverts her dream of becoming a writer.
Worse than that, she makes powerful enemies of Mickey and Old Ray, who stalk her and, one night, change her life forever.
"Jesus In Cowboy Boots" is a curious combination of fantasy and reality. At times, it's intense and serious, but it's also charming and humorous.
Ultimately, though, it's the story of a teenage girl's self-realization and her struggle for deliverance from the world she was born into.
