Scared of Scorpions: My Year of Hell in the Holy Land

by Chauncey Roberts

Overview

With his Vegas-made music video Palestine, My Heart playing on the radio in Tunisia, songwriter Chauncey Roberts tours Syria for the first time when his movie camera is stolen in February 2010. After numerous meetings with Damascus police--even writing a song as tribute for the chief's young wife--Roberts is advised by the US Embassy to get out of the country at once. And yet the camera theft has triggered a downward spiral when, tumbling over the brink of disaster, Roberts pushes onward to co-produce the Palestine, My Heart Concert in Bethlehem on June 5, 2010. Then comes the Gaza Flotilla Tragedy, bringing the concert to a halt less than a week before show-time.
Exhausted, Roberts next creates from a Hebron hospital (before scandal hits) a unique TV sitcom, Princess of Palestine, based on a divinely gifted teenage pianist from Bethlehem. "Don't worry about the money!" exclaims his young German co-producer, who suddenly exits during the Arab Spring. Overstaying his Israeli visa by nine months Roberts is inspired by Palestinian children and a scout troop to commence writing a suspense screenplay, Camp Evil, in which Jewish settlers terrorize a Palestinian Boy and Girl Scout camp.
Paranoid. Delusional. Committed to the truth. Meeting Palestinian psychos and talent, Israeli bogies real and imagined, the risky, beer-drinking vagabondish farmboy from West Virginia keeps penning songs and scenes, breaking rules and escaping from landlords until his final escape from the Holy Land...and Israel which says he can never return.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940045768153
Publisher:	Chauncey Roberts
Publication date:	04/06/2014
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Originally from Charleston, West Virginia,
Chauncey Roberts was educated at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, the University of Washington in Seattle, and in Freiburg, Germany. Injured with minor head injury at age 23, he abandoned a possible political career while suffering from "vagabondage" and moving continuously, including around the world while teaching business English and at universities while writing screenplays, articles, short stories and songs. Roberts was a participant in the Hungarian Revolution of 1989; his song Palestine, My Heart played on the radio in Tunisia before the Arab Spring. Before upheaval in Ukraine in 2013 he sang his "Judgment for the Bushes" at a Kiev festival. In 2013 he created a podcast series for Yappi Corporate in Kiev, The Saga of Lusty Louise, in which he impersonated all the male voices and two older female roles. His first video blogs are short historical films made in Germany, Building the Case for a War Crimes Tribunal Against Bush, His Cronies and Blair. His music videos include Impotent Again and There's a Child (tribute to Iraq War refugees). His newest song is "Boycott Israel: Don't Eat Their Bananas."