Virgin of the rodeo

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Step right up and join Sonja K. Getz - big hips, bigger brain, monster mouth - on her tour of the West that Was Suppressed. They say that all true Western heroes are outsiders; well, in Dorfburg, Texas, you can't get much farther out than a jumbo-sized, rabidly P.C. woman who won't shut up and doesn't give a warm cowpie whether you like it or not. Vowing to show all the hometown clods - starting with Tinka, her iron-willed, cutie-pie German single mother - Sonja embarks upon a quest to find the father she knows only from a worn photo of a Native American trick roper. Sarah Bird, called "a fearless madcap"' with a "sharp eye and a rapier wit," takes us along as Sonja transforms herself into "Son." Son hitches a ride with the Ronpope-slurping, Percodan-gobbling Prairie James - the, by God, best damned trick roper north of the Rio Grande - and his all-white wonder horse, Domino, for a tour of the offbeat rodeo circuit. Along the way they meet Prairie's old sweetheart, the female bullriding champ of the world, and her five children; an eight-fingered black roper who had to win his buckle after all the white boys had quit; an alligator-wrestling suitor for Son; a peyote-pushing sham shaman; and the wildly racist, intractably chauvinistic producer who rules his fiefdom of alternative rodeo with an electric cattle prod. Besides discovering that both cowboys and love can come in a variety of shapes, colors, and genders, Son also learns that the man who starts your life - your real life, the one you were meant to lead - just ought to be your father. When Sarah Bird turns her perversely compassionate eye for the outsider on that curious borderland where the lyrical myths of the Old West clank against contemporary realities, the result is a lot of candles being lighted to the "Virgin of the Rodeo."