Events
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Start: 7:00 pm
Please join us in welcoming Michael Perry, acclaimed author and humorist, to The Bookcase on Tuesday, August 28 at 7:00pm.
What can we learn about life, love, and artillery from an
eighty-two-year-old man whose favorite hobby is firing his homemade
cannons? Visit by visit—often with his young daughters in tow—author
Michael Perry is about to find out.
Toiling in a shop Perry describes as "an antique store stocked by Rube
Goldberg, curated by Hunter Thompson, and rearranged by a small
earthquake," Tom Hartwig makes gag shovel handles, parts for
quarter-million-dollar farm equipment, and—now and then—batches of
potentially "extralegal" explosives. As he approaches his sixtieth
wedding anniversary with his wife, Arlene, Tom, famous for driving a
team of oxen in local parades, has an endless reservoir of stories
dating back to days of his prize Model A, and an anti-authoritarian
streak refreshed daily by the four-lane interstate that was shoved
through his front yard in 1965 and now dumps over 8 million vehicles
past his kitchen window every year. And yet Visiting Tom is
dominated by the elderly man's equanimity and ultimately—when he and
Perry converse over the kitchen table as husbands and as the fathers of
daughters—unvarnished tenderness.
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