Hitting the road

Old folks on a joyride in The Leisure
Seeker; Robin Bowman crosses
America to investigate teenagers

by JULIET WATERS

Missing: John and Ella Robina. Married senior citizens, last seen heading out of Detroit driving a ’78 Leisure Seeker RV. Could be dangerous, mostly to themselves, but also to others.

Ella, the brains behind the peripatetic duo, is dying of cancer and has nothing to lose. John, the driver, has a gun, a death wish and Alzheimer’s. Potentially suicidal, when he remembers to be. Against their adult children’s wishes, and all medical advice, the couple has “kidnapped themselves” to set out for one last joyride along what remains of the historic Route 66.

It will be no surprise if Michael Zadoorian’s The Leisure Seeker hits the big screen one day, taking its place among my favourite road movies, Thelma and Louise, Little Miss Sunshine and Hard Core Logo.

Casting John would be easy. This would be another great role for Alan Arkin as the alternately randy, sweet, foul-mouthed and demented driver.

Weird thing about Alzheimer’s: you can forget the identity of the person you’ve been married to for 50 years, you can carry a picture of your “friends” at Publisher’s Clearing House in your wallet believing it’s your family, and you can wonder if every single motel you stay in is home. But your ability to drive is apparently one of the last things to go.

I’ve heard that about music too. Alzheimer’s victims will lose the ability to speak before they forget how to play an instrument. So if I have one real criticism about The Leisure Seeker, it’s that I would’ve made John a musician. Seems appropriate, given the route they’re travelling.

I had a harder time trying to mentally cast Ella. She’d have to have the acting chops to seem mom enough to call her worried-sick kids, all the while maintaining the stubbornness of a runaway teen, and the language of a Detroit truck driver. She’d have her snarky side. The kind of gal who sees through that phony, folksy Will Rogers. “Any man who never met a man he didn’t like just isn’t trying hard enough.” She’d have to look innocent enough to talk a state trooper out of his suspicions. And without giving too much away, I hope, she’d also have to be able to pull a gun on someone and look like she means it.

Ella’s complicated. But so is aging. “Even beyond the teen years, parents still have to prove to their children that they are not as stupid as they think.” This is not to say that this is the best idea, “Two down-on-their-luck geezers, one with more health problems than a third world country, the other so senile that he doesn’t even know what day it is—taking a cross country road trip.” But as Ambrose Bierce once wrote: “It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs.”

FROM OLD TO YOUNG

I don’t usually review my Christmas gifts, but last year a friend of mine from NYC gave me Robin Bowman’s It’s Complicated: The American Teenager, which I just found out made the American Library Association’s 2009 top 10 books for young adults. Bowman’s stunning collection of pictures and essays by teens across the U.S. also won the 2008 Gold medal for photography at the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

It would be impossible to gush enough about this book. Over the course of four years, Bowman took eight trips across the country, taking Polaroids of every possible type of teen that exists in the U.S. From prom queen to pregnant hillbilly drop-out; fundamentalist to second generation bohemian; Hassids to prep school wasps; debutant to drag queen.

Then working with the kids, giving them final editorial approval, she went from the Polaroids to high-end art portraits, each accompanied by a short oral history. I defy anyone to find a class, religion, race or sexuality that isn’t represented here. A mind-blowing accomplishment that makes vivid truth out of the fact that these echo boomers are double the population of their parents.

THE LEISURE SEEKER BY MICHAEL
ZADOORIAN, WILLIAM MORROW,
HC. 288 PP, $24.99
IT’S COMPLICATED: THE AMERICAN
TEENAGER BY ROBIN BOWMAN,
UMBRAGE EDITIONS, HC, 153 PP, $48