Tales of the Tinkertoy
By JJ Semple
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About this ebook
When 15-year-old Gus Mazur leaves his Oklahoma birthplace to live with his aunt and uncle in New York City, he narrowly escapes the blame for getting a girl "in trouble." In the Big Apple, a whole new life opens for Gus-from boarding school to university to Marine Corps duty in Paris to a career at the WBN television network.
It's the dawn of civil rights struggles; WBN needs reporters with insider access to events off limits to their white counterparts, which enables Gus, as the network's only non-white producer, to be promoted executive producer by the age of 30. Yet, he chafes when he's forced to run civil rights and Vietnam stories that hide the truth from the American people. But the money is good and there aren't that many opportunities for "someone like him."
It is also a time of liberation when women in all walks of life assert themselves. No more so than in television. It's against a backdrop of war, a struggle for civil rights, women's liberation, and television that Gus's encounters with three exceptional ladies lead to a greater self-awareness:
Joanna/Vicki: Gus's first love whose dedication to her career as an economist dictates a relationship based on yearning and remembrance as they pass through each other's lives—on-again, off-again.
Lil: A gentle Chinese-American who keeps Gus real in the face of the compromises he's forced to make and the commercialism that pervades the television industry. After Gus is waylaid in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, she's instrumental in helping him piece his life back together.
Skipper/Miriam: A dedicated third-grade teacher and exceptional athlete-Gus's bi-sexual lover, who by exposure to Gus's work, imagines herself an anchorwoman—a dream come true when she becomes the first woman to shatter television’s glass ceiling.
Skipper’s popularity takes WBN’s management by surprise. She embodies the pent-up hopes of thousands of women long denied access to jobs such as hers. As she receives more and more mail from adoring fans, she begins to believe in her infallibility. To encourage this cult of personality Noah Goodstein, the manipulative, conniving president of WBN, surrounds her with sycophants and toadies.
The lives of the main characters begin to unravel when Skipper refuses to answer questions about her sister’s disappearance. Her career threatened, she turns to Goodstein who will go to any lengths to protect the network’s popular anchorwoman, provided Skipper agrees to marry him, a surefire way, he believes, of binding his most precious asset to the network. He’s counting on her popularity to pay for the losses incurred by the News Division, which puts him at loggerheads with Gus who wants to preserve the objectivity of the News. And yet...despite Goodstein’s clout with the authorities and Skipper’s popularity, the police decide to look into her sister’s whereabouts.
Simone de Beauvoir once called Stendhal and Joseph Conrad feminist writers. Add to that list Tolstoy (Anna Karenina), Henry James (Portrait of a Lady), and Theodore Dreiser (Carrie). Tales of the Tinkertoy carries on the tradition of these great minds.
JJ Semple
JJ Semple has worked as a film editor for NBC with TV producers Stuart Schulberg and Ted Yates, and he edited “Assassin,” an independent feature film, for Rod Bradley's Streetlight Productions.In the 1970s and 80s he lived in France, where he directed his own training school, Arazon, a company that prepared managers for negotiation and problem solving. After attending a French business school, he established a subsidiary of UNILOG, a leading French software company, in the US. He returned to Paris to work for Apple Computer Europe, designing multimedia programs. He also taught a multimedia course at the American University in Paris. It was during this period that he began writing feature screenplays.His screenplay, “Everyone Wants to Make Movies” (co-written with Mark Richardson) won the Telluride award in 1997, and their screenplay “Little Dan” won first place at the Telluride Independent Film Festival in 2000.Semple's formal education includes studying English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and George Washington University, and a master’s degree in marketing from Hauts Etudes de Commerce in Paris.His personal education involves yogic practices and spiritual exploration, inspired by a wide variety of teachers, writers and philosophers, including Gopi Krishna, Milarepa, and Lao Tse. However, his worldly accomplishments pale beside his thirty years of investigating workable methods for activating the Kundalini~Life Force. JJ Semple is one of the foremost authorities on the practice and application of Kundalini~Life Force Science.
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