Evil weirdness in the Vermouth Theater bathroom... a topless lassie emoting over the bagpipes... Celeste’s bad case of waiter-lust... the Manila envelope resurfaces...
It could only be Round 3 of our continuing tag-team triumph, “Right of Way.” And since Hunter Thompson’s not around to make sense of the madness, what happens next is up to you.
How did our story become so severely twisted so fast? Blame it on Alex Austin, the West Hills-based novelist, teacher and playwright, who linked the Sydney Pizer character’s use of the word “laddie” with his own family’s oral history to come up with a Scottish burr under the saddle of L.A. Mayor Russ Napolitano.
“Even after decades in the U.S.,” Austin says, his mother and her siblings “used words right out of the poetry of Robert Burns. Boys and girls were ‘laddies’ and ‘lassies.’ So Sydney Pizer... had to be a Scot.”
Austin says his mother and her Scottish family tended to heat their homes to 85 degrees, a psychological by-product of their constant struggle to stay warm in the ancestral homeland.
“Scotland has few trees and apparently had few dinosaurs, for oil and natural gas deposits are negligible,” Austin says.
“What the Scots did have was peat, which not only can be burned as fuel, but is used to make Scotch whiskey, giving the spirit its distinctive flavor. Unfortunately, there’s not enough peat, so the Scots have long faced choosing between the manufacture of whiskey and warm interior environments.”
Lucky for Austin, and for us, that meant a lot of cold nights in the Lowlands, which led to the intolerably heated atmosphere that spawned Austin’s urge to write.
What he’s written about here plays upon the parallels between the methane gas deposits under L.A. and the peat bogs back in the old country. Both can be mined as large-scale fuel sources, yet both, if not handled properly, can also blow up in your face.
Austin’s pages 7-11 bring us to a critical juncture, hinting at a complex back-story packed tight with potential menace. What went wrong on Scotland’s East Highland Line, and how was Celeste’s industrialist husband Larry involved? Was Larry just forced to pay the ultimate price? And how does it all tie in with the mayor’s quest to build his subway?
The questions are in place. Let’s start digging up some answers.
