SYNOPSIS

Three days before her Ash Wednesday wedding, an unhappy bride dyes her wedding gown black and drinks "an unexpected quantity" of light green ink. Although it fails to poison her, the ink stains her veins and arteries until she resembles "a stalk of celery left too long in a glass of colored water." Concerned, her maid of honor - who is having an affair with the groom - brings her a gift-wrapped package of heavy pancake make-up. But the wedding, of course, is off. In the world of Jennifer Boylan, the lives of ordinary people may go suddenly, disturbingly awry, while those of the not-so-ordinary come completely unhinged. Astronaut Elvis Presley rides into orbit aboard a rhinestone-studded space capsule. Polar explorer Jimmy Durante, lost in Antarctica, recites "Da Rime of da An-chink Mariner." Lyndon Johnson assumes the presidency on the death of the assassinated John Lennon. Aging stooge Moe Howard (whose trademark line gives Boylan her title) is transformed into a bearded, tablet-bearing Moses. ("Oh, a wise guy.") In twenty stories that mix comedy and horror, face and fantasy, Jennifer Boylan pursues the absurd, the grotesque, and the surreal with a relentless, deadpan logic. The merely eccentric, however, he invests with an offbeat charm that masks a barely controlled manic energy. "That's what it's like to be a human cannonball, Johnson," a former circus star tells his piano tuner. "Jesus, if we had a cannon around here, I'd show you." taken from the cover of the book

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