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Characters in the
Skeeter Kitefly Books
(presented more-or-less in the order of their appearance)
Page Five
The Ups and Downs of
Skeeter Kitefly
Skeeter Kitefly's Sugardaddy Confessor
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Skeeter Kitefly's
Titular Assets
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COMPACTIFICATION
behind the scenes
RoBynne O'Ring's
GRUNTS OF
PASSION
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Last Updated
February 06, 2010
Lucky Pierre and
Antoinette Derente
Peyton's parents: he's a cabaret pianist
(cadet
offshoot of the wealthy Derente
family) and she's a Louisiana-born dabbler
in
the Demortuis art scene.
...A Chico Marxlike love for gambling kept him plugging away on the nightclub circuit. He’d rehearse with racing forms propped beside his sheet music; come home from tours either bearing expensive presents or emptyhanded and -pocketed. Had a Chicolike eye for the ladies too, for filles de joie of every age and race; but always remained faithful (in his heart) to Peyton’s mother. As for Antoinette: it was gumbo this and gazpacho that, jambalaya every day and lots of Gallic shrugs...
Jazzbo the Suave
Jacques Derente VI, Peyton's third cousin
and surrogate older brother.
...For the Wizard of Schnoz, that storied epoch culminated in a summer road trip via Jazzbo’s new LeMans Sport convertible, cherchez-ing les femmes du Moyen-Ouest—or “chasing country twattail,” as Jazzbo phrased it...
Dawn Swift
A languid ceramics major at Merely SAD.
...A drowsy young Brünnhilde, very fair and sedate, whose white jersey put you in mind of yodeling milkmaids...
The Dilated Pupils (Nazztrils)
Student social group at Merely SAD
and the
Elsew No-Nazz; called the "Dilated Nostrils"
by Sadie
Benison.
“...Anybody can play the highbrow,” he’d say, “but it takes flair and scope and depth to be a Dilated Nostril!...”
Henry Bramham
Sculpting instructor who becomes Dean of
Merely SAD.
...What other conclusion could you jump to? with gaunt Henry Bramham, that counter of pennies and paradigms, taking over as Dean? Merely SAD had been forced to face up to the need for hard-edged austerity, and who better to impose it than a Minimalist sculptor? Get out the adze and chopping block!...
Isobel Otterburn
Merely SAD's semicelebrated Performing Arts
instructor.
...Isobel Otterburn, regarding them with the utmost distrust, signaled for a halt; but not only were the Dilated Pupils somberly dressed and ‑expressioned, they were filming the proceedings with a Super 8 camera. And celluloid, to the conceptual-minded, was irresistible: “as-one-of-the-mechanical-media,-it-lends-validation-to-any-artistic-endeavor...”
Elizabeth Goade and the Salamander Troika
Isobel Otterburn's star
protégées, who enact
Burnt Offering and Burial tableaux.
...As a performance artist she was a standout: while the other Troikarinas tended the Burnt Offering hibachi, scattering ash and dust, Beth would strike spasmodic postures with head flung back, nostrils agape, and eyes popping out of their sockets—“not unlike a colt realizing it’s trapped in a bog...”
CHARACTERS:
Page
One
Page Two
Page Three
Page Four
Page Five
Page Six
The Wunderlichs
Robert S. Hallowday (Hal)
Peyton's oldest friend in Elsew: once the
principal Dilated Pupil, later editor/publisher
of Current magazine.
“...Yes, we go back a long ways, you and I,” Hal grinned. “Remember those all-night poker sessions at Marr’s? Good times; good times.”
What Peyton recalled was saying Don’t bogart those, Esau, while Chairman Hal raked in pot after pot...
Confidence Man
Peyton's cartoon depiction of Ronald Reagan
(also known as the Trickledown Mummer in
the White House).
...Confidence Man needs a martial moment, so let’s invade an island in the Caribbean (not Stalingrad, mind you) and depose a Marxist regime (not Castro’s, mind you) in nine days flat—and be a proven wonder! To stirring strains of B‑movie music, and the audience’s hip-hip huzzahs...
Mrs. Rhodes
Skeeter's new boss at the St. Mintred
Medical
Center Women's Clinic.
...Last night she’d been pissed at a Mrs. Rhodes, her dyspeptic new clinic manager at SMECK, who’d declared herself “shocked and dismayed” at something Skeeter’d either done or failed to do. Whereupon Skeeter lost no time in dubbing Mrs. Rhodes “Wide Load” and “That Would-Be Colossus...”
Vincent Van Gogh Jr.
Merely SAD painting major who was "overcome
by cruddy vapors."
...And don’t forget that kid who’d gone so far with his Van Gogh emulation as to commit botched-but-terminal suicide by shooting himself in the stomach. Quickest way to a man’s heart, after all...
Asa Pursch Ewell (APE)
Pioneer newspaper cartoonist, and subject
of
Peyton's famous unfinished monograph.
...A monograph, Peyton explained, was a scholarly treatise on a specified subject. “Oh. Looks like yours is about rummage sales.” “No. APE.” “Apes?” “A.P.E. Asa Pursch Ewell. A Post-Expressionist cartoonist. Completely forgotten today, of course.” “As Per Usual...”
Daring Dewey and Farf Etched
Characters in A. P. Ewell's groundbreaking
comic strip.
...In Daring Dewey, APE took distortion to elliptical heights. Peyton would search for some confirmation of contemporary influences—the Fauves, Die Brücke, Kandinsky, Cubism—but there was only Farf Etched hitching rides on speech balloons, stealing a scowl from a scowlery and using it to transform from Stone Age caveman to Louis XVI gentilhomme to elegant lepidopteran taking wing into the surrealistic twilight sky...
Thomas Stockwood
Longtime Chairman of the Merely SAD Design
Division; ousted by Dean Henry Bramham.
...Picture Foghorn Leghorn with a white leonine shock, blackstrap molasses drawl, and habit of sweeping aside anything he found uninteresting as “Irrelevant trivialities! What’s important Ah say important heah is the DISPLAY! the PRESENTATION! the IM-PACT”—and you’ve got Br’er Tom...
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