And every one of those
words rang true
And glowed like
burning coal
-
Bob Dylan, Tangled Up in Blue
Piltdown Lad 8.5
The Cult of Teddy Ruxpin
Kelly Dessaint
For the first dozen pages of The Cult of Teddy Ruxpin I thought I was reading a word-for-word
account of my adolescence. My parents were Christians and I remember attending
numerous “revival” meetings – the shouting preachers, hellfire and damnation,
Jesus as the only bridge to salvation, the call to be born again, the magnetic
tug of the crowd as people leave their seats to push up front and be blessed, the
ceaseless persuasion to conform, the mesmerizing speaking in tongues, the
baptism of fire.
Through his writing, Kelly captures the mixed emotions of
adolescence, the mixed motivations, feelings, and thoughts that besiege us in
the spaces between childhood and adulthood. The Cult of Teddy Ruxpin is a story of rebellion and personal
evolution. Like most of Kelly’s zines, this was a “read straight through”
session – cliché as it sounds, I literally could not put this zine down until I
was finished reading. Then I started at the beginning again.
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