Mike Schraeder

Honky-Tonk musician Gary Stewart was known to “ride an audience like bucking a bronco." When people listened to him sing, many wondered if he would “get out of the song alive” with his wild-abandoned approach to performance. He had a slew of hits throughout the seventies and early eighties and played with the likes of the Allman Brothers and Charlie Pride while writing hits for Country legends Hank Snow and Bill Walker. Bob Dylan, while on tour in Florida, once tracked down Stewart’s double-wide trailer to pay his respects. And by his side, through it all, was his wife of forty-three years, Mary Lou.

Yet their life and marriage was not entirely a honkey-tonk heaven. Stewart’s career took a downward swing once the 80s arrived. His music was too rock ‘n’ roll for country fans and too country for rock ‘n’ roll fans. Stewart was essentially a genre unto himself and this was not good for record sales. While his career was on its last leg, Steward suffered a terrible car accident in 1980 that pushed him towards painkillers and even more alcohol. His only safe-haven were the lusty, burnt-out, alcohol-ridden honkey-tonk bars of third-rate southern and southwestern towns whose patrons saw in Stewart what the Nashville record producers could not see—a musician who superseded labels and refused to conform for the suits who had taken over Country and Rock ‘n’ Roll music. “Little Junior” was always welcomed among his own kind—red necks, hillbillies, outlaws, women of questionable morals, drunks, and coke-heads who wore torn up blue jeans, turquoise, leather, belt buckles, cowboy hats, and rattle-snake boots. If the record producers couldn’t accept him for who he was, then he would sing for those who could.

Mary Lou, or “Lou” as Stewart called her, stood by her man from the time the twenty-year old small town Florida girl kicked the sixteen-year old Stewart out of her car at a drive-in movie theatre for sitting on her records in the backseat. They married two years later and would spend the next forty three years loving, hating, fighting (sometimes with fists, sometimes with knives, sometimes with guns, but most of the time with words), raising two children, reaching the height of musical fame and then losing it in a matter of a few years, and hopping on and falling off the wagon more times than they could count. When Lou passed away from a heart attack in 2003, Stewart had just begun touring again at the age of 58. Lou’s death was the fatal blow for a man who struggled with more demons than Orestes in Aeschylus’ trilogy. Little Junior shot himself in the neck a mere three weeks after Lou’s passing. Gary Stewart and the Last of the White Buffalo is about their forty three years together.

Sammy’s life is spiraling out of control. Due to her meth addiction, she is in danger of losing her eleven-year-old son as she attempts to make ends meet as a stripper and prostitute. The lives of her and her son potentially take a turn for the better once a young Mormon missionary knocks at their door. Sammy is forced to face the abuse of her past as she tries to prepare her son for the harsh realities of growing up poor and weak.

The Chicken Coop Stratagem follows the journey of Margie Kroll, a middle-aged woman who has problems on a biblical scale. She’s trapped in a small town. Her husband is abusive. Her lover has become “born again” and has consequently left her. And to top it all off, the bar she owns with her husband, The Chicken Coop, is being picketed every night by the congregation of The Mt. Moriah Bible Church of Jessford, TX. She wants to abandon it all for the sake of finding her independence, identity, and living out her dreams of adventure, but personal issues with codependence as a result of a lifetime of mental and physical abuse stand in her way. When Margie discovers a way out, she must decide upon comprising her moral integrity for the sake of freedom or taking advantage of a small window of opportunity even though it may mean being haunted by its ethical implications for the rest of her life. The Chicken Coop Stratagem is a comedic examination of how the battle between religion and secularism affect the average person’s life and how one woman tries to discover who she truly is amongst the backdrop of abusive relationships, spiritual confusion, and living in a small rural community.

Jocelyn Pickleberry, a substitute teacher and Christian Self-Help author, has just published her first book with the help of her attractive and masculine literary agent Trevor. Jocelyn has volunteered her unemployed, librarian husband Dale to drive her and Trevor on her first book tour across the Midwest in order to spread the Word of Jesus and, of course, to sell as many books as possible. Dale sees this as an opportunity to reunite with his elderly grandmother, the executor of the Pickleberry Cheese trust. Dale discovers that the first grandchild to provide a great-grandchild for Grandma with receive the entire Pickleberry Cheese trust. The catch: Dale is possibly sterile. Will Jocelyn betray her vows of holy matrimony in order to secure the millions of dollars that could be left to her husband, or will a miracle from above intervene and provide Dale and Jocelyn with a child despite Trevor's best efforts to seduce the vulnerable Jocelyn?