The Banana Sculptor, the Purple Lady, and the All-Night Swimmer: Hobbies, Collecting, and Other Passionate Pursuits

The Banana Sculptor, the Purple Lady, and the All-Night Swimmer: Hobbies, Collecting, and Other Passionate Pursuits

We Americans love to look at ourselves. How we vote, where we work, what we think about church and school -- studying ourselves is a national pastime. What has been missing in all this self-examination, until now, is a book about the greatest national obsessions of all: the hobbies we pursue, the collections and amateur sports to which we devote so much of our lives. The Banana Sculptor, the Purple Lady, and the All-Night Swimmer chronicles the amazing variety of ways in which we relax, compete with others and ourselves, and indulge some of our richest fantasies. Here are wonderfully warm and witty accounts of Americans as they: attempt to swim all the Great Lakes, often in horrible conditions; quit a job and begin raising sheep to accommodate a newfound passion for spinning; eat at every McDonald's in the nation; carve The Last Supper from wood; cross all the world's suspension bridges; build huge banana sculptures; roller blade, scull, and bake; and collect marbles, Noah's arks, talking birds, and much more. In these pages you'll meet a marvelous array of ordinary people who do unusual things, sometimes to extremes, as they define for themselves worlds of imagination, contest, and excellence. These are people who thrill to the chase and sometimes plain wear themselves out having fun, whether it's flying kites as big as a king-size mattress, canoeing in the Canadian wilderness, or meticulously recording the daily details of their everyday existence. In Working, Studs Terkel gave us an unforgettable oral history of the working life of an earlier generation. The Banana Sculptor, the Purple Lady, and the All-Night Swimmer is a history for our own times -- of the passionate pursuits by which so many of us define ourselves and of the universal search for happiness and a sense of fulfillment. Maybe you'll find yourself in the forty people profiled here. Maybe you'll find a hobby that you'll want to make your own. Either way, your life is likely to be enriched, just as the lives of the people you will read about are enriched by the depth of their commitment and the beauty of their accomplishments. Christopher Buckley You could take up a strange hobby, or sit back and revel in this fascinating book about other people's. Me, I'm headed for the armchair with this nifty book. Roger Rosenblatt Like other first-rate, highly imaginative cultural investigations, this one has a certain brilliant sneakiness to it. What seems at first to be simply a story of how people spend their free time becomes an exceptionally thoughtful examination of the adventures the mind chooses for itself, and, more deeply, a celebration of how the mind is composed. People are what they pursue in their private hours, and Sheehan and Means, having detected this fact, open it up to display the rich complexity of human wishes. Christopher Buckley You could take up a strange hobby, or sit back and revel in this fascinating book about other people's. Me, I'm headed for the armchair with this nifty book. Roger Rosenblatt Like other first-rate, highly imaginative cultural investigations, this one has a certain brilliant sneakiness to it. What seems at first to be simply a story of how people spend their free time becomes an exceptionally thoughtful examination of the adventures the mind chooses for itself, and, more deeply, a celebration of how the mind is composed. People are what they pursue in their private hours, and Sheehan and Means, having detected this fact, open it up to display the rich complexity of human wishes. Susan Sheehan is the author of seven books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Is There No Place on Earth for Me? She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1961 and has written for The New York Times and Architectural Digest, where she is a contributing writer. She lives in Washington, D.C. Chapter One: Doug Fishbone: Lots of Bananas As a youngster in Queens, New York, Doug Fishbone assumed he would grow up to be a doctor "because that was in the rhythm of the household and my father was a surgeon." One night, back when M*A*S*H was a hit television show, he was awakened by a bad dream: "I was performing surgery and I killed the patient." After he graduated from Amherst, where he was a music major, his substitute-career thought was to be "a wheeler-dealer business type." He spent some time in Israel selling a stretch fabric made of acetate and spandex, called Slinky. "I'm an easy-going guy, not a real grab-'em-by-the-lapel salesman, so I operated at a net loss," Fishbone, age thirty-two, says. Fishbone returned to New York, got a job "in the financial field," and took some art classes. First he worked with clay, then with bronze. "I loved art and I hated my job, so I quit the financial gig and decided to devote myself to becoming an artist." As part of his preparation, he took a job at a bronze foundry in Long Island City. "Most of the guys I worked with were Ecuadorians. I used to go to sals