Cristina

Where to begin...one minute I’m in the Baja founding my own polyandrist cult and the next thing I know, I wake up in the steerage of a scientific research vessel supposedly recording whale songs but actually transporting contraband copies of Dianetics and a shipping container of Pixie Sticks to Laosian freedom fighters. That’s where it stopped making sense, obviously. If you rewind even further, the real problem begins at a port in Athens in a bar named Napolean's. Really, it was Gogh’s fault, cheating at that hand of poker – next a table gets flipped and the jet-haired hooker with the missing finger starts throwing Gogh’s drachma into a rubbish bin and spitting at the wall. And then come the Papadopoulos brothers, belts in hand, the ones who drive the 1977 Lada Nivas with General Lee mud flaps. We are out of there in a flash and Merv sneaks us onto the nearest boat where we initially stow away and eventually become part of the kitchen crew. For weeks we are at sea and manage to successfully introduce Mexican Wednesdays into the food rotation. Flautas are a big hit. After too many Mexican Wednesdays to count, we dock in Crete and take odd jobs delivering copious amounts of fertilizer to a Canadian industrialist’s manure plant and being the trend-watching entrepreneur he is, he says Religion is IT, the next capitalist frontier ready for a little creativity and innovative exploitation. The next thing you know...