Baby, Would I Lie?

Dear Jack,

Herewith, a preliminary report and a suggested approach:

The exhilaration of finding oneself in the very heart of the American ethos is hard to describe. Despite the complications and sophistication of 200 years of history, Americans are still essentially the same rugged, simple people who first braved the unknown to carve a civilization from this new continent’s wilderness. The process of taming that wild and beautiful land continues, here in Branson, Missouri, among these rugged rocks and sandy scrubs, where the eternal verities of family, honesty, and valor now unexpectedly find themselves confronted by many of our postmodern ills: murder, rape, dark passions, and a complex, cynical, uncaring legal system.

Branson is country-western star Ray Jones’s spiritual home, as exciting as Atlantic City, as clean as Disneyland, as fresh and new as wet paint. And these people are Ray Jones’s people, honest, simple, slow to anger or judgment. In this confrontation between Ray Jones and the citizens of his soul, the presence of the world’s press, eager for a kind of meaning they can understand, seems almost irrelevant.

Sara Joslyn