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A Fully Interactive Country & Western Album
Launch date coming soon
TOUR GUIDES
Producer: Tavia Stewart-Streit
Editor: Chris Angotti
Author: Tupelo Hassman
Music: The Naysayer
Visual art: Suvan Geer
ABOUT THE TOUR
 From a Puget Sound speakeasy with the feds on its trail to the Sea of Cortez at dawn, The Hassman Family Experience: A Fully Interactive Country & Western Album follows the lives, loves, and fault lines of the Hassman family as they chase their future from the Pacific Northwest and down the West Coast. The Hassmans and their experiences act as a palimpsest of a rootless American family’s grappling for authentic heritage and each of its nine tales do the same, layering over the ones that have come before to create a multi-dimensional and multi-generational reality.
 The Experience’s nexus lies in the San Francisco Bay Area: as finite as the Silicon Valley-machined lever moving the arm on Chuck E. Cheese in a window off the 101 Freeway, as infinite as the vibration of 700 bagpipers playing “Amazing Grace” at the Scottish Highland Games at the Alameda County Fairgrounds, and as sweaty-palmed as a memorial held in the Turf Room at Golden Gate Fields, mourners lined up at the betting window. The Experience promises a view of a family that is at once unusual and universal, told from nine stops on the West Coast by the hitchhikers that climb aboard for a few miles or a few lifetimes, including MacGuffin, a black Terrier mix, and, of course, the Hassman Family themselves; Jack, Farnsworth, Dot, and the yellow 1974 Ford Gran Torino making the trip possible, the Banana.
 Country and western music has a reputation for presenting the pathos, fight, and hilarity, as well as the absurdity, of the American experience. With this in mind, Experience author Tupelo Hassman has enlisted musical artist The Naysayer to record a country and western album inspired by the Hassman Family tales. This will be The Naysayer’s seventh album and third country-focused album, after Heaven, Hell, or Houston (Carrot Top Records, 2002) and Pure Beauty (Carrot Top Records, 2003). In any musical genre, The Naysayer singer/songwriter Anna Padgett is a natural storyteller in her own right and her lyrical narratives and rhythms are a perfect accompaniment and counterbalance to Hassman’s literary work.
This tour will showcase The Naysayer’s musical compositions alongside Hassman’s stories and the complete tour will be available for download on the Invisible City Audio Tours website as well as in limited edition form as a double-album set complete with maps, directions, and mile-marking treasures for the intrepid listeners ready to pack their bags and join the Hassman Family on the road.
About the author Tupelo Hassman
Tour author Tupelo Hassman has an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University. She is a fellowship winner from The University of Iowa’s NonFictionNow Conference (2005), was a finalist in The Writers @ Work competition (2007), and was a judge for Notes & Grace Notes fiction contest (2009). Her work has been published in We Still Like, Tantulum, Paper Street Press, The Portland Review Literary Journal, and ZYZZYVA. Hassman explores the kaleidoscopic perspectives of the American West through storytelling in much of her work, most notably in her forthcoming novel girlchild (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Febraury, 2012). Hassman is a resident of Oakland, California.
Tour Route
Route description with points listed cardinally from the north—the land of wisdom and white buffalo—to the south—the land of eagle’s courage.
Time between each stop is estimated driving time.
Happy Hour
The Dancing Pig Saloon
(the tip of the Toandos Peninsula, Puget Sound, Washington)
4 hours 30 minutes
Sunset
Bridal Veil Falls
(30 miles east of Portland on the Columbia River Gorge, Oregon)
5 hours 30 minutes
A Tragedy
Oregon Shakespeare Festival
(Ashland, Oregon)
5 hours 20 minutes
Private Event
The Turf Club at Golden Gate Fields
(Berkeley, California)
40 minutes
The Massing of the Bands
The Caledonian Club of San Francisco’s Scottish Highland Games
(Alameda County Fairgrounds, Pleasanton, California)
40 minutes
Private Event
Chuck E. Cheese’s
(San Jose, California)
3 hours
The James Dean Memorial Junction
(Shandon, California)
3 hours
Any Karaoke Bar
Koreatown
(Los Angeles, California)
8 hours
Dawn
Puerto Peñasco
(Sea of Cortez, Sonora, Mexico)
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