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Rory Is the 21st Century Equivalent of Jean Shepard

I love the classic movie A Christmas Story and recently bought the 20th anniversary DVD (which is a must have for any fan of A Christmas Story). In all the extras they mention the book In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepard a bunch of times, and although I’ve known that the movie was loosely based on some of the stories in the book, I never bought a copy of this book. That was until last week, when I finally ordered it (it wasn’t in my local mega-book stores). I’m only about half way thru the book, and I’ve noticed an uncanny resemblance to Rory’s story telling (especially his recent East Coast Observations). Now, I don’t know if Rory grew up watching A Christmas Story, or is a fan of Jean Shepard, but it is remarkable how much Rory’s story telling mimics the style of Jean Shepard. Jean was mostly known for his evening radio show out of New York’s WOR-AM, and then got into writing and live performances of his stories at various colleges, plus wrote for magazines like Playboy, Mad, and National Lampoon. Rory has a blog (which is pretty similar to a late night radio program), and does live performances at the famous Nerd Dinners, but I think this is just the start of something bigger. I'd like to think we are starting to see the emergence of the 21st century’s version of Jean Shepard. Keep up the great work.

Published Sunday, March 21, 2004 2:06 PM by donxml

Filed under: Random Access

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Rory said:

Don -

You are far, far, far too kind :)

Yeah - I loved "A Christmas Story" when I was a kid. My sister and I were totally into it - that and "The Breakfast Club."

Until, of course, "Top Gun" came out, and then I watched *that* twice a weekend for the next 87 weekends.

But, no, I've never read any Jean Shepard. Maybe I should

Or, if my writing is that similar, maybe I *shouldn't* :)

Either way, I've been wondering lately if my stuff was good enough for print (with some cleaning up), and you're giving me the kind of encouragement that might just cause me to figure it out.

Thanks :)

March 21, 2004 3:53 PM

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About donxml

I’m an independent consultant, specializing in .Net solutions architecture, based out of New Jersey who also doubles as an evangelist for XML, Domain Driven Design, enterprise architecture and .Net. I do not work for Microsoft, the W3C or any other big company that you may know of (at least not yet). I’ve been an indie for over ten years, and although I’ve been tempted a couple times to take a job with companies like Microsoft, I’ve haven’t found something better than my current situation. I work mostly with the large pharmaceuticals that are based here in New Jersey, and usually find myself on long term contracts. Definitely not the prototypical indie consultant, but it lets me dedicate time to my non-income generating activities like the developer community stuff, plus financing open source projects like XPathmania and MVP-XML. If you would like to talk to me about doing some contract work, just contact me via the contact page. My rates vary widely, depending on lots of different variables, but mostly distance from Jersey, and type of work. Plus, I’ve been known to donate some of my code for various projects.