January 2020
Celebrity Photo Of The Month

Kim McKimmie with Chris Rush

Chris Rush is an award-winning artist and designer whose work is held in numerous museum collections. The Light Years is his first book and an amazing and disturbing coming of age memoir.

From the book-jacket:

“Chris Rush was born into a prosperous, fiercely Roman Catholic New Jersey family. But inside the gleaming mid-century house, with his flawless hostess mother and thriving businessman father, ran unspoken tensions that, amid the upheaval of the late 1960’s, were destined to fracture the precarious facade.

The summer after his first year at a Catholic boarding school, Chris’s older sister Donna draws him into her orbit, which revolved around the charismatic Valentine, high priest of the new age and entrepreneurial drug dealer. It is Valentine who places the first tab of acid on twelve-year-old Chris’s tongue, proclaiming: “This is a sacrament. You are one of us now.”

After an unceremonious expulsion from school, Rush heads to Tucson to make a major drug deal and still barely a teenager, disappears into the nascent American counterculture. Stitching together a ragged assemblage of lowlifes, prophets, and fellow wanderers, he seeks kinship in the communes of the West and spends his adolescence looking for knowledge, for the divine, for home. Given what Rush confronts in his travels - from ordinary heartbreak to unimaginable violence - it is a miracle he is still alive.”

Miss Kim said that Mr. Rush is an absolutely lovely and warm human being that deserves a big round of applause for his writing talent and bravery. He has shown a real act of courage to tell his story and it is so uplifting to see the gracious, intelligent and kind man that was able to emerge from teen years that were atrocious.