Televy Gide

From Plastic Tub

Ukrainian. Born 1958. He shows up slapdash, fallen through a trapdoor. He is a snapping turtle and garners a box of sparkplugs.

Like so many members of the AA circle, young Gide came to America as a young child. His father, a de-frocked Orthodox priest, had run off with comely milkmaid from his parish. Having thus chosen, he was shunned by the narrow peasants of his village and soon decided to sail for the Land of Opportunity where his brother waited with a position in his profitable factory where he manufactured sturdy pants for working men. Despite their colorful beginnings, the Gideschenko family settled into the picture of middle-class normalcy. Televy was a Cub Scout and attended high school in Brooklyn, where his father moonlighted as an assistant baseball coach. Gide himself played a mean game of ball but the ambience of school stifled him. Despite his father's objections, he dropped out of high school to write for the racing forms and he learned the business from top to bottom. A natural, he had mastered many aspects of the business by the time he was twenty.

His own journal, the weekly Accidental Bugle has from 1981 been supplying AA poets with the coded messages they sometimes need to kick start their work. Begun as an irregularly-published source of telegraphic poetic fragments modeled on racing tips, he continued to work for the racing papers another fifteen years before he was able to dedicate himself to the Bugle full-time. Four years later, in 2000, he was joined by a young firebrand by the the name of Guileless Maccabee.

Journalism is Gide's consuming passion, though in the 90's he took some time off to work in televison in his native Ukraine. He also writes descriptions of films on a freelance basis.

He currently resides in Prague, and is said to make frequent visits to the Ukraine where he played a low-key but important role in the election crisis of 2004 on behalf of anti-Gnome partisans.

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