Looking For Mr. Magoo

Aspects of Freedom

It’s 1983: the first week of a hot August. All-American Lisa Scott Gordon rides her Harley behind Magoo’s RV from northern Minnesota to her first Black Hills Motor Classic in Sturgis. She nurses the little Sportster across the Great Plains in 100° and more, changing the oil nearly every other stop, as Magoo and Lisa’s sort-of-boyfriend Earl watch with uncertain patience. But it’s freedom — the open country, the wind through Lisa’s long blonde hair.

Thirty years later and things have changed. Lisa is no longer in the minuscule minority of girls riding their own machines: she’s a professional with a post-graduate degree. Magoo owns his very successful tattoo business and is a well-respected member of the Sons of Silence Motorcycle Club, who wear their 1%-er patches with pride.

Lisa contacts Magoo after three decades of silence, asking if he would meet up with her again at the famously spectacular Sturgis Rally: and on camera, too. But how is their freedom now?

Magoo agrees, telling Lisa and her very British husband to find the private Motorcycle Club land in the Black Hills. There is a waterslide party, food, and brotherhood. But will the Sons of Silence agree to let the stranger in, and watch their freedom close-up? Lisa assures Magoo that she, and her man, mean to treat everyone with the utmost respect and will come bearing gifts of food and drink. Lisa is fairly sure that one brings flowers — her husband is doubtful.

Will Magoo meet them? Will his 1%-er brothers agree to a camera on their private land, when they never publish their own photographs? Will Lisa survive the 1,600 miles she needs to ride over the next nine days?

What kind of answers will everyone give to her one burning question — what is freedom to you? Is it there on the open road, in the roar of an engine, in the great spaces of America? Can you have it in “The Home Of The Brave” when the Government tries to watch you go to the bathroom?

Included in this proposed epic are 200,000 bikers, the vast Badlands, the Corn Palace, Mount Rushmore, Garrison Keillor, the Crazy Horse Monument and a possible encounter with a movie-star. A fabulous burlesque show acts as a centrepiece. We even throw in the Minnesota State Fair and Paul Bunyan. However, Paul declines to answer the question.