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Rain or Shine: A Family Memoir | 
 enlarge | Author: Cyra Mcfadden
Publisher: Bison Books
Category: Book
List Price: $10.00
Buy Used: $0.01
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Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 911965
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 178
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.4 x 0.4
ISBN: 0803282419
Dewey Decimal Number: 070.44979184092
EAN: 9780803282414
ASIN: 0803282419
Publication Date: January 28, 1998
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More.
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Product Description
Cy Taillon was the molasses-voiced king of rodeo announcers. When he died in 1980, newspapers in the West canonized him as the dean of rodeo and compared him to John Wayne. A reformed rake, handsome and charming and flashy, he was also difficult, often more lovable to the public than to his family. In the thirties he married a spitfire dancer from Arkansas who changed her name from Nedra Ann to Patricia, and they hit the road in pursuit of stardom.
Their daughter, Cyra, grew up on the rodeo circuit, traveling all over the West with her free-spirited, hell-raising parents, often eating hamburgers and sleeping in the Packard. She was the mascot, dressed in cowboy gear in spite of her father, who wanted her to look like Shirley Temple. Rain or Shine is the story of Cyra’s complex relationship with her parents and eccentric relatives. She looks back with pride, regret, and humor on family life spent and misspent in the gaudy, gritty world of rodeo.
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| Customer Reviews:
"Rain or Shine" February 8, 2008
The author was a schoolmate of mine from Montana. I sent the book to another classmate knowing she would enjoy it as much as I did. She loved it! Pat
 That's a girl on the cover, y'all August 27, 2006
After reading her wickedly satiric THE SERIAL, I decided to spend some time with some other authors before diving into this. This one's the Pulitzer nominee, so I assumed something even more hilarious. Instead, I got reality. Still wickedly witty, but factual rather than satiric.
(Same thing? Maybe. Don't make me think too hard or I'll never finish this review.)
It's a very different animal, showing us that McFadden has quite a range. She lived a very interesting life with a very interesting family, and here it is. She's observant, insightful, clever, and well worth reading.
I've read many memoirs and enjoyed them while I read them, then forgot them a week or a month later. Heck, I can't remember most of my own memoir these days. But this is a memoir I will remember. It's a great book. That's all I have to say. If you want to know why, read some other review. I know they're out there. I'm just agreeing with them, okay? It's what I do.
McFadden's Masterpiece April 15, 2005
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
It's about time this book was back in print. In my opinion, "Rain or Shine" is the gold standard for memoir writing. I read it back in 1986 when it was first published (and a finalist for the Pulitzer that year) and reread it again just recently. Even though I have little or no interest in rodeo announcing, trick-riding, or the old (or even recent) west, I have an addiction to good writing. "Rain or Shine" is so luminous (and humorous) that it immediately captured my attention. And held it. This one's a sleeper. It would make a great movie. It reads like one already.
The story of Ms. McFadden's parents, Cy and Pat Taillon, comes to life immediately and everything they do seems fraught with such passion and abandon that we know, before they even realize it themselves, that this couple will not end up in rockers at 80 talking about the good old days together. He's a rodeo announcer who likes a drink. She sublimates her own ambitions and becomes a trick rider to be with him. Early on, we are told by members of the supporting cast (chiefly, Pat's sister, Ila Mae, and Cy's best friend, Roy) that Cy and Pat Taillon are starcrossed and mismatched, recklessly piloting their Packard down Satan's driveway and taking their vulnerable little girl with them. However, we don't quite see it that way, as young Cyra is always in her backseat bedroom (they live in the car on the road), humorously showing us that there may be a little envy involved as Cy rises to the top of his game early and stays there. Slowly, the family begins to enjoy some measure of success. Inevitably, setbacks occur.
The couple's eventual flameout is a shock, even though it isn't particularly unexpected or spectacular. One day, Cy Taillon simply unhooks his Packard from the family trailer and drives away, leaving mother and daughter sitting by the side of the road. As the Packard disappears on the horizon, Cy's "best friend" Roy materializes and hooks the trailer up to his car, taking both mother and daughter home with him. Roy has an ulterior motive. He and Ila Mae have been diligently attempting to wrest Pat away from Cy so that Roy can have Pat for himself. It works -- Pat's emotions and security are in disarray. She needs a steady hand, something concrete in her life. Cyra, on the other hand, is never fooled by Roy's betrayal and ulterior motive. She's astonished at how easily he stuck the knife in her father's back. Soon Roy and Pat are married and thus begins one of the most hilarious sections of this memoir -- life with Roy. In a reversal of lifestyles, young Cyra must now adhere to a strange set of rules and regulations intended to foster good health, including the proviso that each bite of food is to be chewed exactly 28 times "to get all the goodness out of it." It is clear, in her shaky state, that Pat has settled for Roy, who is about as boring as he is devious. But is Cy completely out of the picture? Ila Mae and Roy's plan to snatch Pat away and save her from eternal damnation looks like it has run into some kinks.
Cyra McFadden was Cy Taillon's first born child, his namesake, a female replica of him. She was blessed with his almost-impossible-to-feminize name (pronounced "Sigh'-rah"), which is actually quite nice. He loved her and she adored him. Who wouldn't? Not only was he a respected, handsome man, he had the most soothing voice west of the Mississippi, possibly even west of the Atlantic. As a little girl, Cyra could be found at his side, a minature version of him in custom made cowboy boots, her father's jacket over her shoulders to keep her warm as he announced the cowboys. By the 70's, however, Ms. McFadden was marching for peace in San Francisco while her father was promoting the Vietnam war from the crow's nest at rodeos. They hardly spoke. When they last saw each other, father and daughter argued about racial intermarriage, politics and the whole range of topics that fractured families in the early 70's and still does today. After a long estrangement, they made up. On his terms, of course. Cy was a stubborn man, as stubborn as his daughter, and he now had a wife and two sons who treated him in a way his daughter couldn't, with blind respect. It seemed that, in the end, Cy Taillon settled for less just as his first wife had. I found it heartbreaking that, when he died a wealthy man in 1980, he erased his only daughter out of his life so thoroughly that his will, in which she was left nothing, arrived at her home postage due.
Far from depressing, "Rain or Shine" is absolutely hysterical. Ms. McFadden seamlessly weaves actual correspondence into the text that not only advances the plot -- Ila Mae sends out a stream of letters full of moral judgment and condemnation -- but is screamingly funny. When it turns out that Ila Mae isn't exactly a tower of moral rectitude herself, the reader wants to say "I told you so!"
Fans of Cyra McFadden remember "The Serial" from the mid-70's (a rich and enlightened left hook to the rich and enlightened folks in Marin County). She brings the same humor, airtight prose, and bullseye characterizations to the proceedings here as well.
"Rain or Shine" is simply a classic.
Like nobody's loved you. . . June 27, 2004
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The reference in the title is to the dedication of the author's father, a celebrity rodeo announcer, who never missed a day's work because of the weather. It's also a shorthand reference to the old song "I'm gonna love you like nobody's loved you. . ." Her book is not only a tribute to her famous father but an account of a difficult father-daughter relationship that soured from worshipful love to bitterness and eventually to a kind of grudging respect in his last years before dying in 1980.The book is also a family memoir, characterizing the lives of those awkwardly related to her by blood or marriage: the author's mother and stepfather, an older aunt and her husband, and her father's second wife. Each of them is as vividly drawn as the larger-than-life Western luminary at the center of the story - Cy Taillon, whose golden voice and gentlemanly manner won the devotion of rodeo cowboys and fans from San Francisco's Cow Palace to Madison Square Garden from the 1940s to the 1970s. Not surprisingly, what the author's story reveals casts her father in a somewhat different light, first as the hard drinking, gambling, womanizing ne'er-do-well who married the author's singer-dancer mother after a one-day courtship. Following the rodeo circuit out of a home base in Montana, they fought and loved each other passionately, a Scott and Zelda of the Western plains, and then broke up. Following a spectacular crash at an air show in Great Falls in 1946, at which Cy used the microphone to calm the startled crowd, he became the hero he was destined to become. Assuming a life of rectitude with a new devoted wife and two new sons, he was finally launched in the career rodeo people will always remember him for. Meanwhile, his first wife languished in a miserable second marriage, and his daughter grew up, loving her absent father deeply while stubbornly unwilling to come to terms with the man he had become. Thanks to the University of Nebraska Press for reprinting this wonderful memoir. It offers a fascinating window into the world of the rodeo circuit, at least as it once was. For rodeo-going readers, it does much to explain the evolution of the role and persona of the rodeo announcer and the elevation of rodeo cowboying into a kind of gallantry. It's also an entertaining story told by an author with a gift for both sentiment and satire. With her eye for the absurd detail, she can unerringly find the irony in an often rueful story. The many family photos are also a wonderful addition to the book.
Childhood on the Western reaches of memory January 7, 2000
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
Yay! Cyra McFadden's memoir is back in print! I had snapped up all the used hardcover editions I could find a few years ago when I heard it was out of print. But why?Because this slim memoir is the kind of story that unfolds in the reader's head like a gorgeously-shot film, one that's perfectly cast and shot on locations that evoke the internal emotions of its characters to stunning effect. Cher once actually owned the movie rights on this book, then I heard nothing more of it. Her instincts were right on. If there was ever a book that cried out to be adapted into a film or a play, this is it. McFadden grew up in the West, the daughter of Cy Taillon, a legendary rodeo announcer and his wife Pat, a one-time showgirl with charisma enough to match her husband's. Cyra grew up a little cowgirl gypsy, as the family roamed the Western rodeo circuit together by car in the 1940's. McFadden's eye for detail in regard to smells, sounds and her childhood consciousness is extaordinary, as is her realistic depiction of her parents' tumultuous love for one another that is the basis of the story and McFadden's adult questing. The smell of cattle, the sonorous voice of her father, the taste of all-hours road food and the touch of sequins on her mother's old costume gowns....this book is filled with details that will linger in your imagination for years. Old family photos accompany the text and they are intimate and haunting. All is told in a voice that is unsparingly honest, as well as sympathetic. McFadden cherishes her vagabond childhood and gives us a technicolor look at the richness of its place and time. Buy this book if you love a well-written memoir. Or buy it because you love the West. Buy it because you love cowboys and showgirls and all-night trips down dusty highways. But buy it, and many copies of it, because you will want your friends to experience its cinematic poignancy after the movie in your head ends. Obviously, one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing. Woefully under-read and underappreciated, I encourage English teachers to consider this in a curricula on memoir writing. It is lasting stuff.
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