It may not have been as much of an acid-induced experience of enlightenment for me as it was for the characters played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, but Easy Rider was a moment of reckoning in my personal development. It was also the final spark of inspiration that started me working on my first novel, Gris-Gris Daughter.
Some credit should be given to Netflix. Without the impulse movie picking implicit with going to the movie store my wife and I filled our Netflix queue with more intelligent movie choices. One otherwise nondescript Friday, the U.S. postal service delivered Easy Rider for our evening’s entertainment. Being a gen-x-er born in 1974 I had very little idea what to expect from the movie other than a couple of dudes on motorcycles taking some drugs. I mean, how can you go wrong with Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson? A bad-boy heartthrob and two of the craziest character actors to hit the screen? But I digress.
