Virgin of the rodeo

Step right up and join Sonja K. Getz - big hips, bigger brain, monster mouth - on her tour of the West that Was Suppressed. They say that all true Western heroes are outsiders; well, in Dorfburg, Texas, you can't get much farther out than a jumbo-sized, rabidly P.C. woman who won't shut up and doesn't give a warm cowpie whether you like it or not. Vowing to show all the hometown clods - starting with Tinka, her iron-willed, cutie-pie German single mother - Sonja embarks upon a quest to find the father she knows only from a worn photo of a Native American trick roper. Sarah Bird, called "a fearless madcap"' with a "sharp eye and a rapier wit," takes us along as Sonja transforms herself into "Son." Son hitches a ride with the Ronpope-slurping, Percodan-gobbling Prairie James - the, by God, best damned trick roper north of the Rio Grande - and his all-white wonder horse, Domino, for a tour of the offbeat rodeo circuit. Along the way they meet Prairie's old sweetheart, the female bullriding champ of the world, and her five children; an eight-fingered black roper who had to win his buckle after all the white boys had quit; an alligator-wrestling suitor for Son; a peyote-pushing sham sha