Growing up should be this much fun! Join Tommy Stohlgren, his four irreverent brothers and friends in an old neighborhood in Oakland, California for eight days in 1964. "It's a story based on actual events," Stohlgren said, "as well as I can remember them fifty years later. My brothers and friends think it was a comically accurate re-telling, and that matters most to me."
Stohlgren's autobiographical gem traces his transition from a sweet Catholic school kid to a skeptical smart-ass. We laugh along side him as he finally notices girls, and gets tossed from religion class. After an hour-long lecture that "God is All-loving and All-merciful" from "Sister Mary-something (the names have been changed to protect the innocent), young Tommy reaches a logical conclusion, "If God is all-loving and all-merciful, there could be no Hell!" Needless to say, the nuns at St. Theresa's Catholic School are not pleased. Then, Stohlgren begins to question everything about his faith-based upbringing. He stumps a young priest in confession, and botches his first and only Mass as an altar boy. With a lot of help and sketchy philosophical advice from his wild brothers, with whom he shares one bedroom, Tommy fully develops a strong conflict with authority, abandons his ancestral religion, and becomes an evidence-based learner, and later, a scientist - laughing all the way!Videos