Not So Innocently Abroad

From award-winning actor and playwright Ken Richters comes this original, irreverent, and funny travel memoir of his month-long U.S. Department of State goodwill tour of Russia and Ukraine. Before Russian President Vladimir Putin's 2014 takeover of Ukraine's Crimea region, and after spending more than 30 years performing as Mark Twain (satirizing every government official and politician within earshot), the actor received a series of furtive phone calls from Hillary Clinton's State Department asking him to leave the United States for the former Soviet Union. Richters agreed to the performance tour, but the diplomatic communiqu s left him to wonder if the proposed trip was an "official" State Department trip, or sinister plot by one of the many politicians and government officials he offended during his career (including seven U.S. senators, fifteen past and present members of Congress, twenty-six state governors, countless local politicians from all fifty states and a sitting justice of the United States Supreme Court) to have him permanently "disappeared." Originally scheduled for two shows in Moscow, the mission was extended for nearly a month to retrace Twain's travels in Eastern Europe. The book chronicles performance stops in Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Simferopol, Sevastopol, and the Livadia Palace in Yalta; almost causing a diplomatic incident involving the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Crimea; hallucinating on a road trip while taking suprisingly-powerful over-the-counter Ukranian medication, seeing a naked Oprah Winfrey and matryoshka doll juggling monkey riding shotgun, after self-medicating in an attempt to cure the Crimean Croup; and how, unknowingly, making the same observation about the beauty of Ukrainian women that caused Vice President Joe Biden public ridicule, elevated Richters to a Ukrainian media cause c l bre.