Checks and Balances or Bottoms Up!

In Checks and Balances or Bottoms Up!, a Gotham schoolgirl learns to be a feminist activist after being deemed a white elitist by her friends. Not least of her motivations is the injustice and callousness of a certain giant puppet who represents the dominion of arrogance and calls to passing women, “Here pussy, pussy, pussy!” During a spontaneous protest by subway passengers on the L train, this unlikely heroine acquires two key allies — a subway conductor and a teacher — and is inspired by three others — a Buddhist monk disguised as an itinerant bum, an investigative reporter, and a blue fairy. Together, they witness the agony of deportation, the shortage of health care, the misery of unemployment, the threats to clean air and water, and the fight to stifle the free press. So they set out to thwart the monster of apple pie fascism and threats of planetary death from the pumpkin head of state.