First Thursday: Dinner and Bikes Tour

The Dinner & Bikes Tour is traveling the western states this September to tell stories and show movies about bicycle culture while serving up tasty gourmet vegan food.

On Thursday, Sept. 1 at 7 p.m., a trio of presenters will be at the as part of the First Thursday program for high school students.

Joe Biel will shock and awe with tragicomic excerpts from his biography of Lee Harvey Oswald. He will also show clips from Aftermass, his upcoming documentary about bicycle activism in Portland, Oregon over the last twenty years.

Biel has been part of Microcosm Publishing since he started the business out of his closet 15 years ago.

According to Katie MacBride, the Mill Valley Library’s Young Adult Librarian, Biel’s company has published some popular titles including, Making Stuff & Doing Things and Chainbreaker Bike Book: A Rough Guide to Bicycle Maintenance.

Joshua Ploeg is a traveling vegan chef, who improvises climactic culinary masterpieces using ingredients from the nearest store or just the rice cooker and blender someone left behind in the corner. In adverse circumstances, he claims his food only gets fancier. His book In Search of the Lost Taste is a Microcosm smash hit. He has several cookzines, including the popular Fire and Ice and the brand new So Raw It’s Downright Filthy.

Elly Blue brings tales of the bicycle economy, accompanied by photographic evidence. She publishes a blog and a zine, both called Taking the Lane, and writes regularly about bicycling issues for venerable online news outlets Grist and BikePortland. You can see parts of her presentation from the tour she and Biel did in August shown here; this time around she’ll do something very different.

First Thursday at the Mill Valley Public Library started in October 2010 said MacBride and through word-of-mouth the program has been growing ever since. The programs are specifically directed at high school students.