During a Layover in "Lay" Country

Just read about the upcoming premiere at the Sundance film festival of the new documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, based on the book of the same name (link here). Last November, during a brief layover in the Houston airport on the way to our honeymoon destination, I searched the bookstands for an "easy read" for the eleven hour leg of our flight from Texas to France. The Enron book caught my eye in an instant. The irony was too compelling. A book about Enron, once the most high profile, fastest growing, and politically connected energy company in Houston, being prominently displayed and sold in the George H.W. Bush Intercontinental Airport in that very same town not long after its epic collapse. I began reading my newly purchased copy soon after take off from Bush airport and was nearly halfway done by the time we landed at Charles de Gaulle in Paris. Truth is stranger and oftentimes, more interesting than fiction. The Enron saga had it all. A true rags to riches story in the form of Kenneth Lay, the founder and longtime chief executive of Enron, who grew up in rural Missouri to a dirt poor family that barely managed to stay housed and fed. Love, hate, power, politics, betrayal, infidelity, ambition, greed, arrogance, deception, fraud, and near the end, a dramatic suicide. Danielle Steele could not have imagined a wilder story for one of her novels. Just hope the soon-to-be-released film is as interesting as the book's account of Enron and its litany of characters.