Miki Dora in Morocco

David Rensin, who just published a long and definitive oral history of Miki “da Cat” Dora called All For a Few Perfect Waves, thinks his book is too short. His editor made him trim the thing down to 475 pages. That means a few choice chapters in Miki’s life have been deleted. So Rensin has posted interviews with people who knew him late in life, like in Morocco, including Laurent Miramon, who runs a surf camp in Oualidia and hosted Miki there during the winter of 1998-99, when the old surfer was ill and (probably?) pursued by the FBI.

For you hodads, Miki Dora was a character in Gidget. Whoops, that’s not fair. He was the soul of the late-’50s Malibu longboard scene that led to the novel and movie Gidget, which made Miki and his friends famous as well as unrecognizable. Maybe July 4 is an ideal day to recognize this exemplary American. He was a criminal and a hypocrite and he was cooler than anyone you can think of.

     posted 4 July 2008 by Michael Scott Moore