Frank Bama Trevor Kane Colonel Cairo Charlie Fabian Joe Merchant Billy Cruiser Rudy Breno Hoagy The Hemisphere Dancer Desdemona Desdemona, a major character in the novel but not its protagonist, is a psychic based on a small island off the coast of
Hispaniola. She finds her mission to be the building of a rocket ship to travel to the
Pleiades. Lacking both science knowledge and working capital, she bases her
rocket ship on the long abandoned rusting hulk of an airplane fuselage that had once belonged to
Howard Hughes. While theoretically under construction, her ship the
Cosmic Muffin also serves as her houseboat and hosts her bakery business. Desdemona's psychic abilities involve nearly random reception of messages (usually phrased as riddles, much to her consternation) concerning both life itself and the eponymous search for Joe Merchant. She and Joe Merchant first cross paths in the 1960s in San Francisco. As their paths developed, she became a backup singer in Merchant's band, and was once married to an associate of Merchant's. Following the breakup of both her band and her marriage, and the descent of Merchant into the drug world (Desdemona herself was famed for her pot-brownies while in San Francisco), she worked her way south through the midwestern states, then to Mexico, where her interest in Astronomy and psychic ability was cultivated. Ultimately, she arrived in the small Caribbean island of Little Lorraine. This characterization of Desdemona also appears in several of Buffett's songs, including "Fruitcakes" and "Desdemona's Building a Rocket Ship" from his album
Banana Wind. ==References==