California on their minds
Last night I was thinking how the Mamas and Papas song “California Dreamin’,” with its very 60s idealization of California as a magical place for which a person might yearn, could not possibly be written now.
That segued into thoughts of another Mamas and Papas song from that era, “Twelve Thirty,” in which the singer has returned to that idealized sunlit California world after living in New York. It’s less well-known, but I think it probably is familiar to a lot of you:
And then I remembered still another Mamas and Papas song, “Strange Young Girls.” That one’s even more obscure, and although I already was familiar with it I only recalled snatches of the words. What I did remember was a feeling the song gave me of wistfulness and creepiness. For me, the 60s always had that creepiness, that sense that things had spiraled out of control and the final result would not be good.
This is how the song begins:
Strange young girls
Covered with sadness;
Eyes of innocence
Hiding their madness.
Walking the strip–
Sweet, soft, and placid—
Offering their youth
On the alter of acid…
[NOTE: After I composed this post, I noticed this article at American Thinker entitled, “Gone Is the Romance of California.”]
[NOTE II: If you want to read a good but terrifying story about the 60s and the phenomenon described in that last song, I recommend the story “Xavier Speaking” by Charles Baxter. The one-page excerpt at that link is the beginning of the story, which is quite dull (actually, very dull). The story picks up considerably as it goes on and packs quite a wallop, to the best of my recollection. It seems to have been written in the 1970s, but the collection of short stories in which I originally read it was published in 1984.]
You just knew a headline like this would be coming from the Babylon Bee: “Californians Desperate To Escape Cling To Landing Gear Of Last Jet Leaving LAX.”
“LOS ANGELES, CA—One day after Governor Newsom fended off recall and secured the continuation of his reign, swarms of Californians descended upon Los Angeles International Airport desperate to escape. As planes filled and people began getting turned away, mothers attempted to pass their babies over the fence of the tarmac, and others clung to the landing gear of the last departing planes. . . . Those lucky enough to make it out are being transported to military bases around the country to await relocation to one of the remaining states that have not been completely run into the ground.”
https://babylonbee.com/news/desperate-californians-cling-to-landing-gear-of-last-jet-leaving-lax
I hadn’t heard either of those songs in decades until just recently- I played every song youtube had available from the group when you posted the California Dreamin post a few weeks ago. I especially liked “Strange Young Girls”- yes, very haunting and creepy in a way, and sad.
I’ve long loved the Mamas and the Papas – my mother loved to sing many of their songs in the car with her four kids when she had visitation rights. But I only have their Greatest Hits. The CD version doesn’t have For the Love of Ivy, but has a few others, including Twelve-Thirty, but Not Strange Young Girls.
Cool good song I didn’t know.
How about those harmonies? Great difference in voices, not sisters nor brothers, but a wonderful blend.
At about 1:40 in this Midnight Voyage version you can hear their acoustics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGLzE2OJKaw
(My CD has them doing a second take, going from good to great).
As everyone knows, Quentin Tarantino is meticulous about his soundtracks. In his latest film, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” he does the Tarantino version of the Manson killings. So, Tarantino has “Twelve Thirty” playing on a neighbor’s stereo and just as Tex and the Manson Girls pull into that fateful Benedict Canyon cul-de-sac and then — bam! — the chorus of the song hits:
_______________________________
Young girls are coming to the canyon.
_______________________________
Puts a whole different spin on the song!
Love him or hate him, Tarantino is a sly dog.
Here’s the weirdest Flower Children song I know. Some combination of creepiness, craziness and innocence. It’s sort of an anthem.
The lyrics will numb your mind!
____________________________________
They just wanna be wanted.
They just wanna be free.
Why can’t we just love them
and let them be?
–Marcia Strassman, “The Flower Children” (1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0TyaIt0yjQ
____________________________________
That says it about as well as it can be said.
Strassman skipped singing and went on to an acting career, which included TV “MASH” and “Welcome Back, Kotter.” RIP 2014.
Neo’s post reminds of a documentary that came out a few years ago “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold” (2017). Joan and her husband John Gregory Dunne migrated to California in time to catch the summer of love or thereabouts and that occupies a significant portion of the film. Not too long after some of their experiences, Didion and Dunne wrote the screenplay for Panic In Needle Park.
Didion was born and raised in California, so for her it would’ve been more a return than a migration. I don’t know where her husband Dunne started from. They both went to California to write about the “youth culture” that the fake news of that era was promoting. Their articles appeared in the SatEvePost, where they had a regular column, and other staple middleclass coffeetable mags. Didion’s were collected in her book “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” (which unless my memory is playing tricks on me was also the running title of that Post column).
I don’t know that any part of their California experiences got into the “Needle Park” screenplay: that was a New York story, an adaptation of a novel by James Mills who also wrote “Report to the Commissioner.”
I hope this is helpful.
Baceseras,
Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” captures the sinister undercurrents of the 1960s. So does “The White Album”, but it was after the fact.
John Gregory Dunne, Didion’s husband, was an Easterner. Born into a wealthy Irish Catholic family in Hartford, Connecticut. Younger brother of Dominick Dunne, also a writer, journalist, and producer.
You surprise me sometimes.
I’ve been fond of “California Dreamin'” from the first time I heard it as a small child and it might get my vote as the finest song for mass entertainment produced in the last 60 years.
The Mamas and the Papas have a small repertoire as their destructive ego conflicts destroyed them as a group after only a few years. All of their music is at least satisfactory, and Cass Elliot’s voice and stage presence were exceptional.
I think Camille Paglia has written about the Mamas and the Papas, and her experience the first time she heard “California Dreamin'”.
They both went to California to write about the “youth culture” that the fake news of that era was promoting.
They actually earned an excellent living as screenwriters during those years, although they had other irons in the fire. (One curio was a joint assignment they had in VietNam of all places. They took their newborn just-adopted daughter with them).
Lost children, stumbling blindly through life, seeing only darkness in the light of day. Yearning, desperate to “get back to the garden”.
California may become a metaphor for what is happening to the U.S.as a whole…
I was in college in that time. You couldn’t get away from the surf-muscle car-hippy-age of love vibes sounds. Albums, radio, amateurs trying….
It was a marketable product to young folks, most of whom had maybe three months a year where they could look outside and dream. The other nine, on campus with like-minded folk at a very high population density, were pretty grim, compared to The Dream.
My first CA experience was in Needles. It’s a “dry heat”.
Now probably gone.
I
A great singing group who like so many bands imploded because of tensions within the group. California Dreamin’ and Monday, Monday will still be played on radio stations for more decades to come. John Phillips was a great song writer and Cass Elliott and Denny Doherty had fabulous singing voices. Michelle Phillips is the only one still with us.
Those lyrics still hold true. The Walk of Fame area is still filled with drug-addled run-away teens prostituting themselves for their next hit. I always wonder what tourists think, when they come looking for glittery Hollywood, and end up in a filthy, dangerous, tourist swamp.
I was able to read the entire story of Xavier at the site you posted, and you are right that it packs quite a wallop.
I was thinking of Dunne’s move to CA. I did miss the point that Panic In Needle Park was a novel adaptation, though I knew the film was largely different than California vibe of the time. I remember the film PINP moderately well.
However, If you watch the documentary, it has some detail on how the famous literary couple hob knobbed with many California celebrities back in the day, and how that culture was awash in drugs and overdoses. I’m sure that impacted their thinking.
Few of these kids will make it to any version of California
I remain stunned that this is allowed to continue week after week.
Chicago Weekend Shootings – 6 dead; 38 wounded so far:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/at-least-6-people-killed-38-wounded-so-far-in-chicago-weekend-gun-violence-3-year-old-boy-among-survivors/ar-AAOAGTR
lurker:
Glad you read and appreciated the story. It’s very chilling and powerful and I think it captures the dark side of the era.
The California Dream lasted a long time.
Much of my early childhood was in La Jolla and Marin, toney places I’ll admit, but they were beautiful and I remembered them. Though I wanted to return, I didn’t think I’d ever get back to California. Then in 1982, after five miserable years in Boston, I got a job offer at a software startup in San Francisco so I jumped on it.
And it was good.
Sophie B. Hawkins had a song which came out in 1992 and summed up my feelings. It was “California Here I Come” in a minor key with a Biblical out of bondage story, culminating in Hawkins reciting the “Lord’s Prayer.”
____________________________________
California I’ll be there
Let me fall into your hair
I won’t be guilty for my New York City care
My sister come along with me
Our God is offering our share
California I’ll be there
–Sophie B. Hawkins, “California, Here I Come”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2z9E8cYiUc
____________________________________
If that sounds over the top, over-egged as Zaphod might say, it still held a truth. And if you never heard that call and responded, it’s possible you missed something.
There was always a worm in the California apple. You only had to read Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett to know that hippies didn’t ruin the place. But it remained a place of dreams, of astonishing natural beauty and economic opportunity for well over a century.
I mourn its present decline, but have faith it will renew in time.
huxley:
I’ve spent tons of time in California, both south and north, over the last 50 years. I have gone pretty much every year and sometimes spent months there. I lived there for a year as well in the mid-70s. Suffice to say I know it well and have watched the lengthy downward slide. It is still a very beautiful state with a special feel to it.
I don’t recall ever hearing an entire M&P album at the time, and these songs are new to me. Very striking. There were a few people who, without being ordinary Americans who were simply bewildered and repelled, saw the dark side of what was happening then. I’m always telling people that the two Didion books mentioned above are essential if you want to understand the ’60s. Or perhaps I should say “The Sixties”–i.e. the whole counterculture/left-wing thing.
huxley:
I think the Manson connection – with the lyrics of Twelve Thirty and especially Strange Young Girls – is almost unavoidable, even though the songs preceded the murders. I recall the eyes of the Manson girls – totally flipped out and in another world from which all morality had departed.
By the way, that’s the theme of the Xavier story – not murder, but a mind’s descent.
Mac:
I read Didion’s Slouching back when it was new. I remember thinking it was good.
I think you’d find both books relevant now, not politically but culturally. The White Album touches on the Manson case. Didion is a sort of neurotic type and I always feel like she would read her own sense of dread etc into anything she wrote about. But in this case she was right.
Tom Wolfe’s, “”Electric Kool-aid Acid Test” is a brilliant narrative of a slice of that era from Big Sur to San Francisco.
neo:
It is curious how “Strange Girls” and “Twelve Thirty” can foreshadow the Manson Killings.
An odd intersection is that Manson selected Michelle Phillips’ home for a “creepy-crawl” — secretly entering someone’s house and leaving evidence so the owner will realize the break-in.
As well as a good dry run for the killings to folllow.
It’s not entirely clear why Manson targeted Polanski’s house. It had been previously rented to Terry Melcher, Doris Day’s son, who had become an LA record producer who had decided not to help with Manson’s career in the music biz.
For those who can go the distance, there is much conspiracy theory lore about Laurel Canyon (the canyon of “Twelve Thirty”) and here’s the mother lode:
–“INSIDE THE LC: THE STRANGE BUT MOSTLY TRUE STORY OF LAUREL CANYON AND THE BIRTH OF THE HIPPIE GENERATION”
https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/laurelcanyon/
@Huxley:
My turn to hit you with the TL;DR! 😛
Skimmed Part 1 and couldn’t help thinking just how weird stuff is when you start looking into elite degeneration and the improbable interconnections a good researcher can dig up between the most unlikely folks. I guess the only person who is going to be missing from the very long text is Aleister Crowley and only because he died too soon.
Zaphod:
I didn’t go the distance on that one either and had the same thought. Would one find similar degrees of Kevin Bacon within other elite groups?
To some extent, I think, but the Laurel Canyon story rather stretches the point.
@Huxley:
It’s a Small World in some professions and interest groups. You get guys like Heinlein, his wife, L. Ron Hubbard and assorted weirdos all hanging out together on the outskirts of the California aero-space racket during the 50s, for example. Or the strange cast of characters who made up the Beats. I mean, a gilded Burroughs heir, a very iffy queer poetasting Jew shouldn’t have been allowed within a million miles of any Navy Yard, a drugged out sex-crazed railway brakeman, a misplaced Quebecois… But there they all were together! And what the hell did any of *them* have to do a dairy farmer from Oregon or Tom Wolfe, for that matter?
A bit different for the proverbial “It’s a Big Club and we aren’t in it” crowd… That’s more a caste and common background thing.
Didion is a sort of neurotic type and I always feel like she would read her own sense of dread etc into anything she wrote about.
Too true. Her powers of observation and her way with words tend to make up for it.
She’s now 87. She buried her husband 18 years ago, her one and only child 16 years ago. She has no grandchildren. Her brother has children (living in California, I believe) and some of her husband’s shirt-tails who live locally look in on her. I’m wondering if she’s understood in some ineffable way that this is how she’d spend her last years.
Strange Bird… Joan Didion… But At the Dam is a wonderful rumination on what was and what might have been.
Damn… I forgot the Hell’s Angels. Getting old!
https://allenginsberg.org/2014/06/first-party-at-ken-keseys-with-hells-angels/
First Party At Ken Kesey‘s With Hell’s Angels
Cool black night thru redwoods
cars parked outside in shade
behind the gate, stars dim above
the ravine, a fire burning by the side
porch and a few tired souls hunched over
in black leather jackets. In the huge
wooden house, a yellow chandelier
at 3 A.M. the blast of loudspeakers
hi-fi Rolling Stones Ray Charles Beatles
Jumping Joe Jackson and twenty youths
dancing to the vibration thru the floor,
a little weed in the bathroom, girls in scarlet
tights, one muscular smooth skinned man
sweating dancing for hours, beer cans
bent littering the yard, a hanged man
sculpture dangling from a high creek branch,
children sleeping softly in their bedroom bunks.
And 4 police cars parked outside the painted
gate, red lights revolving in the leaves.
December 1965
Zaphod:
In comparison with Laurel Canyon scenesters, the Beat Varsity Team, except for Burroughs, were all nobodies from nobody families. Likewise Ken Kesey. Burroughs denied to his death that he benefited from the Burroughs Corp. Not that I would take his word for much of anything.
All they shared was a love of words and getting high. Neal Casady wasn’t much of a writer, but he was a legendary talker, who could supposedly quote big chunks of Proust from memory.
The Beats don’t defy the Kevin Bacon odds like the Laurel Canyon crew.
huxley,
That Laurel Canyon Drive website is wild. It reminds me a little Tobey Maguire’s character in Wonder Boys (2000) who’s obsessed with Hollywood suicides.
Have you heard of Pandora’s Box? It was located at the foot of Laurel Canyon Dr. It might be in your referenced website, but that’s quite long. From Wikipedia.
Sorry. A little long.
Re: Joan Didion…
Yes, she’s one to read to understand the sixties. “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “White Album” are essential. She is, as well, one of American’s great essayists.
The two books can be divided roughly between Before Manson and After Manson. Those killings were an even bigger deal in the hip, elite world of LA than in the American public mind. Didion discovered she lived in a “senseless killing” neighborhood.
_______________________________________
Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.
–Joan Didion, “The White Album”
_______________________________________
Didion went on to interview Linda Kasabian of the Manson Family. Kasabian was the driver to the killings, but didn’t participate directly. She became Bugliosi’s star witness against Manson and thereby earned immunity.
TommyJay:
Sure, I remember the Pandora’s Box story and Steven Stills’ “For What It’s Worth.” Back when I took rock lyrics too seriously, I was a bit disappointed that a curfew was all the song was about.
But it was the principle of the thing…
Rock never interested me then. It does now, as it takes me back. Or, I should say, where it takes me interests me.
This music was my last couple of years of college. Then, in Basic, when the lights went on, Fred Stoll (hope he’s doing well) turned on his radio and we got the top twenty.
Only time I could count on hearing them, since I didn’t seek them out.
So I’m back there with some good guys.
I presume it was the same at other schools. At Michigan State, there was a cohort of non-students who hung around and hung with a certain cohort of students. Hard to tell who was enrolled and who not. They were united by weed and what today is called “resistance”. You could see a milder version of the California dark side.
I think the students involved were at least somewhat intrigued by the dark side, at least at a distance. They’d escaped their middle class regimented lives and maybe somebody would crash in their dorm room, maybe be overheard trying to make a deal or some such.
Hope they stayed away from the really grim stuff.
The trouble with reading Joan Didion to get an understanding of the sixties is that, in “Bethlehem” and “White Album,” her preoccupation is the so-called “the counter-culture,” which she treats as the central and defining condition of those years. Such was the official story; and Didion like all too many others went along with it — maybe really believing it, or because that’s how you get to be called an important writer, by writing about what’s officially agreed upon as the important story.
But editors weren’t scrambling to cover the counter-culture because it was important: just the opposite, the air of importance was generated by their constant enthusiastic coverage. That fake news has been left standing to this day. Well, a persistent phantasm is still a phantasm; reality is more various. Anyone wanting today to understand the sixties must try to see around Joan Didion (and the other writers on the same beat), and try to recover the lives and stories that didn’t “trend,” and not to fit them into the official story, but finally let that old fake fade away.
Baceseras:
Agree. It was like one of those Things which lasts maybe two weeks on the morning talk shows, except it lasted and lasted.
A college student dressing like one of the M&P, or even sloppier and talking about weed is an imitator. Not the real thing. But there were so many of them, references on the news, third-tier rock bands…..all over the place.
But thinner than the metaphorical icing on the cake.
On the other hand, you have to admit the actual culture of the time was pretty boring, and tie-dye, long hair, and a surfer drawl seemed important in contrast.
But it should be recalled that Viet Nam was looking over everybody’s shoulder, one way or another. It would be a not-very-interesting thought exercise to consider where The Movement would have gone, or come from, or looked like, if the war in SEA had not happened.
“…Or the strange cast of characters who made up the Beats…”
We interrupt our regularly scheduled deprogramming (AKA howling?) with…my Lord! “Big Poetry”??
https://www.theepochtimes.com/an-interview-with-leading-poet-and-petrarch-translator-a-m-juster_3990252.html
(…Well, at least it’s not “Deep Poetry”…)
Richard Aubrey said:
“At Michigan State, there was a cohort of non-students who hung around and hung with a certain cohort of students. Hard to tell who was enrolled and who not”
Sounds like “Mason-Abbott, Snyder-Phillips” land.
Finally got around to reading “Xavier Speaking” last night; its narrative style had a Twilight Zone quality, but it certainly did capture the darker side of the ’60s. Something I don’t miss.
geoffb. And Ann Street. My one summer’s apartment is now a parking garage Had an ad hoc set of roomies, one of whom turned out to be wholesaling weed from the basement. That was so long ago they hadn’t even gone metric.
Didn’t need a weed bust on my record so I told him to take his business elsewhere. I must have seemed sincere, as he did most pdq.
In retrospect, sorority row seems to have been a lot more fun.
But he and his partner would occasionally slide into a dorm dining room or sit in on some class someplace. And they had some of the books the lefty sociology set were reading.
Not bad people, but thinking about them gives me a feeling of….being unwashed or something.
I graduated in 66 and, with a temp medical deferment, got a job as a fraternity grad adviser–most houses had housemothers–and got the house name of Mama, meanest mother on campus. Bout a year and a half and off to the Army.
I worked with a civil rights group which slewed my acquaintance numbers pretty far left.
huxley —
Back when I took rock lyrics too seriously, I was a bit disappointed that a curfew was all the song was about.
Well, hell, I’m disappointed now. 😀 I never heard that before.
Richard Aubrey:
I was there one year, 66-67. Money problems sent me after to a local community college. Weird year. Mothers of Invention played the Student Union. Timothy Leary and George Lincoln Rockwell III gave speeches on campus. SDS was doing organizing. Great rock music was everywhere. Protesting the women’s curfew rules and the campus ban of Lawrence Ferlinghetti from reading his poetry. Taking over Bessy(sp?) hall with a sit-in. I lived in Wonders, good food as the football team lived there. Great team that year.
But editors weren’t scrambling to cover the counter-culture because it was important: just the opposite, the air of importance was generated by their constant enthusiastic coverage. That fake news has been left standing to this day. Well, a persistent phantasm is still a phantasm; reality is more various. Anyone wanting today to understand the sixties must try to see around Joan Didion (and the other writers on the same beat), and try to recover the lives and stories that didn’t “trend,” and not to fit them into the official story, but finally let that old fake fade away.
Good point. Though people who lived through those years as adults tell me the period running from 1965 to 1968 was quite jarring, even if it wasn’t palpably present in their daily lives.
You had four things which were palpably present, and the period after 1968 may have been more salient in this regard than what came before. One was the explosion in street crime (prefigured by an explosion in juvenile delinquency between 1954 and 1963). This ran on for about 17 years. The other was the social ecosystem flip manifest in the explosion of divorce. Over a 12 year period (1967 to 1979), the ratio of divorces to extant marriages trebled. The third was the explosion in the use of street drugs (limited to those born during the post-war period, however). The fourth (somewhat prefigured) was the disappearance in stages of feminine purity as something animating and motivating for men and for women.
For a couple of days now, “California Dreamin’ ” has been sort of an earworm for me. I’ve long loved the song, and along with “People are Strange” (Doors) was one of the best songs for thinking/ feeling while walking alone at twilight, shrouded in fog or drizzle, in South Gate (LA east Central, between nice Downey and not-nice Watts).
This week in Slovakia marks the end of summer, “Autumn winds blow, chilly and cold”, and the state of America makes me melancholic, along with the weather.
A few days ago, Althouse had a post including “list songs”, so some of those have also been popping into my head. Plus marriage plans for pregnant daughter, and birthing plans for pregnant daughter-in-law; going to be a double grandpa by Valentine’s Day.
Not sure “Human” quite qualifies:
https://genius.com/The-killers-human-lyrics (with video too!)
Pay my respects to grace and virtue
Send my condolences to good
Give my regards to soul and romance
They always did the best they could
And so long to devotion
You taught me everything I know
Wave goodbye, wish me well
I really do miss the beaches of sunny So. Cal, and glad we went to 3 when I was last there 2 years ago. (Each time might be my last)
Art Deco’s “The fourth (somewhat prefigured) was the disappearance in stages of feminine purity as something animating and motivating for men and for women.” reminds me of the complaint so many 30+ feminists make: “where are all the good men?”
The good men are looking for college graduate virgins, slender, around 25. The smart girls are grabbing the good men then. The (not-so-smart?) party girls are having more “fun”, with more guys, but far less commitment.
Richard Aubrey says of the counter-culture ‘sixties: “On the other hand, you have to admit the actual culture of the time was pretty boring.”
No, I was persuaded for a while, but I no longer go along with that assessment. It’s superficially plausible: back then, as at any time, there’s a surfeit of dull productions current in the culture-stream. And for sure, before the “youth movement” gained ground, everyday life in our cities was not particularly “carnivalesque.” And someone was popping up every few minutes to ring changes on the “bland and boring” complaint about America and American culture. You could believe it just because you heard it so often.
Fake news. Most of the complainers were themselves part of the culture they complained about: they were angling for a bigger role, a starring role.
One aspect of the complaint that we had to overlook to buy into it, is that even if somewhat true it applied only to the “pop culture,” and that’s the least part of culture — the knick-knacks and jingles peddled by Autolycus.
Kids whining, “We’re bored,” and hucksters wheezing, “Let me show you something new!” That passed for Cultural Criticism with us. Are our faces red!
huxley —
I made it all the way through the Laurel Canyon material, and wow that’s a whole lot of grade A USDA Prime nonsense. 😀
A mix of gossip, true crime, innuendo, family connections, and everybody knowing everybody else makes for a perfect conspiracy theory universe.
I dig this stuff, purely on an amusement level, so I bought the Kindle of the book to see if what I think is the central premise — that the hippie/folk rock LA music scene of 1965-70 was a creature of US military intelligence — is any better developed or, y’know, explained. I’m guessing not, but at least the gossip is fun.
And let me say for the record that although I was born in 1965 and so I’ve only seen later photos of David Crosby, he always provoked that uncanny-valley-maybe-a-lizard-person-avoid-avoid-avoid response in me.
Bryan Lovely:
Good to meet another Conspiracy Theory connoisseur. This material used to be at another website, where I first read it, and there was less of it. I’m rather boggled how much there is now.
It is impressive how the Laurel Canyon music scene was so connected with money and the military. Although the children of affluence and power would be good candidates to rebel and then have better opportunities, on account of money and connections, to find places higher up in the new hip hierarchy.
Still, I was amused to read that Gail Zappa attended the same kindergarten as Jim Morrison and some say she brained Morrison with hammer.
Drop word how you like the book.
MBunge. You mentioned Snyder-Phillips. I recall being at the grill talking with a young lady. She said, “You know something Aubrey? You’re clean.”
Take a minute and figure out a response.
She gestured at the others in the grill.
Half a dozen scrawny guys with wispy beards, unwashed faces, bed hair, dirty feet and presumably unhygienic in-betweens. All trying to look like individualists like everybody else, said an acquaintance later.
I had, up until then, thought frequent showering was necessary for a successful social life. It began to look as if it might be sufficient.
As to boring: I figure boring is where you have to make your own trouble. Not boring is where you keep hopping from one unfavorable circumstance to another.
I played lacrosse for two years. We started the club. Half the guys, who knew how to play, were from out east. Couldn’t have a more boring demographic than that from which lax players came. Then there were the midwesterners who figured we needed down field blocking.
When you have guys named Turf and Butch and Nose and…. are a club with no effective adult supervision, you can be unbored. But that’s a choice.