What I told you last week about the sixties was the bloodless synthesis of a
whole lot of experience. Now I want to tell you about the experiences
themselves--it's kind of like the difference between peach and psychedelic
orange.
God, did we have fun. Somehow my husband and I became the nucleus around
which a whole lot of wildly creative people circled. I don't quite know how
such mild-mannered academic types as we were pulled this off, but we were a
LOT like Kermit the frog keeping peace and order among the loonies on the
Muppet Show.
We picked a couple of them up in my husband's Music Appreciation course. He
was a teaching assistant, who noticed that before class, one guy would go
and plonk out the strangest melodies on the piano. That was Al, raised in a
town of 700, across the street from the only movie theater. Movie music and
Lawrence Welk were his formative musical influences, until he discovered
classical music and melded all these influences together into a bizarre
pastiche. And if Al had not called attention to himself this way, we still
would have noticed him; of all the people writing the required essay on "My
Personal Response to Beethoven," Al was the only one whose response was
"acute jealousy." Al brought with him his best friend Brian. The two of
them were an inspired comedy team even before they discovered pot. The
music course also yielded a freshman girl obsessed with Gilbert and Sullivan
and bent on joining the D'Oyly Carte company.
The others came in different ways--my husband's ex-girlfriend brought in her
current boyfriend, who brought in some of his buddies. They all came to our
apartment, which was directly across from the main campus (the old Capitol);
you had to go past it on the way from the dormitories to classes or back, so
they all dropped in.
Nobody had any money, so we served Kool-Aid (12 delicious colors, one
delicious flavor) and talked. My husband had always wanted to build his own
town so that he could name the streets after his favorite planets from
science fiction--Gwilp Boulevard and such. So one day we bought
poster board and started to sketch in the landmarks of the town,
Blemish-on-the-Landscape (I always loved your English hyphenated town names like Puddleby-on-the-Marsh in the old
Dr. Dolittle books); when our friends dropped by they would draw in
their own architectural additions. The town centered around the Old
Crapitol (by an unfortunate oversight, the building was sited on a marsh,
and had been slowly sinking ever since; entry was now by way of the second
floor). The park contained a monument to Ethelred the Unready, much admired
by our citizenry. Social life in Blemish revolved around the First National
Bar and Grill, while financial dealings were handled at Joe and Irv's Bank
(located on Main Street, which was, of course, a cul-de-sac). A Victorian
mansion housed the prime industry of the town: the writing, printing and
distribution of pornography (elegant tasteful pornography, mind you).
Sadly, in our many moves, our map of Blemish, product of so many loving
inept hands, vanished forever. I have been drawing on the memories of our
friends trying to reconstruct its details, and one of these days, I will
draw it again.
But this was only one of our mindless entertainments. We had serious business--
saving the world from evil. Somehow a curious mythology sprang up among us.
We came to the conclusion that evil was spread by the malicious spirits that
lived under large rocks. These spirits had to come out at night; if they
did not do so, they would die. But they had to be back before the sun came
up, or the rays would kill them. We had two choices. We could force them
to stay inside their rocks, and they would die from starvation. Or we could
keep them from returning to the rocks.
And the force that would hold them captive was: mustard. Yes, if we simply
spread mustard across the rocks, the spirits inside could not go out, and
the spirits outside could never return. They would shrivel beneath the sun
like the wicked witch of the west under Dorothy's bucket of water.
So late one night, we went out with a gallon container of mustard, painting
the rocks on the main campus. And the next day, Lyndon Johnson announced
that he would not run again. (And campus maintenance men, spraying water on
the rocks, were overheard saying "But why mustard?")
Of course, all our men were eminently draftable. One of them tried to argue
to his draft board that he had really bad asthma, but when the draft board
is drawing from a population of 300 people, they tend to figure "He's only
allergic to green stuff." (If it occurred to them that the Vietnamese
jungles were largely composed of green stuff, they didn't worry about it
excessively.)
So in between the serious stuff--applying for conscientious objector status
(and some of our guys actually did do alternative C.O. service) we plotted
increasingly preposterous schemes to avoid the war. One of our notions was
that Iowa should secede from the union, thus depriving it of a substantial
percentage of its popcorn and pork. Since the only thing standing between
Iowa and Canada, a non-combatant in VietNam, was Minnesota, we figured we
would take Minnesota with us. After all, this was where Scotch tape was
made, and the union could hardly hold together without Scotch tape. We
figured this would prevent the government from getting too huffy about our
secession. But just in case, Brian, our farm boy, well aware that the
meanest thing under the sun (until Sen. Phil Gramm came along, anyway) is a
pig, suggested that we should station pigs all along our borders. And,
should the feds show signs of active hostilities, we could drop pigs by
parachute into Washington, D.C.--pigatroopers, as it were.
This is not to say that we didn't have work to do; my husband and I were
working on graduate degrees (my M.A. in American Civilization, which
qualified me to become a secretary, and my husband's Ph.D. in composition
and music theory), and we were both teaching. We also didd part-time work
with the campus radio station where we were computerizing the record
library. In those days, this meant typing out punch cards which were fed
into a mammoth mainframe, which was then instructed to create music
programming in segments of 58 minutes. Our notion was that the machine would put together 13 minutes here, 26 minutes there, etc., and arrive at a pleasing 58 minutes of assorted classics. This was when I first became deeply
suspicious of computers. Ours developed an absolute passion for the
Symphonie Fantastique (57.5 minutes), Holst's The Planets (57
minutes), and the complete works of Mahler, Brahms and Bruckner. (On one
memorable day, it programmed four different renderings of Symphonie
Fantastique back to back; the professor who taught conducting was in a
state of complete and utter bliss.)
Being at the radio station gave us a unique opportunity to try our own hands
at programming. I had just discovered that the patron saint of idiots was
Saint Gildas, whose saint's day was January 29. So on January 29, we staged
the First (and last, as it turns out) Annual St. Gildas Day Festival,
featuring prominently the work of our friend Al, the schlockmeister. We
performed his Kazoo Sonata, accompanied by the piano bastardo (a
piano with love beads laid across its strings, to interesting musical
effect) and his art song, My Village, a six minute piece, modulating
freely from key to key while Brian, our singer, waited hopelessly for it to
return to the key of C where he would sing the complete lyrics (to wit: "My
village"--as our commentator suggested, who knows what this man could have
accomplished had he only had a better lyricist.). Al performed his
Concerto in the Polish Manner (I won Al's heart forever when I told
him, years later, after I first heard Bach's Concerto in the Italian
Manner, that it sounded wrong to me). And Al played what he claimed
were pieces found in that attic in Spillville, Iowa, where Dvorak spent so
many happy hours, the suite of Iowa Peasant Dances, including the immortal
Saturday Night in Keokuk.
Our friends tired of Kool-Aid, and the guys who lived in the dorms began
filching teabags from the cafeteria to keep us supplied. Being guys, of
course, it wasn't long before they turned teabag filching into a competitive
sport. It wasn't long before one could not make a sufficient splash with a
mere grocery bag full of filched teabags; no, trash barrels full became the
thing. How else do you suppose I know that teabags provide wonderful
insulation for packing china? (we moved a lot. No, not because the
neighbors insisted.)
These are some of the funny, memorable, stupid things we did, but they're
still not what shed such a golden glow over the sixties for me. It was all
those nights of conversation and laughter and serious discussion that never
stayed that way for any length of time. My husband and I were cast in the
role of older brother and sister, counselors, mother hens. And we loved it,
and them.
I don't think anything this good ever happened to Newt Gingrich. Certainly
not in the '60s anyway. No wonder he hated the '60s. H.L. Mencken once
defined Puritanism as that haunting fear that someone somewhere may be
happy. But then, he had never met our Speaker of the House.
Previous Columns: Flower Children, Me and a Book, Never Middle Aged, Legal Speech, Stupid Speech, To Find or Not To Find, We Will Rock You, America in 9 Innings, Thank The Ludd, Target Market, Naming Names, Something Amyth , In Praise of Men, Small Truths , White Whine, Draft Dodger, Tar Baby, Sensible Lizards, Debut, Week 2, Hard Copy, Word Child, Every Other Inch A Lady, Naming of Books, Progress, maybe (sort of...), All Reasons Great & Small, On achieving perfect copy, OJ (On Justice), Waiting for Webster's, What Genes Have Wrought, Light Out, Staying on the Map, Don't just stand there..., Remotely Funny, No Government Day, Advice For Desperate Men, Why Kids
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