BUB the SPACE DOG

The treasures and artifacts not only existed in the Library at Williams College, but they were scattered throughout the Grand House.  The plastic flying saucer models, when not in use to guide the way of the saucers spinning about the universe while the space men were looking for a friendly place to make contact, would be installed in a line in a top cupboard shelf, and you'd have to pull a small ladder to get one down or stand on your tip toes if you were taller.

But in the drawer in the kitchen, the old wooden utensil drawer with a turned glass knob, was an envelope.  Dr. Hopkins and I had been talking to someone, and they had mentioned something about a dog.  And I asked, "Dr Hopkins has a dog?" because I'd never seen one in his house.  But it turned he had a dog that was in the kitchen utensil drawer.  And I said to Dr. Hopkins, "You have a dog here?"  And he nodded, and said "Bub."  (Bub?  I wondered?)  And Dr. Hopkins lead me into the kitchen and showed me where Bub lived.  Which was a kitchen drawer.  Well, this was interesting to me, because the dog was in an envelope, and Dr Hopkins slid out a little card holding a piece of black fur glued to it.  And he held it up to me and said "Bub."  Then he put it away.  Well, it took me awhile, but I did discover that Bub was a REAL DOG ONCE and HAD GONE INTO FLYING SAUCERS with his owner, who was a contactee, as well.  That guy whose name I forget now used to lecture about his trip into flying saucers somewhere far in the South and sell a little piece of fur from his dog Bub to the onlookers for a small bit of change.  And Dr. Hopkins had one of those, and THAT has been lost now to history because he'd been foreclosed upon and had to get rid of all his personal possessions, or maybe Larry Leon found it and threw it out for the garbage men after the estate sale.  But he's one of the contactees who was a visitor on the estate when Dr Hopkins held his flying saucer conventions as part of the Understanding Movement at the Claremont Hotel. 

When BUB made his trip into space, it was years before Laika actually went up, so we were still ahead of the Russians back then in space research in conceptual terms even though everything had a carnival atmosphere wrapped around it.   

And the wimmins knew, we really knew that although Sandy was an attractive woman and Peter an attractive man, the only reason he was really truly drawn to her was so he could get to the power behind the throne and in displacing Ronnie as the love of Sandy's life, he with her help could assume complete and total control of the Mime Troupe much more quickly.  And it was OBVIOUS! 

He loved her passionately, he says now, a love that was never requited. 

And he even kind of tried that with me once, and I was a nobody with that early Los Olivos thing.  Way back then!  I was talking about a musician I'd had a crush on when I saw a kid (Peter would give me an encouraging smile) and how I'd actually ended up dating him eventually (Peter drew closer to me pretending interest in my story, and Peter was an attractive guy then and I was beginning to succumb to his wiles), and but after a few outings with him, all I ended up liking about that guy was the color of his car (which was kind of turquoise) so I'd describe to Peter how I'd actually liked the color of the guy's car (and Peter drew closer to me) and I would break the spell: "So he has a cool little turquoise sportscar to fart around the freeways in ... just fart fart fart right down the autobahn und ausweys ... " and Peter would pull back and turn his attention to another.

I was a nobody back then with that early Los Olivos thing, as were we all.  But Sandy and I both spurned Peter's advances.

It wouldn't be a real draft card that the little puppet cut up.  OH NO!  He was too gentle and kind to ever go to a war and do those kinds of things.  He held up a big cardboard draft card and another puppet would come in with a pair of scissors from the side curtain and cut it up, just slice through it sometimes.  And that other little puppet was gentle, too, you see, he was small and gentle and if he had been a real person cutting up a draft card, he would have been beaten with sticks and taken off to jail.  But if the little gentle puppets did it in spite of being afraid of the consequences, (and the draft card and scissors would shake sometimes to indicate that fear), that means we could do it, too.  Othertimes, it would be a jagged snip, snip, snip as a different script revised to meet current events and new theatrical situations rolled out onstage.

When the early Mime Troupe did the anti-war thing, when Reagan was governor of California, the puppet held a "ray-gun" now.  I still liked those smaller shows at Provo Park. (This is a gentle little troupe, even the puppet shouldn't hold a ray-gun, so another puppet would burst out from the curtain with a little stick and not hit the other puppet, because that was wrong to hit people, but knock the ray-gun out of the other puppet's hand after a slight fencing duel between them.)

Did I ever tell you about the Acid Test I went to during that early period?  This was during the Mime Troupe time.  I was carried there in a car, and they were showing films of young farmers milking rattle snakes, squeezing the venom into a small bowl, and how to transfer the venom through lab sphincters and funnels like zerfs into Erlenmeyer flasks and maybe there was a shot of a bunson burner going with a Florence flask bubbling ....   I was so proud, because I had once spoken to Owsley once upon a time about how rare rattlesnake venom was becoming.  And a band was playing somewhere in the room.  My friend who had inherited the large cottage from Sandy and Ronnie had carried me there, and hauled me out before I drank the punch.  She's always rescuing me from weird situations where I'm approaching the edge of an abyss that might collapse under my feet and pull me in.  She's the one who drove the car and carried me away from the theater showing in Santa Monica, at an underground theater when Mick and I were watching the movie with the Nazi leather boys.  Whew!  Close ones!  Those were close ones!

But that film of the guy milking the snake!  I recognized him!  He was the same guy who led me to Owsley's front door back in 1964 when I was first in Berkeley, and we'd stopped along the way in a field to smell wild fennel and look at the tall marsh wild flowers, and the girls would skip and dance, it was a field in Richmond near the marsh and I believe we'd had to cross railroad tracks to get there.   He was one of the original pranksters in Berkeley back then .... back then I wore a red white and blue rugby shirt with a starchy white collar, and they would eventually get some, too.  We scoured Berkeley stores together, one got a college guys rugby shirt that was a little more serious looking with darker more subdued colors, but they were still rugby shirts ... all of them .... and red white and blue essentially .... they'd got on an old schoolbus, which I believe was grey in color back then, and left from a parking lot in Berkeley, and another friend showed me the spot where the bus had been parked. So I waved "bye bye".

Remember the telephone credit card number script, and  the puppet who put beer tabs in parking meter coin slots to jam the mechanism and get free parking and so jam the system?

During the first anti-war shows about the draft cards (below), a cardboard hand came up holding the draft card and then a little puppet came with scisscors cut it.  Still performed at smaller venues like Provo Park.  Those were the early days when I was closer to some in the group and did have a little input along the line.
 Even as I watched the things I had been early on involved with and had a contribution in creating, I watched them change as they evolved through time and performance.

Later the shows into bigger pieces and the groups split apart to perform throughout the state.
There was a turning point with another of the shows .... the hair hang high hair hang low show, though very well done, had changed in spirit.  There were now things with my ideas (the soldier with the blown off arm pointing the direction with a simple bloody stub, and that moved into a puppet prop that had wires inside the costume, so the actor could lift what remained of his arm and point.  Sophistication and production is all right, but .... now there was a subtle shift /// instead of empowering people, all the people in the audience, the entire viewing public, to engender a good feeling to work towards social change, and as new players came in and others dropped off or fell away, there was the beginning of a subtle near imperceptible sometimes shift in perception and how things were played to the audience, now was the audience was in on it straight from the beginning and "knowing" the government was the bad guy, kind of mentality.


Darryl broke with the Mime Troupe when it was "playing bourgeoisie" and went over to perform in parks in Chinatown.

Even the chains kept evolving as the event moved on in time and the play was performed in different locations.  The chains became stocks and pillories, and Darryl would hang there, sagging with a slight bounce  and smile and roll his eyes.

Telephone Call Puppets

So just as Dr Hopkins would answer "Miss Kim" when I asked how Sandy Archer found herself onto the estate, if someone were to ask me where the idea came from for that first play the Mime Troupe took to the farm camps, I would have to say "Padua Hills."  Because I had clipped out one of the playbills or ads from the local Claremont newspaper, with the idea of sending it to a friend of mine who had gone to school in Los Olivos because the name of the play at Padua Hills was called "Los Olivos."  But because the original play had likely been transmuted so much over the course of the years, with the original meanings likely laid over with veiled meanings, convoluted here and there, then added to and obscured some more plus the meaning given by new hands in performance, as well as changing by new theatrical styles all over the passage of time, (and I was by then a student of classical literature at the time), I suggested going back to the Ur-version, the original version of the play, the one far back in history that might have a clearer or somehow purer intent than later renditions we might have access to today.  Just like the song "Sierra Morena" that became "Cielito Lindo", as I would try to explain to friends at the time. 

So someone took over writing the script, that was Peter Cohon, and I mean took over writing the script when such ventures were much more gentle and communal in nature previously, and I was in this cold dark damp basement somewhere in San Francisco borrowed for a rehearsal hall and not enjoying the experience very much.  I can't remember what this group was rehearsing, or what the play was, but it wasn't "Los Olivos" (the script Peter had taken over).  And I went back to Berkeley to the big cottage on Williams estate and talked with a woman about this, and then Sandy came in I think.  I ended up saying, "Peter's as bad as Ronnie, sometimes, always blowing his own horn."  Because Ronnie sometimes had that aggrandizing temperament as the plays met with more popularity.

Here is one of the in-between skits.  I think it had a title of "Kumraden", maybe I'm misremembering.

One time, I just remembered this, Ronnie fired me during performance at some political event on the Berkeley campus because Ronnie, because of his outlook, determined I was "playing to the bourgeoisie" during a period of improvisation in between performance, when you're trying to engage members and small groups of the audience individually to pull them into the piece and better engage them with the larger piece.   This!  After I had so much fun walking into the middle of a Wrigley's commercial being filmed on campus and improvising on the stairs of the student union.  This!  I can't even remember what I was doing or what the group was doing, and truthfully maybe that WAS part of my own problem.  It had been MY idea, afterall, to take this series of skits to the steps of the Student Union Bldg in Berkeley.  Ronnie stepped out from the left from behind a columnade and we talked in between my lines, and I was fired.  I persisted, "What am I doing wrong, Ronnie?" and "I wasn't at that meeting, Ronnie, where we discussed the theory behind such skits ... " He stood next to me firmly as if ordering me off the stairs, and Peter came out and added bulk to the shoulder assault.  At one point, I spelled it out for them and the audience, "B-O-U-R-G-E-O-U-S!  BOURGEOIS!"  So then I said, "So what if I spelled it wrong, I still am one!"  I even led a little cheer, "Bourgeois to the left, and bourgeois to the right, stand-up, sit-in, fight, fight, fight!"  And Ronnie was caving in beginning to agree with me, seriously agree with me.  And I said, "I saw one out there.  I saw a bourgeoisie!"  I crossed my arms over my chest while facing the audience, with my right hand resting on my left shoulder, as if I were hugging myself for comfort, and wiggled my finger at Peter and said, "And him!  HIM!, Bourgeoisie!  Mon Ami.  HE's bourgeoisie!"  And I spat at Ronnie, "You're right, Ronnie, I shouldn't be here.  But HE (pointed at Peter) shouldn't be here, and YOU (pointed at Ronnie), either.  We shouldn't even be here!  We should be playing someplace else!"  Then I walked down the steps saying "woe!".  And threw up my arms as if to plead, and grasped my hands in front of my chest as if I were begging:  "What, did I do wrong, Ronnie?  What?  Ronnie, please I beg of you, tell me, what can we do to truly inspire these people?"   I turned back to give them a look as they resumed the regular skit, and went and sat on the curb on Bancroft, across from the smokeshop that once sold real Cuban cigars, where the buses pulled down the street in a very noisy squealing manner and always spewed our exhaust.  And that was it.  I was kind of done with it. The two men were locked together in their very fiber of being and had joined creative forces to try to keep the women in their place.  But all of that other stuff, about how we shouldn't have been there and go someplace else instead .... that's what ended up really happening.

That skit evolved a bit in its treatment, to be the one where Sandy was led to the guillotine and Darryl was in chains on the stage, both trying to be set free.  Everybody LOVED Sandy.  She was the greatest actor in the troupe!

Then Tessa came in to take over some of Sandy's parts (the bureaucrat with a heart of gold at the telephone company) and I was in the audience watching that one, too, as I had provided some input into the thing early on. 

We were always being reminded not to play to the bougeoisie, and I had somehow done it, even though the script actually called for it.  Later, in another performance at Provo Park, I remembered seeing the horrified look come into Darryl's eyes as his costume malfunctioned and first he stared straight into the eyes of someone he knew would likely become bourgeoisie, and as Darryl was slipping his arm into the costume (which wasn't designed well enough to afford a quick character change), Darryl turned his eye towards me, and it seemed he was horrified by that realization and I thought I saw a real moment of FEAR! in his eye, and I thought he was going to quit on the spot.  But he turned back and had help getting into the costume, and finished the performance.  But he did decide to quit, a little after I did, and started up "The East Bay Sharks."

The women actors and their friends would follow everyone's careers and follow the news of their former friends,and we didn't like hearing stories about the communal sex that Peter was involved in and how he would decide to sleep with which women, and when.  Because WE KNEW BETTER!  We knew the women were making decisions in that regard, as well.  I thought he was dippy.

In the old old days, when this all was just starting to form, it was all so very, very much better.  When a good idea came out on the floor, Darryl who always held his recorder and would play little notes in between the interchanges and sometimes over and through them, when a good idea came out that Darryl thought was FUNNY or GREAT, he would soar into a high pitched note.  He was like Harpo who only talked through his harp.  He was funny doing that.  But his note was soar HIGH and everybody would catch on that Darryl thought this was a good idea.  And some would follow him off to talk about it, like they were following the Pied Piper.

At the time I am writing of, 1967, with "Kumraden", I used to wear a French denim workshirt, pullover style with collar, and with a large buttons to fasten the top.  Almost exactly like the one Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen wore in "Papillion", the movie about Devil's Island.  But that movie came out in 1973, based on a book that was first released in France in 1969.  I had found my workshirt a few years prior, nestled among some import items at a local Army & Navy store.  I'd see the movie and say to myself, "Hey! They've got nothing on me!"   I could feel like such a trend-setter, sometimes. "Prisoners on Devil's Island!" I'd say to my friend, Heidi.  "At least they're on a nice little tropical island in the Caribbrean somewhere."  And Heidi caught on and started laughing.  "We should write a script," I said to myself, about people who just see the gloss and don't really understand the content.  So I described a scene I had in mind about the Great Gatsby, where it was told from the perspective of people all sitting around the pool watching girls dance, being totally unaware of what was really going on.  I would later describe that scene to a friend, and he would stare at me in complete disbelief and say, "THAT"S not what the Great Gatsby was about .... " And I would reply, "But a lot of people at the time seemed to think it was!"  

We had another skit about draft dodging and how they were drafting longhairs and Uncle Sam cutting off their locks, and I would urge everyone to participate by singing an old pattycake song: I'd shout out, "HIPPIES!"  "Quick, hippies, help!  They're cutting off his hair!  And then I'd sing the pattycake song to urge audience participation, "Hippies ...... Does you hair hang high, does you hair hang low, can you tie it in a knot, can you tie it in a bow, Can you throw it over your shoulder like an old Union soldier?  Does your hair hang low?"  So we'd draft members from the audience to come up and help the hippie (which came at the exact point I cang "throw it over your shoulder like an old Union soldier") who was picked up and thrown across the shoulder of the guy playing the army guy drafting the hippie who was likely being dragged off to war, but he started rotating in time with the music until it stopped and stood there still holding the hippie on his shoulder.  And one of the women would shout out from the audience, "Where are they taking himn?"  And the reply was, "To jail".  So we'd shout in unison, "To JAIL!" (in horror) Then I or someone else would And the jailer would reply, "You either get drafed or you go to jail"  And I or some other would say, "To JAIL or the draft!  What a choice.  This calls for some quick thinking to get out of this mess.  And the girls would huddle  and talk a bit and then shout out "Quick!  Anybody got a draft card?" And produce a basket for donations, "Just a small donation for the theater"   Then as they were out in the audience doing that, with the audience thinking the skit was over, we'd re-emerge ask for a donation from the audience of a draft card. And one would usually appear, and WE didn't cut it up!!  Oh no, it was that puppet with the scissors who did.

(FREE LONG DISTANCE TELEPHONE CALLS)

And after the credit card number skit with the puppets, everything evolved again and soon the troupe was doing the same sort of skit, almost exactly the same, only THIS time the little puppet had a Captain Crunch whistle he would hold to his lips and pretend to blow (and an actor behind the stage would blow an actual Captain Crunch whistle at the perfect moment) and the fellow in front of the stage would hold up a box of Captain Crunch cereal to let everyone know where they could get such a whistle.

Imagine A School Where ....

Actually, I had found my way onto the edges of Williams College perhaps even before Sandy.  Back in the summer of 1964, a young Telegraph boulevardier who was attending John Woolman School (a Quaker school in the hills of Northern California) carried me up on his motorcycle on a tour of the Berkeley Hills.  Sometimes because of Claremont and all the private college prep schools dotting the foothills in near vicinity, it seemed to me a lot of the kids I knew had gone to private schools, when in fact at that moment in time, I only personally knew three.  Two were schools located in California.  First was a friend who was sent off to a boarding school called  Midland in Los Olivos near Santa Barbara because he was a handful and there was something to be said for that form of education, the English boarding school approach to child rearing.  And now Jot, who did not seem to be of a bookish nature, told me something of John Woolman School and their founding tenets.  (And simultaneously this is about the time that Montessori Schools were blossoming everywhere, Waldens were growing like lily-pads in every pond, and across that bigger pond in England was Summerhill.)

The last, Peter, who was sitting at the table at the coffee house with me (and Jot and Nick) went to the weirdest school I had ever heard described, where it wasn't the kids who acted up, though those in authority seemed to think so, almost a concentration camp in the jungle where children were forced to build roads through mountains..   So Jot, Peter, and I must have been talking about new kinds of schools at the coffee house on Telegraph.  I'm there at a summer session at UC Berkeley to see if I can get along with the place.  People were reading books about all kinds of alternatives to public education (and theory of education), so I had just finished A.S. Neill's "Summerhill" where the frontspiece invited me "to imagine a school where children could be free to be themselves."  Wow!  Imagine THAT!  (as long as it isn't like something out of "Lord of the Flies.") I likely said I had never even seen a weird private school, all the ones I was familiar with were respected boy's academies (like Webb School in Claremont or Los Olivos somewhere near Santa Barbara) and so on geared to carry people into the private schools like Claremont colleges, or maybe Berkeley.  But I didn't want to see any detention center schools in far away countries, or even closer than that!  So Jot decided to take me to see one.

He knew all the places to go on a motorcycle, the Lake, all the winding roundabouts Grizzly Peak and Fish Ranch Road eventually, all that wound about and lead on to somewhere even more interesting and we were free, free, free, free, FREE as the wind.  There were still large urns along the road then as you went even higher into Arlington.  I was pretty sure he lived in a fancy place in the Berkeley hills because he went to a private school and had a motorcycle and such.  So he carried us up.  We zipped past the wall that fronted Arlington, and took a sudden turn to the right, pushed into a small grove of eucalyptus and parked.  We walked down the road to a large mansion, and I broke into a little monologue, talking to him, like this was HIS home and he was talking me home to meet his parents.  And it was right at the point that I raised my arms wide under the portico and exclaimed, "Such a wondrous place!  But it's a miracle we found our way here" that a couple of older gentlemen stepped outside the door, and who I came eventually to know as Charles was standing in the doorjam as who I came to eventually know as Dr. Hopkins came out to see who we were and what was going on.  Charles stepped out, and who was at the door now but a much older gentleman.  All watching us and waiting for us to announce the reason for our arrival.  So I asked Mr. Hopkins in lofty language for permission to walk about the estate a bit and he granted that.  Jot and I moved to the great patio which had a view albeit somewhat obscured by tree tops of the Bay as well.  I think the wisteria was in bloom, too, and he loved plants as much as I did. And when we were done, after sitting on a stone bench staring out at the southern vista, the young man and I returned up towards the motorcycle to go home.  Mr. Hopkins was waiting for us, and I thanked him for letting us walk about, and talked of my friend, who loved plants, and I was trying to get him a job because he'd told me his mom was nagging him about that, so I did say something like, "If you ever need a gardener, let me know.  I know the right guy. The absolute right guy."  But I really wasn't expecting that Jot would be to hired on the spot.. So we left.

In thinking about it now, actually I knew another person at the time who had gone to a private boarding academy, because when they didn't have time to deal with her during her troubled teens (she was dating Raquel Welch's brother at the time, and Raquel will come into the story later, so reader take note!), her parents had sent her away to a lycee in Switzerland that was run by an actual Nazi.  So I had probably mentioned her, and that's how Peter brought up his story about "Shimber Berris", you see.  She was the one who had inherited use of the cottage at Williams Cottage in 1966 from the Sandy and Ronnie of the Mime Troupe. 

1969 The Cosmic Connectivity between Sandy Archer and Miss Kim Revealed

It took me a very long time to determine what Dr. Hopkins meant in answer to my casual probe about how he approved Sandy Archer (Mime Troupe co-founder) as a resident of the large cottage, as he had replied, "Miss Kim." And he went on to elaborate as completely as he could, by saying that "Miss Kim came from the Orient". So, to make a long metaphysical story short, Dr. Hopkins selected Sandy Archer as a resident of the large cottage because of Miss Kim. (Because of the name "Archer." "Dr. Hopkins knew the Archers, who were ministers in the Universal Church of the Master... .") Asking the simplest question of Dr. Hopkins was a challenge to me, as well. When I was interested in learning about the estate and the history of the large cottage, and by extension its residents (both past and future), I made a simple first query: "How was it Sandy rented the cottage?" He shook his head, he didn't know. I persisted, "Well, where did Sandy come from?" (meaning how did she end up renting the cottage) He didn't know. I had to formulate a different question to prompt what I hoped would be the correct answer, "How was it Sandy found her way here?" (to which he then replied "Miss Kim").