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".