I am only half right. After reading this book and the offerings of the women hand-picked by Ms. Cain, I’ve happily come to new understandings about others and myself. It turns out that I am not as isolated as I once thought. It turns out that I am part of a tribe (of fringies, but a tribe nonetheless). Understanding and accepting fringie life helps me to better navigate the waters of the normie world, for although I am not as crunchy as some, I am certainly crispier than most. I am proud that I, like so many of the women in this book, will never have beige carpeting in my house, will never own or wear a skirt suit, will never revere misogynistic steak-house politics, and will never be a Rules girl, obedient to some outdated, fifties model of partnership. I find there is a common bond and an actual language that is immediately understood by super-crunchy-granola types, one that is as colloquially familiar to me as val speak or wall street chic cheek is to its kind. This book explains my envy of the French language with its luxury of a tu and vous to establish a boundary of familiarity, something that is sorely lacking in my own vocabulary. It unravels the mystery behind late bloomers with my background. As a child, I was given free rein; now I am only employable as an empress of the universe, or something in ‘the arts.’ (I can’t be in fluorescent lighting, it’s against my body’s religion.) In a love-all-serve-all-blurred-edges-universe, one tends to lose oneself rather easily. Whatever it is I believed hippies lacked in goals, I now realize they more than make up for in tolerance.
Growing up between two worlds, I learned to judge people by their actions, not their outsides. People are either part of the problem or part of the solution. For or against the planet and everyone on it. Black, white, fat, skinny-who cares? The wise counterculture hippie in me doesn’t care about that. Lazy is not black or white or brown or yellow. It is lazy. Sexual carelessness is not hippie; it is sexual carelessness. Lastly, everyone has a story to tell, everyone is unique and everyone has to find her own way in this world regardless of her upbringing and her relation to the starting line.
If you grew up in bare feet, you may find this book a comforting balm of commonality. If you are a normie, you might appreciate the, at times, alien differences between us and our collective ‘life is short but very wide’ approach to things. Either way, these essays offer a vivid glimpse of the wild ride of a counterculture childhood. All in all, a compelling anthropological gathering.
Love,
Moon Zappa
August 1999
Introduction
This is what I remember: the rusted frame of an old car aban-loned in a ditch near the farm, Ray sitting on an overturned bucket watching his vegetable garden grow, the comings and goings of men in John Deere caps and plaid shirts to and from the barn across the road, the long drive into town in the red ‘62 Ford truck, the taste of dust rising from the lane, the blackberries, the smell of wet dogs, standing on my tip toes to pluck a seed from a sunflower, gathering brown eggs in the chicken coop, priming the pump, swimming in the pond, snapping turtles, strawberries, morning glories, snapdragons, the Allman Brothers’ Brothers and Sisters album cover, how there was music, always music, music during big dinners at the long table in the kitchen, music that colored everything (the kitchen was yellow, the house was white, my dress was red), music at night when the dogs would run barking in a pack through the neighbors’ fields, listening to Bob Dylan on the porch while my mother taught me the difference between Chile tomatoes and cherry tomatoes in our garden, waking up every morning to music.
I am the child of hippies. I spent my plump, naked girlhood frolicking through the vegetable garden and spinning on the porch to crazed, hippie banjo music. I called my parents by their first names until I was nine and knew who John Lennon was before I had heard of Jesus Christ. Grace Slick and Che Guevara were my role models-not Farrah Fawcett, not Betty Ford. I wanted to grow up to be a fire dog. I ate millet casserole and wheat bread, uncoerced. I was weaned on goat’s milk. Until I was six, I insisted on wearing a different color sock on each foot. I ran with the dogs. I buried my dolls. My mother told me I was an artist. My father taught me to sing. I didn’t take baths. I believed Richard Nixon was lying, and I believed I could grow up to do anything.
For my parents and their friends, the idea at the heart of the counterculture was simple: rejection. Rejection of the Establishment’s war, its social mores, its institutions, its hang-ups, its corruption and its pantsuits. The counterculture was a social phenomenon, not a political one. There was no hippie manifesto and, unless you count Woodstock, no one ever called a summit meeting. Yet, some common threads linked the hippies. Like my parents, many were from white, middle-class backgrounds. Many were antiwar. Many used drugs. But the hippies were not at the forefront of the anti-Vietnam movement, like the students or other members of the New Left. Their form of social protest was nonparticipation-total rejection of the war machine and all its accouterments. Cops were ‘pigs,’ the president was a crook, America was spelled with a ‘K,’ adults were not to be trusted-even white sugar was suspect.
Although the hippie trip started out as a social experiment, it became political despite itself. The hippies set about creating a lifestyle that not only abandoned, but defied the cultural norms. By rejecting the expectations and betrayals of their upbringings, they could start fresh with the next generation. They could change the world one child at a time.
Back in the ‘real’ world, the world my parents had forsaken, the questionable futures of these children soon became the source of much anxiety along the cul de sac. What was to become of kids like me who had been denied meat, exposed to free love, and given nouns instead of names? What future lay in store for children who were raised with no boundaries, who knew about drugs and Janis Joplin and the female orgasm, who were never instructed in the art of personal hygiene, who were alienated from mainstream culture, who were taught to question authority, government, the social order? Certainly such children would be ill prepared to participate in ‘normal’ society, much less join the Junior League. At best they would be maladjusted; at worst, sex-addicted, atheist, communist artists.
Hippie kids grew up the products of a great experiment. As with any scene, there were good parents, and bad parents, and everyone’s experience was not the same. But these parents were all trying something different, something radical, something revolutionary. Their failures, in many cases, could be considered as unique and interesting as their successes.