cannabisnews.com: Psychedelic Partying with Ken Kesey! 





Psychedelic Partying with Ken Kesey! 
Posted by FoM on June 08, 1999 at 06:09:33 PT
and the Merry Pranksters!
Source: SF Gate
Let's get some acid!" my friend Darren raves as we stride past the hallucinatory "art cars" parked in front of the International Ballroom at 50 Oak Street.
We're heading to the Bon Voyage Party for Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' WHERESMERLIN? tour, hosted by Anon Salon last Friday night. The LSD-promoting '60s partiers -- whose trippy exploits are hyper-narrated in Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" -- are going to the British Isles to hunt for the sleeping wizard who's supposed to wake up on his home soil soon to guide us into the next millennium (according to an Edgar Cayce prophecy). "We need to re-psychedelicize our lives," Darren mourns. "We forgot all the interconnectedness that we grasped in our youth when we were eating 'shrooms and acid." "I can't handle any more chromosome damage," I reply. "My wife wants to get pregnant -- she'll be pissed if our baby has six eyes and a leg coming out of its forehead." "Hmmph!" Darren pouts. "You're either on the bus, or you're off the bus!" Tie-dye, face paint, and day-glo are chic here as we queue up with senior citizen hipsters mingling with hordes of Burning Man fans; the latter species includes everyone from nerdy cybergeeks to tribal trance dancer babes. Darren and I push through the massive mob into the Art Deco Ballroom, where craggy-faced Ken Kesey -- counterculture Acid King and acclaimed author of "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes A Great Notion" -- is grinning maniacally onstage in a homemade medieval costume of chrome-painted padded armor with a rooster weather vane perched on his helmet. He's a huge, hulking, ex-wrestling-champion mountain of a man, with gargantuan energy: At 63, he looks like he could simultaneously maul any five men in the room. "Ken Kesey's the same age as my Dad," Darren marvels, "but he's having a helluva lot more fun." Multi-generational devotees are splayed around the stage, garbed as faeries, fools, trolls, nobles.... there are even three monks cassocked in gunnysacks. Everyone's waiting for Kesey to speak. We resemble castle rabble surrounding a heroic cosmic Crusader. "We're here because we want to find MAGIC!" Kesey booms soon in his twangy Oregon-country voice. "Let's talk about why 'spirits' are called spirits -- BECAUSE THE SPIRITS TRAVELED ON ELIXIRS! Something MAGIC travels on these chemicals and they can take us where we want to go!" "YEEEAAAHHH!" shouts the audience. Darren wanders off to find some "spirits" for himself.... "Let me tell you some things I know to be true," Kesey roars on. "There're always going to be more Dumb people than Smart people in the world, so get used to it... and, the women are more beautiful here in the Bay Area than in any other place in the world!" "YEEEAAAHHH!" "Let's get into this damn thing now!" he continues. "Pranksters, let's convene onstage -- let's tell our Grail Story. Here they come; here's Vivian Vixen, King Arthur, Lady Guinevere, The Churl, and Queen Mab of the Faeries." Clumsily, the Pranksters deliver a skit, plodding through the lines of a confusing fable about an orphan named Sir Little Big Mouth. I try to follow the preposterous playlet, but suddenly Darren returns with two bottles of beer "spirits" and he's babbling excitedly about enticements in other chambers: "Drugs and dancing and naked people!" Easy decision, huh? We cruise to the dance room where cock-ringed exhibitionists practice free-form tai chi in the strobe lights with freaks of all ages. This is fun, but... The Underground Swimming Pool of Inflatable Mysteries is truly the hub of tonight's high hive energies. Dry ice clouds, marijuana scent and Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" oozes over us as 16 masked and bathrobed performers of the Burning Man Synchronized Water Ballet Team slowly strip off their costumes and leap naked into the water of the International Center's ancient gym pool. The scene is pagan, Rubenesque, and hysterically sexy, and it prompts "faeries and elves" all around us to start kissing each other! "Everybody's totally on X," gushes Darren. He's right -- the drug Ecstasy rules this arena -- everyone's smiling like a post-orgasmic Cheshire Cat. When the manic tribal drumming band Fantuzzi bursts into rhythm the euphoria escalates. A huge, incredibly-hairy naked man flops out of the pool and frenetically dances, splashing water everywhere like a wet Irish setter. Darren rips off his polo shirt; he gyrates maniacally with a woman who's equally topless... Various familiar faces float by -- all aglow with glitter and chemical joy. Languid Bryan and lovely Heather embrace me. "We have to hug you, we have to hug you because we're on Ecstasy," they say dreamily. "Yes, yes," I agree, enjoying a very convincing contact high. They hug me and kiss me and it feels so good, I decide I have to go home now to fondle my wife. On the way out, I check out the Pranksters again -- the Grandparents of Psychedelia. They're still the drabbest act at their own party, but everybody here owes everything to them. SF's world-famous underground party scene is obviously the direct descendant of these acid ancestors. The current energy traces ecstatically back to the Merry Pranksters' silly-wisdom seeking LSD experiments, 30-plus years ago. We're all Ken Kesey's drug-babies. 
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Comment #2 posted by abc on May 31, 2001 at 10:29:55 PT
pot
i think it should be legalized too... i think that it should be someone own decision as to whether or not they want to so something, stupid or not, to themselves.
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Comment #1 posted by mike on March 22, 2000 at 16:46:18 PT:
pot should be legalized
dear beatch,pot should be legalized, thats all i gotta say, cigarettes are worse, at least mary jane is naturalthanks for listening
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