The cause of the sudden change in their behaviour, as well as the meaning of their chants, were both incomprehensible to me. By the next day this strange perturbation had passed and our normal friendly relationships reestablished.

Or that’s what I had written, then I received some editing help and observations from my friend H. She wrote that she found this paragraph jarring because I didn’t talk about my reaction – did I hide the hurt, what did that cost, did I forgive them, etc. At first I was going to simply write back and say that I had intended it to be a short, abrupt and unsatisfying paragraph. However, as I mulled over her comment I realized that there was perhaps a little more that I could add without stepping too far from something that felt like description to something more interpretive. Then I realized I could have it both ways, hence the earlier paragraph remains but I will include this digression. Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it too or at least get pretty close to that situation.

So here’s the thing, it does seem to me very characteristic of my youth that there were (and occasionally still are) many such lacunae, many stories without punchlines, many situations where I with no reflection and little awareness did, or suffered, hurtful things and then simply stumbled on unaware of any consequence. Did I pretend that it hadn’t happened? Not exactly, it was just kind of one of those many surreal things that I didn’t understand. Some of those things were beautiful and felt good, this was ugly and felt bad, but then like those wonderful moments of joy and harmony it was gone and like a joke whose punchline you can’t quite remember, or a dream that you kind of vaguely recall in a dim, distant way, I couldn’t grasp it and had no where to file it away. Did it cost me? It certainly shaped me or at least was one more experience that tipped the scales in a certain fashion, that predisposed certain tendencies and inhibited others. Was that a cost, one of many accumulating small burdens that would eventually take shape in the growth of my personal style of paranoia? The residue from this experience would certainly nurture a powerful feeling that some things must be kept hidden and also a (some would say exaggerated) insistence on trumpeting, at least certain of those differences. The same system of climates predisposed a deep mistrust of appearances, a sense of hidden motives, and the certainty of betrayal. The world was opaque – absurd, and people were, as I would eventually read in Sartre, magicians capable of changing instantly and incomprehensibly from friend to foe, from lover to enemy, from anarchist to fascist, and so on .

As a kid it seemed to me that my friends whose parents were also holocaust survivors lived in houses with plastic covered furniture, funny smells and whispers—places where, despite whatever external reality, always felt to me like dark and musty places where people didn’t walk or jump but skulked on tiptoe. Not our home: Julian, Lizzy and I along with our mother (our cats, dogs, turtles, snake, guinea pigs, or whatever human and animal guests) were exposed to a seemingly endless telling of stories about concentration camps that were horror filled but punctuated with humour, and insight, and humanity. The moral of the story was never revenge or hate, but rather the need to move forward, to learn these lessons, and to always fight against injustice, cruelty and bigotry – wherever they were and whomever they were aimed at.

I mention this because by the time I was 11 or 12 it was clear that I had serious authority issues. My dad always said that my problems with authority were because of this sense of injustice about the holocaust. I didn’t accept his theory. In fact I hated it. It drove me nuts. It was almost as bad as when people dismissed what was most important to me by saying it was a phase I was going through. It seemed to take my deepest thoughts and feelings, my most meaningful actions, and reduce them to insignificance. Just thinking of it still makes me furious. It took me most of a lifetime to figure out he was right. Well, at least partly right.

Whatever their causes those issues with authority formed one thread that led to my time at Square School and to meeting you at Theatre Passe Muraille. Of course it wasn’t just my personal issues, it was their coincidence with important socio-cultural tendencies – it was the 60s after all. As a 12-year-old kid going into Jr. High School I wanted nothing more than I wanted revolution. We lived in a world of injustice, and hypocrisy and I, along with so many others yearned for a change that would smash that all down and for something new. It was more emotional and visceral than intellectual but it was real, as real —maybe more so – than the other things that drove me: the impossibly powerful yearnings for sex, for companionship, and the need to fit in.

Apparently I wasn’t a weird kid. I had friends; I did OK at school and all that. Of course felt like an outsider but what kid doesn’t. But I was developing some unusual and perhaps obsessive interests. I had already been dabbling in yoga and various kinds of meditation for a few years. Imagine: the first time I tried to find a yoga teacher there were only one or two teachers listed in the Toronto Yellow Pages. Nobody I knew had ever heard of it or had the slightest idea what I was going on about. My extracurricular experiments included practicing hypnosis on my schoolmates, studying all kinds of magic: from sleight of hand to the spooky variety, performing strange rituals…Soon they would include drugs and other mischief. I was developing a fascination with the theatre in all its forms, but mostly that subversive, surreal, political current that was taking shape. I was already deeply immersed in the writings of Artaud, and Abbie Hoffman and Aleister Crowley – a heady brew for a kid barely entering his teens.

1967 was the Canadian Centennial. My family took a road trip to Expo in Montreal. I had my Bar Mitzvah

All over the world, young people (sometimes very young people) were rising up—Brothers and sisters it’s time to kick out the Jams! Revolution was in the air and it was really happening. The choice was clear: the death machine that was bringing us the Vietnam War, throwing us in jail for smoking weed, or something else something new. Like the man said: Turn on, tune in, drop out. The riots in Watts came and went; the Summer of Love was also the summer of the Detroit riot. A couple of years passed filled with upheaval and music, and also The Chicago Democratic Convention—that the subsequent US government inquiry would decry as a “Police Riot”. The whole world is watching!

It was easy to believe that Revolution was just around the corner. Hell, governments all over the world were bracing for it. Remember that in May 1968 it was just around the corner, in France, the government would actually flee the country in the face of a coalition of students and unions.

No wonder the heat were infiltrating every anti-war and human rights organization.

Governments and supporters of the status quo were scared shitless, and for good reason. Woodstock lay in the future and while still later would come Altamont and Kent State—we weren’t quite there yet. On the other hand we weren’t scared of the upheaval; we knew a new world was about to be born.

Talk about culture wars (for more on the climate of the times, see my anecdote “Deliverance: a meandering tale” I’ll post it in the blog soon).

I guess my point in all this ramble is, as much as anything, to remind myself that I wasn’t unique. I was a product of the times, but they were deeply my times. We want our Revolution—now! (It was an era that called for many exclamation marks!)!

But there I was, angry, horny, and strangely focused—like any healthy adolescent obsessed with sex, and with expanding my world. Another time I’ll tell you (if you’re interested) about my first toke, and my first hit of chemical, of body drugs and head drugs (you’ll probably remember that was a common distinction in our vernacular).

Anyway, it was around that time, I would have been 12 or 13, and I was rapidly coming to understand that the authorities in my life—my parents, my teachers, the principals and vice-principals—none of them had any power over me. They were ruled by fear. And I would be free and fearless. They were paper tigers as the Maoists used to say.