Dark Side of the 60's Moon - Mike Marino (best novels to read in english .txt) 📗

and guide them to communities where they would be able to live and work without fear of the U.S. Government. We would also provide the same as needed for French Canadian Separatists who had to exit the great white north for the former colony now known as America. We would also aid them in getting IRA and Sein Fein members on the run from Britain into the U.S.

Quid pro quo as they say.

Setting up camp on the small island was  a fortunate turn of affairs as aid and much needed help came from the Michigan chapter of the American Indian Movement. The same people affiliated with the national group  who, in November of this same year would be occupying Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay in a standoff with the U.S. Government.

Danny Two Horse was our choice for co-administrator of MU. An Ojibway Indian from St. Ignace, Michigan who along with other members of the tribe helped our small handful of war resister volunteers who decided to stay and help out. Together we worked in concert giving  the cabins and lodge a makeover. In time we became adept as students in constructing wigwams. These would act as temporary housing  for our resistance people heading into Canada as well as AIM members who were on the FBI hit list for Native American activism and needed to make it to Manitoba! Danny also assumed the role of spiritual leader of our art community. He was after all a member of the Native American Church and could get peyote to us easily enough as our psychedelically delicious sacrament as his converted heathens who now see the light...and colors. He would also be our source of LSD and marijuana and speed I had coming in from my friends in San Francisco. I’d send the money and menu list. They’d mail it to Danny’s on the rez and he in turn became the Marrakesh Express for a cut of the products. A small price to pay for room service.

By the time we were fully operational we were actually a two way swinging door escape route for activists in either direction from Black Panthers, AIM, Quebec Separatists, the Weathermen, the IRA, Sein Fein, draft resisters and military deserters.

We arranged for lumber to be shipped over for the construction of a small stage and amphitheater to rehearse theatrical productions,  music and spoken word projects, while Mssr. Levesque, who owned the island, arranged for electricity to be brought in. In addition he also purchased a number of powerful generators in case of failure. You know...the show must go on! Break a leg...or go to jail...give my regards to Broadway.

As for water, we’d boil the lake and river waters, dug and installed a small well, and had a system of cisterns set up for collection of rainwater for our organic garden and other grey uses. Plumbing...forget it! Good old fashioned outhouses for the guests and composting toilet for we, the Lords of the Manor who would headquarter in the lodge.

The operation expanded by the beginning of summer when Levesque purchased ten acres of land on the souther tip of St. Joseph Island. There would be our large stage for concerts, live theater and films to be shown to the general public for a nominal entrance fee.  The gift shop would feature items from small self produced books by our writers,  art by our artists and music from our musicians for profit. Fifty percent of the profits to be retained by the artist while the other fifty percent would keep us afloat, food, utilities, maintaining our organic gardens and recycling center. (also would pay for our covert and overt activism projects)  

AIM and the Quebec Separatists would also have products in the store with 100% of profits going to their organizations. It was a win win situation. Liam, who we had helped escape the long arm of the London law was busy getting money donated for the IRA and for us. We didn’t expect it, but we were now in the middle of Breakfast in Belfast, it was a welcome cash flow. We also received money from the SDS and Black Panthers. It help to grease the palms of the gatekeepers.

We ready to receive our first flurry of border crossing brigands, a group of five draft resisters from Cleveland. The Safehouse kicked into gear producing five sets of forged documents for Canada’s newest citizens.

We are also preparing for our first festival open to the public on St. Joe...Island Days complete with fake palm trees , musical artists, mimes, jugglers, and clowns, a live theatrical production, food and soft drinks along with Canuck beer and  a wine bar featuring Sudbury’s finest vino. We could jump in the water and stay drunk all the time. We’d open our arms to alms and spare change to Canadians and Americans to join us...and help fund us….even funny shaped Canadian quarters were welcome.




On the small island of Mu we would present a double feature Midnight show two Saturday nights a month for our staff and guests of prime counter culture films and classics. Our first offering would be  “Reefer Madness” and  “Fantasia” for the more open minded. Kids, go to bed now...mama and papa stoner need some bong time!  

Chapter 34 Folk Fest on the Island of Mu

The road leading up to summer was a busy highway of political escapes, in both Can-Am directions. June however held the promise of blessed relief as our volunteers were busy day and night rehearsing for our once a month Summer Saturday festival at our compound campground on St. Joseph. We planned it for months as meticulously as the invasion of Normandy,  promoted the hell out of  it in English, French for sure,  and I think in Swahili and Farsi, or so it seemed. We  got interviewed in the local papers and radio station about the first ‘Can-Am Green Fest” we were putting on.

D-Day had finally arrived and we had busy since the day before installing the sound system for the bands and solo artists to perform; stocking the gift shop with books of poetry and non political fiction produced and written by our Resistance members; t-shirts we had printed up in Windsor for the event with our logo, a Forest Goddess who strangely looked like Myrika in a giant solar sunburst; set up the concession stands and had security in place. We were ready for the rush...gates opened at 9 AM for the day long affair and our welcome committee smiled and greeted….and took the cash destined not for Jerry’s Kids or Red Cross relief efforts in Bangladesh. Jerry’s Kids would have to wait… there was a war in Vietnam we had to end first.

Entertainment on the music stage included performances by a young Delaney and Bonnie. A bluesy duo with enough angel  rasp in Bonnie’s voice to slice through concrete and silk with finesse. Folk singers Phil Ochs and Texas McGill would perform solo and in a trio backing up Buffy Ste. Marie.  Other local folk singers would take to stage performing a gentle mixture of Bill Monroe bluegrass with a dash of songs from the Woody Guthrie songbook. Joe Hill himself would be right at home.

We had local artisans from Canada giving demonstrations on glass blowing. Kites for the kids to fly and an open area for the little aeronauts  as we had plenty of wide open sky without hungry trees lurking and ready to pounce on the high flying “space ships”

The actors and actresses were rehearsing up until showtime for the production of “No Place to be Somebody” written by an old bartender friend of ours back in Greenwich Village. Later he would be the first African American playwright to receive a Pulitzer, and "No Place to be Somebody" was the first off-Broadway play to receive the award!
The play explores racial tensions in the current civil rights era story about a black bartender who tries to outsmart a white mobster syndicate.

The actors of all the plays to be presented would take  their positions according to direction and the vision of the playwright and as one in unison with others, would breathe life and form into the script, giving wing to the words they spoke that came from the mind of another and placed on paper as the words spilled forth from the keys of a typewriter and many copies were made and bound and passed around to actor, actress and stage hands to prepare for the opening night curtain to rise into the air above their heads, and reveal an auditorium filled with anticipation to inhale the cerebral smoke of great art in the tradition of George M. Cohen and George Bernard Shaw or Ibsen.

Ours was an activist compost of hungry actors and actresses, and equally hungry activist writers who wrote one act plays. Most had a subtle social message. The rest of the  group consisted of four other writers. Emmett Coin who went on to become a filmmaker in Toronto; James Bogner who won numerous accolades and awards including Michigan's Black Poet of the year; Debbie Bodo, a Canadian actress who did go onto semi-fame as an actress on small big screen productions.

On a smaller stage for smaller kids we had a Punch and Judy show put on by a troupe from Kitchener, Ontario who specialized in puppetry and marionette madness. We decided to hold on the more ribald “Lolita” puppet show they performed at Chicago’s “Playwrights Theater Club” where the marionettes performed a rather lewd production of illicit seduction until a more appropriate and private time.

Roaming the grounds throughout the day would be colorful clowns, sorrowful mimes and juiced up jugglers from Canada’s  “Ecole nationale de l humour” as well as “Ecole Omnibus” out of Montreal. That’s when I met Mary Bungert, a female clown of the first order. a novelty at the time, who wore green corduroy pants, just a little short of the ankles, a red shiny shirt, the likes of which he had never encountered before, luminescent, a blazing fireball of nuclear flash-flame red in the sunlight, and colorful balls juxtaposed stop-action in the air with the blue sky as a theatrical backdrop.

She would leap into the air not missing a beat or a ball falling to the ground. On her head was perched one of those Chico Marx hats, and the clown emeritus, Emmett Kelly himself must have done her makeup. Her act alone  created an  undulating illusion of colorful imagery of a big top extravaganza replete with an Asian elephant parade, elastic ladies with short sparkling costumes precariously perched and perfectly balanced on the sinewy backs of galloping  Arabian horses as they raced around the  a ring...In swore, watching her I could hear pipe organ music stolen from a roller rink in some small town in Iowa playing  as the kids on site were  gorging on cotton candy and popcorn.

I have to admit, I was mesmerised and stopped in my tracks. Mary controlled her juggled balls, and they responded to her obediently in flight, gently floating in  a perception of slow motion, three rotating at once, always airborn with another always ready to replace it's space in time. The