May 3, 2005

Name: Susan Karat MacAdams (AKA- The Cheeze)
Married Douglas Elek MacAdams on June 22, 2002 in Northern Michigan,

Douglas's first marriage, my second.

I have two children by first marriage: girls, ages 17 & 19, Zinta and Erika.

Douglas has one daughter, age 30, from a prior relationship with a Bolshevik.

I moved from Baltimore to Montgomery East dormitory in 1969. I lived on the ground floor at the end of the hall. It was a very private arrangement and I could climb right out the window and walk down to Route One. That's how I used to go to work at Big Boy's. I wore lots of make-up, a tight skirt, and an orange apron. Douglas introduced me to the Women's Lib meetings, and since I was studying architecture I went to several meetings thinking they would show me how to behave in a working man's world, but I never understood those women. On several occasions they tried to dominate me morally, but I was strong willed and flirtatious, and had no intention of giving up a good thing. Plus, I had attended a Catholic High School and among the nuns there were several strong intellectuals, Notre Dame Graduates, part of the Daniel Berrigan movement. After four years of their influential badgering, in classes and the drama club, (plus a little of my mother's influence) my consciousness had been tuned to a different wavelength; I was a working girl and a pacifist, the Kumbaya type.

During the Route One demonstration on May 1, 1970, my dorm room became a dusty tomb of tear gas residue. Everyone was evacuated. I was beaten badly by a policeman, clubbed with a metal stick and kicked in the backside. His footprint left a huge purple welt. You could read his shoe size on my butt. So afterwards, instead of carrying candles at evening marches around DC, singing religious songs, and having quasi-ecstatic experiences, I joined the resistance.

I attended some of the meetings where the large demonstrations were organized and studied to be a Marshall with Richard Fox and Gregory Dunkel. I remember Madison Jones, Larry Babbitt, Joe Paul and Douglas MacAdams attending some of those meetings. I never said a word, but I always wore the latest grooviest, hippie gear: head band, long leather fringes, sweeping bell-bottoms. The men had wonderful hair: long golden curls, frizzy Îfros (am I thinking Louie Denrich?), lion manes. The meetings were also Very Male Dominated, intense but informative, with a lot of heckling, debating. It wasn't always clear who was in charge, but something dynamic was always getting done. Heavy, sweet, challenging. It was an interior room with florescent lights. People sat on top of desks, walked around, gesticulating, ranting, deliberating. Never had been in a class like that before or since, although later in life, some of the Hollywood parties I attended would be as brilliant.

After my training, I received a Marshall's blue armband with a white dove "Work for Peace." I still have one of the stickers, a prized possession. One of my first assignments was the demonstration held around the Washington Monument, something like November 1970, where 100,000 people attended and Allen Ginsberg spoke. I locked arms with the other Marshalls and had my back to the stage, facing the crowd; it stretched like a sea up and around the Monument. It was buck-ass cold, and everyone was wearing a hat, so the sea bobbed in watch caps.

During the demonstration, Douglas found me, came right up in my face, fondly called me, "Pseudo-pig," and wandered off again.

At nights, Gregory Dunkel ate at Big Boys in College Park, when I was the cashier. I was in awe of him. Here was the man that helped organized the demonstrations, and he used to pay me for his poached eggs. Last time I saw Gregory he was leading a demonstration in Baltimore for migrant farm workers.

I lived in University Gardens for about a year. Then I moved to Takoma Park with Mona Lisa Heyman. We lived in an old summer type cottage on Sycamore. I could ride my bicycle to the campus. Douglas MacAdams also lived in TP and became my boyfriend during that time. He had a car, a blue Corvaire with orange bumpers. When Mona and I moved out, Bill Nelson, the jewelry Professor bought the house and owned it for a long time. It was a beautiful place and I loved it.

I left Takoma Park in 1972 and moved to New Mexico. I didn't graduate. I attended the School of Architecture for five years and didn't realize, until too late, that I should have been studying engineering. The nuns in my high school wouldn't have known that. So I went to New Mexico to explore other options. I was roommates with Andee Kline in the mountains outside Albuquerque and worked in a frontier town. They gave me a spotted Appaloosa quarter horse and a turquoise blue cowboy hat. Later I moved to Santa Fe and worked as a cook and bartender in the Ski Lodge. I remained friends with Andee and was later in her wedding in Washington DC. She died of breast cancer in 1987.

Douglas MacAdams fled Takoma Park and came out to Santa Fe about three months after I did. The FBI was troubling his existence and the purported sky cam was a heavy burden on him. I always felt that it had a deleterious effect on our relationship. We remained sweethearts for a short time. The FBI troubled him for quite a bit longer.

Douglas found a restaurant job and stayed in Santa Fe another ten years. Those years were a Golden Era in Santa Fe because whatever it was then is not what it is now.

While working as a bartender at the ski lodge I met a man who offered me a job working on the Washington DC Metro. So, in 1973, I moved back to College Park and into the Klowntown, a haphazard old house near Frat Row. I think ten of us lived there that summer, plus other nightly guests and friends. The house had a Carnival Clown on its roof, the kind that you throw the bean bags in his mouth; the name Klowntown grew out of the reunions that are still held in a somewhat biannual manner. The house was located on sorority row and the Clown's presence mocked the Greek symbols that were emblazoned on our neighbors' stately brick homes.

That was the summer of beer and circus. There was only one bathroom and we shared it whether we were intimate roommates or not. Each week, by Saturday, a mountain of bottles & beer cans would accumulate. A purging ritual was necessary and it was more akin to the washing down of a naval ship, perhaps because every floor in old house was covered in linoleum: the stairs, the hallways, the kitchen, and the living room. John Clarke would fill a bucket of warm water with suds and send it cascading down the second story steps. The rest of us, manning mops, fanned the liquid across the floors and back out through the kitchen and down the back stairs. Life was simple then, and our opinions, out in the open.

Seems that every resident of Klowntown had taken an active part in the demonstrations, either for party or political reasons and drugs were part of that communion. Everyone was against the Viet Nam war, which was still going on, and everyone was in agreement that Nixon and Agnew were a pair of blockheads. The nightly news, still in black and white, was always a major event. The summer was hot, the windows open to the lush humid greenery and the voice of John Clarke could be heard at least fifty yards from the house, yelling obscenities at the news. In the living room would be Stanley with his laconic wit, and passing through, Joe Paul, observing the speeches and delivering a rapid fire comedy routine. Whatever went down in that house was a crucial cornerstone for many of us, and a group soul emerged from that union.

Kumbaya, KlownKomrades, kumbaya.

Later, Stanley, Dale Gyongyos and I moved down to 9th and Pennsylvania SE, on the west side of Capitol Hill. It was still a crumbling neighborhood in those days, full of charming large bay windows and antiquities discarded in the alleyways. Stanley and I helped build the DC Metro from Capitol Hill to the Stadium. Our house was located adjacent to the Eastern Market Station and it was in the basement of that house that Stanley and Dale built a studio and began to experiment with stain-glass. Dale later made a living as a designer of large scale modern church glass in Ohio. Stanley developed more of a fine arts, street-wise approach, using discarded bottle bottoms and a rich, full color spectrum that's worth a bar tour of South Baltimore, where his glass is located.

I loved the money they paid me to be a Metro Rail Engineer, but the work was tedious and I found ways to take long breaks, by switching jobs, trading upwards in position, and taking long summer vacations back in Santa Fe. I saw Douglas every summer and we shared a whole tribe of friends, until 1981 when he moved to Seattle and I moved to Los Angeles. But we continued to write to each other, and I still had all those letters and moved them seventeen times until we saw each other again.

Simultaneous to all this, while I had lived in Santa Fe, I had a roommate named Greta, an actress, who later married Bert Schneider, the man who produced "Easy Riders," and for a good ten years I was invited along for the ride. Bert was the person to bail out the Chicago Eight. He paid for their lawyer with the profits from "The Monkees," which he also produced. He also won an Academy Award in 1975 for "Hearts and Minds."

From "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls": When Bert Schneider walked up to the podium to accept, resplendent in an immaculate white tux, he stunned the glittering array of celebrities and millions of TV viewers by conveying a "greeting of friendship to all American people" from Ambassador Dinh Ba Thi, chief of the Provisional Revolutionary Government delegation to the Paris Peace talks. There was a moment of shocked silence, then a burst of applause, punctuated by scattered hisses. ··Three weeks later, on the morning of April 29, 1975, with Saigon surrounded by North Vietnamese troops, South Vietnamese general Duong Van "Big" Minh surrendered. That day the last American was airlifted by helicopter off the roof of the American Embassy. The war was over."

In the late 70's, I used to stay at the Schneider compound high up on a private ridge behind the Beverly Hills Hotel. Bert was as resplendent naked, around the pool, passing a joint, as he was accepting the Academy Award. He kept the award on top of the fridge in the back pantry, like an old bowling trophy.

We weren't suppose to talk about it at the time, but I met Abbie Hoffman when he was underground. It was at a Hollywood party in Manhattan. I was there with Mike Stanley and Allen Gall Carney. Abbie's girlfriend tried to hit on Mike Stanley. I remember watching them across the room and being shocked that a woman so glamorous was flirting with Stan. He was such a rock, and she was one of the most attractive women in the world.

Bert had paid for Abbie's nose job, and it was a pretty cute nose, as I recall. I've forgotten what his alias was, but there was a LOT of cocaine at that party. Abbie and his girlfriend heard that I liked to visit the top of tall buildings, so we agreed to visit the top of the World Trade Center the next day. Four of us took a cab. It was crowded. I sat on the edge of the seat wedged between Abbie and his girlfriend, an ex-model, six inches taller than he. Her arms were encrusted with silver jewelry from Nepal and one was wrapped across the seat in front of my face. She toyed with me, verbally; she was incredibly bright. She asked about Stanley and I told he had to go back to Baltimore to lay some brick. She said, "Ha! He thinks he is the working class hero." I looked over at Greta, who, bore a striking resemblance to Ingrid Bergman in "Casablanca." The cab window was open and the wind blew yellow strands of hair across her perfect profile. The empty buildings of early Soho whizzed behind her like a terra-cotta abstract painting. Life seemed transcendent, and the cab, a yellow flotation device. I looked over my shoulder at Abbie, wondering why so many people bowed down to him, and wondering where Stanley would have sat, had he come with us.

When we arrived at the roof-top, I took out my camera and asked the others to pose. Abbie freaked and grabbed the camera, demanding he take the pictures. I thought it odd, but Greta and I dutifully faced the four directions and I have the roll of pictures that Abbie took. They are stark and bright, the background, hazy, kind of boring. At the end of the roll, still wondering who this guy was, I took one last picture of Abbie without him knowing: his shoes on the concrete roof of the World Trade Center.

XXXXX

Later, when I was "told" it was Abbie Hoffman with the fake glasses, I wondered what the Route One Brigade would have to say. It wasn't like I was influenced by any other political group. I didn't hang out in Berkeley or Ann Arbor and become a civil rights activist. I hung out in Beverly Hills where my girlfriend married into the left coast mob. One chapter went to the next. I always knew where Douglas was, he and Greta knew each other from Santa Fe. But where was Gregory Dunkel, Richard Fox and the others? Were they being wooed by celebrities? Or were they eating alone at the counter at Big Boys?

After DC, twice I lived in Baltimore, in apartments either with, or that I inherited from Michael Stanley. (two years Baltimore, two years Boston, three years Baltimore, then LA). The scene contrasted sharply with the West Coast image, more like a Seinfeld sitcom meets an early John Waters movie. A lot of ex-Klowntown residents visited those apartment as well as many Maryland Institute folks who later moved to Hollywood. Lot of urban pioneers. Alex Fraser lived in an old boat down in the Inner Harbor when it was still an abandoned wharf. He shared the harbor with rats, old tires and a fantastic industrial skyline dominated by the Domino Sugar sign. At night he would walk up to the apartment on Mount Vernon where it was warm and sit for hours in the bathtub. Douglas would send poems from Santa Fe and Alex and I would take turns reading them out loud. Sometimes Alex read them from the tub because there was a window to the kitchen. It was a very small place. When I announced that I was moving to California in 1981, Alex borrowed the poems, and refused to return them again until after Douglas and I were married. He felt that I should have always been with Douglas.

I met Huey Newton at Jack Nicholson's house. Bert Schneider helped support Huey while he was underground and found the boat and the pilot that sailed Huey to Cuba. (It was one of my favorite sit-around-the-kitchen-drinking-beers-on-a-Saturday-afetrnoon-stories, to hear Schneider tell it.) When Bert and Greta got married I went out to LA for a week to help Greta with the details, like finishing the new swimming pool, getting enough wine up to the house and helping her choose a wedding dress, a kind of Cato Cailin role. The night before the wedding, Jack Nicholson held the bachelor and bachelorette party in his living room, a spacious vault overlooked all of the San Fernando Valley.

After all the stories I'd heard about Huey, it surprised me that Huey was such a dandy, dressed to the nines. His suit was like pale yellow silk, his tie, elegant and his complexion, radiant: everything perfect. His wife was gorgeous. I remember everyone admired her. She was Gracious Gwendolyn. They sat on a small sofa against a crème colored wall. Above Huey's head was an enormous landscape of the Southwest framed in a large gold frame; cowboys cooking dinner out on the desert. It was a gorgeous painting, one of those moments in Old Taos History that sends a jolt through me.

I don't remember what Huey was talking about, but he always kept everyone enthralled with his prolonged discourses. I didn't like the way people were fawning him, and how he was holding court. I'd seen other people hold court, like Studs Terkel. He would return a compliment with a piercing question. And he loved the flirtations of gorgeous women. I went out dancing one night with him and Lauren Hutton, the model with the gap in her two front teeth. Studs was in his everyman phase and far more egalitarian than Huey. I couldn't think of anything to say or ask and remember wishing that someone had been there from the Route One Brigade with a smart-ass question, like Alex Fraser, whom I knew would see me as soon as I returned to Baltimore. Instead, I remember how well Huey's outfit blended with the aesthetics of the painting behind him, how vast the lights of the entire San Fernando Valley looked from the wall windows and how perfectly golden sexy the two Academy awards looked at the top of a large black bookcase.

Jack had a piece of Hap Sakwa's wood sculpture in his kitchen and Greta very proudly showed it to me.

Later, in 1981, when I moved to Los Angeles, I became a volunteer at the Odyssey Theater, a relationship that lasted ten years and rounded out my theater education. (I still worked in the daytime as a Metro Rail Engineer and had babies.) The Managing Director was Ron Sossi, the man who wrote, directed and produced "The Chicago Conspiracy Trail."

CHICAGO CONSPIRACY TRIAL

Act One:

CLERK: Will all please rise. (Enter JUDGE HOFFMAN) The United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois is now in session. The honorable Julius J. Hoffamn, presiding. Please be seated. No. 69 CR 180 United States of America versus David T. Dellinger et al. Case on trial.

MR. SHULTZ: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Mr. Foran, counsel for the defendants. The government will prove that each of the eight defendants in this case conspired together to encourage people to riot during the Democratic National Convention which was held in Chicago from August 26 through August 29, 1968. We will prove, that the defendant, David Dellinger, who sits right there, and the defendant, Rennard Davis, who sits next to him, and Thomas Hayden who is standing, that these three men·

COURT: Who is the last defendant you named?

SCHULTZ: Mr. Hayden.

COURT: The one who shook his fist in the direction of the jury?

HAYDEN: That is my customary greeting, Your Honor.

COURT: It may be your customary greeting, but we do not allow shaking of fists in this courtroom.

HAYDEN: It implied no disrespect for the jury; it is my customary greeting.

COURT: Regardless of what it implies, sir, there will be no fist shaking and I caution you not to repeat it. That applies to all the defendants, Mr. Schultz.

SCHULTZ: In promoting and encouraging this riot, the three men whom I just mentioned used an organization which they called the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam to plan these activities. Two of these defendants, Abbie Hoffman who sits÷who is just standing for you, ladies and gentlemen··

COURT: The jury is directed to disregard the kiss thrown by the defendant Hoffman and the defendant is directed not to do that sort of thing again.

SCHULTZ:·.and with them a man named Jerry Rubin who is standing there---these two men called themselves leaders of the Yippies.

HOFFMAN AND RUBIN: Yippie!

I met my former husband in Los Angeles. We married, had two children and got divorced. That did not take very long. He still works in television and lives in Phoenix.

I worked as a Metro Engineer for twenty years: DC, Baltimore, Boston and LA. In Los Angeles, things got messy, engineering-wise and I became a whistle blower. I had been encouraged to speak out through Greta's crowd, particularly via Bob Rafelson, who was a staunch supporter, but, more importantly, back to the nuns and my high school experience, which helped me choose the road less traveled. Co-incidentally, I was getting divorced. Then suddenly, overnight, we had the riots; my house was in the city, right in the center of the action. So during ten days in May 1992, I lost my career, my marriage, and my neighborhood. Then things went downhill and kept going in that direction for ten years. I encountered long-term unemployment, single motherhood, relocation (4X's since then), abusive relationships, long-term childhood illnesses, bankruptcy, lawsuits, apartment fire, & eviction. Life was like a very bad soap opera. I remember one night, just after Erika had been released from the hospital for the third time in a year, I was dressed in my waitress uniform and I got down on my knees by the side of my bed and prayed for a miracle. That was the night the apartment building caught on fire. And I was hoping that God would have made me Queen for the Day.

There were some long nights sitting at the Big Boy's counter with two mouths to feed and not able being able to afford it. I became increasingly depressed. I felt that I had made all the right choices for building a better society but to what avail? Plus, as a clotheshorse, I was looking pretty ragged. My flirtatious mode had dried up. Somehow, in taking the road less traveled, I couldn't see where I was going.

But there was a strong candle of friendship burning amid the darkness and I had some of the greatest, wildest, single mother friends and they provided a rich golden tapestry to our lives. Raising our kids tribal fashion, we might find ourselves bedding down under rugs at a new age vortex in New Mexico or at the hot springs made famous in "Easy Rider." We were all broke and let our children cover themselves in mud and run through old orchards with dogs and horses. Erika, my youngest, thrived under these conditions, as she is the naturalist among us.

When I lived in an apartment in Chicago, there was a nice house for sale for sale in the neighborhood. I told my girls, grades 2 and 4 at the time: "I can sell the house in California and work a full time job, and we could buy that house. But then I would only have two weeks of vacation a year, and we would have a housekeeper live with us."

Zinta, my oldest, stamped her foot on the sidewalk and said, "I would rather live in a trailer and have adventures than live a life like that."

And I thought, "Well there goes trying to keep up with the Jones'."

After some time my life began to turn around. My oldest daughter Zinta started modeling in Chicago and has since worked in Europe and Japan and lives in Los Angeles and New York. Although she is not making enough money to survive on her own, there are many friends around the globe that help her along the way.

My next reunion with Douglas was deep in a State Forrest, down a long, badly rutted dirt road outside Cadillac, Michigan, in August 2001. I was a cook for Zinta's Latvian Scout Camp. We had been living in Chicago for nearly seven years. Douglas had also been living near the shores of Lake Michigan for three years, only up north with his dad. Our repeated attempts at seeing one another had failed, since Chicago is an eight-hour drive from Petoskey.

I knew that Douglas, too, had suffered emotional set-backs, grave illnesses and hard times, but that knowledge left me unprepared for what happened the moment I turned around from the camp fire with a large metal skillet in my hand. He walked into the fire circle and it was like being hit by a Stealth Bomber; my knees quaked, I looked at him for one second and wanted to fall down on the ground. I was completely smitten. Douglas had been a modern dancer in Seattle for 17 years and to stay in shape, to dance at his age, he had to train in the gym. Just three years prior, he had cut off his waist long dread locks. Gone was the dark curly hair. Now he had short, military style, salt and pepper bristles.

We spent the evening with the scouts, who had decorated the primitive campground with ferns and birch bark decorations. They baked special rye bread, black peas and had fermented a soft cheese for the closing night of the camp. Many had attended the Latvian language school in Kalamazoo for the summer and young men and women together, would break into six part harmonies of ancient folk songs. I had learned the rudiments of the language from my prior marriage, but Douglas said it was like suddenly slipping back into the 1920's. There was a large bonfire by the side of the lake, and then later more songs and skits.

Douglas and I talked for a few hours and then went to our separate tents. The next day we broke camp and traveled down state to visit a friend who lived on Lake Michigan. On the beach that next day, almost as soon as we sat down, less that 24 hours since we had re-met, we decided to get married. I agreed to move to his town, and live in the house with his dad, never having met his dad, seen the house or been to the town. I had lots of friends who had tons of regrets. I had listened to them gripe and moan about losing careers, opportunities, relationships, making fools of themselves, but my only regret was that I was not able to have a relationship with Douglas. Right there on the beach, I turned my life on a dime.

A year later, without much of an opportunity to see each other (he took care of his dad and worked during the week, and I took care of my children and worked on the weekends), I moved up north and we wed almost immediately. Douglas had been a bachelor his whole life, so he had a few male dominance issues I had to learn to deal with that were similar to dealing with my male cat. Luckily, I had been reviewing these issues with Dusty for about ten years, and learned to see things his way, most of the time. I had no problem changing my name to "Mrs. Douglas E. MacAdams." The irony! He was the one who sent me to the women's lib meetings! After being a woman of independent nature for fifty years, I became a mail order bride!

But Douglas says he was always waiting for me, so he made room in his small bedroom for all my paraphernalia, which is one of my issues. My oldest daughter moved to Los Angeles at 16 and I no longer see her very often, but she was a headstrong girl from a very early age and I spend a lot of time managing her career via Internet. I've learned tricks of the trade from single mom comrades who live in backwoods Slovakia and have been using the Internet for years to aid in their daughter's modeling careers. Hooray globilization! My younger daughter, Erika, fits right into the high school, and has made it to the Varsity Soccer team. Instead of being one of the "Women who run with the Wolves," I am now a soccer mom, and proud of it. Douglas' dad was shot down during WWII and was in a prisoner of war camp where the "Great Escape" occurred. He is a gentleman and a scholar, and reminds me of the actor who introduces Masterpiece theater, the have similar baritones and vocabulary.

Last year I started substitute teaching at the local High School. One day, it was Modern American History. I scanned the open textbook and got a bolt of shock. This class of 16 year olds was studying civil rights, the large anti-war demonstrations in DC, the first commune in New Mexico and Woodstock! Huey Newton! Abbie Hoffman! The nightly news reports of our tumultuous past were now part of the history books for school children in Northern Michigan. The students were turning in term papers on the Iran/Contra Affair and Ollie North. Some of them had excuses or had to run to the library to print their essays. I was dumbfounded. Somehow it never got through to me, that we were right. I had suffered so much from my decision to be a whistle blower and the resulting bankruptcy and that I missed that really important point. Nixon went down in the history book as a crook, and Spiro Agnew? How did he go down in this Modern American History book FOR CHILDREN? There's one TV photo with ONE quote: "Niggling nabobs of negativity."

Whoozhhh went the water down the steps at Klowntown, and there was John Clarke's voice bellowing obscenities at the Television. Feeling the effects of the onset of the golden years, or possibly from inhaling too much CO2 these days (no matter where you live on the planet) my mind jumped to a parallel universe which used to be called daydreaming. A memory came back: the clanking of the beer bottles, the sudsy water cascading down the steps, having to take a pee in a small bathroom while another comrade took a shower, a thin piece of plastic separating us.

"My term paper, can I turn it in tomorrow?"

"Huh?"

"My paper on Ollie North, can I turn it in tomorrow?"

Ollie North, land a' Goshen. What truth did I miss?

From Dr. Hunter S. Thompson: "1972 was the year I first met John Kerry, at a riot on that elegant little street in front of the White House. He was yelling into a bullhorn and I was trying to throw a dead bleeding rat onto the president's lawn··..We were angry and righteous in those days, and there were millions of us. We kicked two chief executives out of the White House because they were stupid warmongers. ·Wise people said that was impossible, but so what? It was fun. We were warriors then, and our tribe was strong, like a river. That river is still running." From "The Fun Hogs in the Passing Lane" Rolling Stone November 11th, 2004.

What about the street education from the Route One Brigade? Four years ago, still seeking that connection, I bought a copy of "Fugitive Days", by Bill Ayers. From the book jacket: "Ayers begins with his education as a rebel, his increasing sense of horror at the American involvement in Viet Nam. He takes us to the Days of Rage, SDS, the Black Panthers, and deep into the weather Underground. At the center of the book is a terrible explosion, Diane Oughton is killed and Ayers becomes a fugitive." Ayers is now a distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Chicago and is married to Bernadette Dohrm.

"This is a precious book·..because it re-creates a critical point of view and way of thinking that we seem, even a few decades later, barely able to recall." S. Turow

"A memoir that is, in effect, a deeply moving elegy to all those young dreamers who tried to live decently in an indecent world. Ayers provides a tribute to those better angels of ourselves." Studs Turkel

During the class on Modern American History, I found out that being arrested for an anti-war demonstration and receiving a GO TO JAIL card gets you out of jail free now in the eyes of many of the High Schoolers. (They wear shirts that say the DOORS and LED ZEPPLIN. If you have been to Woodstock, then you are a living god.) They were shocked when I showed an old Viet Nam War documentary and pointed to a demonstration and said, "I was there."

"You're lying!"

"Douglas was arrested during one of the demonstrations."

"No way!" (Douglas, as the only male librarian in a small town, is known by many.)

Douglas's first arrest was at the Skinner building. The second was on the day of the Justice Department demonstrations, and as he likes to point out, the largest single day of arrest in the history of the world. He was moving away from the Justice building to block another major intersection when he was thrown into central lock-up and kept there overnight.

Douglas's views and mannerisms have not changed one iota. In the morning, as the sun comes up over Lake Walloon, he drinks his coffee slowly and watches CNN. Alone in the room, he will suddenly burst into his characteristic laughter at the irony spoken over the airwaves that many Americans probably swallow with their coffee and think its truth. I've asked him to write an essay every time he nails down a good argument at the dinner table, but he hasn't started yet. Poor Erika, she had no idea what I was getting her into. Yet she's a smart kid, and selected "War and Peace," to read on her own this winter. I found her an old copy on the bookshelf. It belonged to Douglas's mother.

Douglas spent the last four years on the Board of Directors of the Natural Food Coop. The last two years he was President while they finally moved from their old hippie headquarters to a brand new building on Main Street. First time there had been a grocery store in town in nearly thirty years. It was an enormous diplomatic duty that he performed free of charge.

When Bush declared war in Iraq, the family was home in front of the fire. Erika and I sat on the rug as the men watched television. Erika was working on a large board for a school project: the seven layers of costumes that a woman wore in a Shakespeare play. I understood the mechanics of it very well from having worked at the Odyssey Theater in Los Angeles, and we laid out detailed sketches as Bush gave his speech. I asked the men a simple question. What war was being fought in England during the time of Shakespeare? Could they name it of the top of their heads? I knew what clothes women were wearing, as did my daughter, down to the minute detail of the undergarments. Do you know?

So I ask you, what is more important? War or Fashion? OK, that's a trick Platonistic question. My answer? Well I jockeyed a passion for fashion into a job as a costume designer, and now I help other people look good. I've worked on six major shows this year, and enjoyed every minute of frustration. Politics is fashion, fashion is political. The only way I can end the war is to come to some kind of peace with myself.

The best lesson I learned from all this? It doesn't matter how rich, powerful or famous you are, if you are a jerk, people will remember for being a jerk. The richest and most powerful people in the world look up to the ones who are the most gracious. What I learned from meeting Huey Newton, was to be more like his wife, Gracious Gwendolyn. Granted, I am not a saint, even though I tell my family that I am one almost daily, nor am I as diplomatic as I should be at my age, the blockheads still infuriate me, but at least I comprehend that the truth always wins in the end.

Kumbaya, Work for Peace, Happy Anniversary!

Mrs. Douglas Elek MacAdams (Mrs. Cheeze)

Critics rave; "The Cheeze packed thirty five years of political baggage into a five pound bag. Someone must have raised her consciousness along the way."

"Karat, you've got legs, boobs and brains, and that's a rare combination in this town." ---Bert Schneider

"He who makes war his profession cannot be otherwise than vicious. War makes men thieves and peace brings them to the gallows." ----Machiavelli

The Klownhouse Klown on the roof as drawn by Jim Risdo