Back At The Old 88's

Yeah, I've been slacking. A fit here, a false start there, and before you know it, I'm just not writing anything. Again. Well, this time, I'm back at it. When my boss, Peter, wants me to enter repair orders into the computer, he always says, "so...I need you to hit the ol' 88's." He's referring to a piano keyboard, which has 88 keys. And, now I'm here, at the 88's.

Enough of the "Happy Birthday" stuff. That's a story for another time. In brief, I volunteered to help organize the 30th anniversary celebration for the FSM, and wound up working with this total nutjob of a woman who ran the Women's HERstory Archives, and the National Clearinghouse for Marital and Date Rape out of her dusty, crap-filled home in the Berkeley hills. She was self-absorbed and scam-o-riffic. Both "charities" functioned as tax shelters for her. She became involved with the FSM because she was originally involved, but nobody wanted to deal with her. As her gofer, I had to put up with a lot of shit. Most of the shit came from her. The woman had a scent allergy. Yeah, a "scent allergy." She was like that freaky guy on Northern Exposure who had to live in a bubble because he couldn't stand smells. Well, this woman, whose name I won't mention, had her volunteers go to a shed behind her house and dress in scent-free clothing. Because most of the volunteers were women, the spare, scent-free clothing was, yeah...you guessed it...women's clothing.

I ended up wearing a fetching denim skirt and a pale pink blouse that barely closed over my chest. I had to wrap my hair (then in a ponytail) in a headscarf, and work in her home, without shoes.

Okay, so now to the present.

There's a lot of stuff for me to come up to speed on. Milo's doing well. He needs to have blood and urine taken next week, but so far, so good.

The big news right now is that I'm an ebay junkie. Well, not a junkie, but a casual user. No. More than casual. Check out the shit I have for sale. Feel free to bid on any of that crap. It's the detritus of my adolescence and early adulthood. Much, much more will follow, and, actually there's a story behind why I ended up on ebay.

Tomorrow. I promise.

More Happy Birthday

Yesterday, SFGate had this piece about the FSM celebrations. There's this piece on the FSM on today's 'Gate.

Why all of this happy birthday stuff on my weblog? I'll tell you why. Ten years ago, I helped organize the 30th Anniversary of the FSM. More on that later. My tale involves crazy people (naturally, I mean, it's Berkeley, right?), and cross-dressing. Let's leave it at that, and I'll tell you more later.

Stay tuned.

Happy Birthday

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

Mario Savio,
Berkeley, CA
December 3rd,
1964

This week, the Free Speech Movement, or FSM, turns 40. The FSM, for those who are not familiar with it, was (from the FSM acrchive website) "based on a confederation of 19 student political, religious, social action, independent and other organizations" at the University of California at Berkeley. The Movement was a reaction to the University Administration's policy to ban student organizations from setting up information tables in and around Sproul Plaza. The FSM gave rise to the long string of sit-ins, protests, riots, and vigils that occurred on the Cal-Berkeley campus throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties. Here are some descriptive chronologies of the FSM-related events that took place in late 1964/early-mid 1965.