Jul
22
My Mother and The Hippy Mafia
July 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment
What’s your mother reading this summer? My mom happens to be reading the book Orange Sunshine – a book about the LSD culture in the ’60s and a group of smugglers and hippy-philosophers called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, of which Timothy Leary was an integral part. This choice of summer reading may seem out of sorts for a mother, but not for mine. My mom was one of the young hippy chicks, mostly runaways from conservative Orange County families, that the author talks about in the book. These girls were taken under the wings of the mafia-like dudes of the Brotherhood, initiated into the scene as counterculture groupies, young wives, and mothers of wayward kiddos roaming the beaches, kids who were known to sometimes be dosed on LSD as young as seven or eight years old. My mom can’t stop talking about this book, not only because she was there, but because it tells such an intense (true) story and covers some seriously interesting history. My dad was involved in this infamous Brotherhood too – a poet smuggler and an associate of these psychedelic surfer criminals, all crammed into a beautiful paradise in Laguna canyon that they called “Dodge City”…and this is where my own childhood begins. Hey, maybe I should write a book…
From Book Soup (the blog) – here’s a brief review of Orange Sunshine:
…Orange Sunshine tells the story of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a band of surfers in Laguna Beach who became the world’s biggest acid and hashish smugglers and dealers in the 1960s. When Sandoz Labs acid was increasingly hard to come by, the Brotherhood synthesized “Orange Sunshine,” the most potent acid of the time. Apparently they dropped thousands of hits of this LSD from an airplane onto a crowd of 25,000 in a three-day Laguna Beach celebration. The occasion? An apocalyptic birthday party for Jesus Christ. They also wanted to buy a tropical island and install Timothy Leary as the high priest of a new spiritual Utopian society.
For an excerpt from the book click here.
Here’s a video interview with one of the guys from the Brotherhood. A documentary is in the making, based on the book.
There is something Kafka-esque about 1960′s counterculture, so it’s fitting to end with this bit of book news:
An Israeli judge has ruled that Kafka’s unpublished writings, along with manuscripts, letters and journals by his friend and fellow author Max Brod, are to be made public. The literary world awaits! For more on this, click here.
P.S. Summer is not over! Publisher’s Weekly makes some delicious suggestions for summer reading, here. And another thing: Check out this interview with Bob Stein, co-founder of The Institute for the Future of the Book, here.