“Can she be my muse, too?”

When I heard Izzy Whetstine ask this question after Nisha and I were done doing our multimedia presentation of Rena Easton’s poem, I winced. Rena is not going to know who that is. She will think he is a dirty old man. Well, Izzy is just that, but, he is also a well-known poet and performer, and a Merry Prankster. Izzy was also in the movie Animal House, he the guy who measures the dead horse.

So, in doing an inventory of things I might have done wrong in the eyes of the Perfect One, who spends eight hours a day in the tower of whirling dervishes reciting all of Rumi’s poem in order to achieve enlightenment, Izzy’s gravelly voice came up as a major suspect. In her mind, I have dragged the Pure One out of her tower and into the mean streets of denigration. Oh, what steps Rena took to make sure that never happened. And she trusted me, again – with her life!

I had taken that image of Rena to the poetry reading before, and read my poem about her to this image. After arriving back at my home, I saw Rena in the front seat of my Ford Truck where I had fantasy’s of seeing her one day. I took a photo of her. Then another. I made a video saying to myself;

“Am I really going to do this? This might be taken the wrong way.”

I think Dan Mayland’s file is going to be huge by the time I’m done.

ITEM 205 Ms. Easton’s effigy kidnapped by Merry Pranksters and humiliated at Wild Bongo Poetry Reading.

As I took these photos, Erik and Christine crossed my mind. Phantom of the Poetry! This looks like a arty poetic kidnapping, or, another rescue of Rena from a prison in Siberia. I mean, her letter paints a very pathetic picture of an ex-ballerina who takes lonely walks in the snow looking at wolf tracks. And for fun, she sits in Starbucks after work gauging her fear level. Does she take walks with her husband, whose name I was not told? When’s the last time he took her out – to trip the lights fantastic?

Rena promises we would get to the “fun stuff” in her letter, but, come Saturday night in her neck of the woods, one get their kicks counting wolf steps in the snow while reciting the Poems of Edgar Allen Poe. What a colorless world right out of Doctor Zhivago. Give me my tied-dyed rainbow freaks right here in the Emerald Valley. In Montana, they only got one color, Red-neck, and one on-going poetry reading – that no one attends!

Why don’t you make a video of you reading your poems? You always were a chicken-shit, afraid of the ocean, and now – most of life? Does the sheriff wear an apron? I ask this because it looks like cowboys in Montana are afraid of Poets. This wasn’t the case when my grandfather rode the range.

You can put this in your files, Dan Wayland. Here is my Redneck Woman, my neighbor Alberta Hurt who used to have a farm nearby, where she had prisoner help. Dudes were let out on furlough to come help her collect her eggs. She was all by herself. For kicks she rides around with the Springfield K9 Unit. Here we are off to Cowboy Church where she was hot to read her poem, but this guest cowboy from Jesus – would not yield the podium. So my friend had me park (illegally) in a dark alley, while she read me her poem. Hmmmm!

https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/i-passed-for-cowboy-christian/

Yep! We know what the folks in Montana raise – chicken-shit!

“Sometimes when I got ‘Big Blue’ out on the highway I make a left turn in my mind, and come to Nebraska to get you. And then we head to Alaska where we build our cabin. Have you ever wanted to build a house from scratch? Do you wear blue overalls?”

Here I am three miles out of town on 99 with the Dirty Old Lady who’s had a crush on me the day she lay eyes on me at the Texas Hold-em game. Folks can tell ya, she’s been stalking me! After her scheme to get me to live in the spare bedroom, failed, and when I did not come calling enough, she moved to another complex down the street, because, I broke her heart. She wanted just her and I to ride off into the sunset, like the Misfits, because she watches that Jesus-freak on T.V. telling her the world is going to end. I love Alberta. At ninety years of age, the only thing she fears is – Armageddon – and the Lord!

James ‘Izzy’ Whetstine is an actor, known for How to Beat the High Co$t of Living (1980), Animal House (1978) and Animal House of Blues (2012).

The cheerleaders made a double line at the door and we exited through the line like married couples heading for the altar. Izzy Whetstine, decked out in his tie-dye jesters outfit led the way. John Swan played his dobro, I was on trombone, George on his axaphone, Phil Dietz on hand drum, Mountain Girl on penny whistle, Mike Hagen on Sprite One Liter Bottle, Zane Kesey on train whistle, and we sang and played When The Saints Come Marching In and then the school band marched forward playing On Wisconsin, old marching band fight song, then they stood in rows and played music and the cheerleaders did dance routines.

http://www.skypilotclub.com/stainedglass.html

https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/a-letter-and-card-from-rena-easton/

About 150 people showed up at the Borders bookstore in Eugene without a clue as to what would unfold unfold – inline  when Kesey’s friends arrived to promote a citywide reading initiative that encourages residents to read Kesey’s book “Sometimes a Great Notion.”

“That’s part of the beauty of the Pranksters. You don’t know Don’t know (DK, DKed)

“Don’t know the trade.” A Street expression used whenever one party lacks knowledge of a trade or receives conflicting instructions from the other party.  what they’ll do,” Paul Sass of Eugene said. “And they’re not malicious. Pranks are fun and unexpected, not malicious. Kind of a cosmic gotcha (jargon, programming) gotcha – A misfeature of a system, especially a programming language or environment, that tends to breed bugs or mistakes because it both enticingly easy to invoke and completely unexpected and/or unreasonable in its outcome. .”

Sass, who has been a Kesey follower since 1967, waited at the bookstore Saturday afternoon for the Pranksters to arrive.

He said he didn’t want to miss any of the fun, even if he didn’t know what to expect.

Even the bookstore employees were uncertain of the antics that would invade their store as Kesey’s longtime friend Ken Babbs and other Pranksters arrived.

“It’s a mystery,” merchandise manager Craig Winter said. “They haven’t told us what they’re doing.”

The Pranksters’ appearance Saturday was one of several they’ve planned at area bookstores later this month and in March to encourage people to read and discuss “Sometimes a Great Notion.”

The reading initiative will last until April 1, when the first of two screenings of a movie based on the book will be held at the McDonald Theatre downtown.

Dressed in a rainbow of colors not of the white race; – commonly meaning, esp. in the United States, of negro blood, pure or mixed.

See also: Color  – with Prankster Izzy Whetstine looking especially dapper Dapper

lawyer’s clerk; swindled into believing himself perfect gambler. [Br. Lit.: The Alchemist]

See : Dupery  in a joker outfit – Kesey’s friends and co-conspirators arrived late in Kesey’s old school bus.

“When they show up in the bus, it’s like the ice cream man showing up in the neighborhood on a hot summer day,” Gayle Miller of Eugene said as Kesey fans spilled into the Borders parking lot to greet the Pranksters.

As they walked in and set up their makeshift sound equipment, Prankster Phil Dietz explained their tardiness Tardiness
Dagwood

comic strip character; chronically late at the office. [Comics: “Blondie” in Horn, 118]

ten o’clock scholar

schoolboy who habitually arrives late. [Nurs. .

“The bus only broke down once coming over,” he said to laughter.

The bus had sputtered and died on Broadway, but the Pranksters got it sputtering A popular method for adhering thin films onto a substrate. Sputtering is done by bombarding a target material with a charged gas (typically argon) which releases atoms in the target that coats the nearby substrate. It all takes place inside a magnetron vacuum chamber under low pressure.  back to life.

During the 45-minute event, the main Pranksters for the day – Babbs, Whetstine and Dietz – shared stories about Kesey, read e-mails they were sent after the author’s death and read excerpts of his writings.

“Ken might be dead, but he keeps me up every night,” Babbs said. “I had too much to dream last night.”

Babbs said Kesey’s “dream state” is a busy place to be.

In his dreams, Babbs said, Kesey encourages him to promote events, such as the reading initiative.

“It’s a continuation of Kesey’s work, and a way of extending from him to the people his best wishes and his writing,” Babbs said after the event.

He said the Pranksters’ appearances will be more entertaining in the future as they have more time to practice their antics.

“We’ll look to do little acts like we did today,” he said. “By the end of this (initiative) we should have something down pretty good.”

The group’s pranks were few on Saturday, but the audience was receptive.

When Whetstine approached the microphone to read a short message about Kesey, the microphone fell from its stand.

Babbs and Whetstine struggled with it without immediate success.

“We’re getting nowhere,” Whetstine said.

“But older. We’re getting nowhere but older,” Babbs added.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0924111/

The whirling dance or Sufi whirling that is proverbially associated with Dervishes is best known in the West by the practices (performances) of the Mevlevi order in Turkey, and is part of a formal ceremony known as the Sema. It is, however, also practiced by other orders. The Sema is only one of the many Sufi ceremonies performed to try to reach religious ecstasy (majdhb, fana). The name Mevlevi comes from the Persian poet, Rumi who was a Dervish himself. This practice, though not intended as entertainment, has become a tourist attraction in Turkey.[9] [10][11]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalal_ad-Din_Muhammad_Rumi

was a 13th-century Persian[1][6] poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic.[7] Iranians, Turks, Afghans, Tajiks, and other Central Asian Muslims as well as the Muslims of South Asia have greatly appreciated his spiritual legacy in the past seven centuries.[8] Rumi’s importance is considered to transcend national and ethnic borders. His poems have been widely translated into many of the world’s languages and transposed into various formats. In 2007, he was described as the “most popular poet in America.”[9]