Confessions of a Hippie

Adriana Bardolino

Description

Fileld with love, sex, drugs, and rock, this memoir shares the story of a young hippie’s rollercoaster ride through the counterculture movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
Adriana is a young woman in her twenties navigating her way through the counterculture during the late sixties and early seventies. It’s a virtual roller-coaster ride of events and emotions that often blur the lines between her present life and her past. At the beginning, she is torn between her communal family and her nuclear family. She is swept up in the politics of the day—free speech, the peace movement, free love, and communal living. Psychedelics, music, books, mysticism, and the people she meets along the way open her mind to her relationship to nature and the universe itself, as well as her place in it. She questions everything about life. She chooses to see her relationships, loves, and life events in a very metaphysical way, sometimes even ethereally. Perhaps, if you lived through that era, you will see some of yourself in her. If not, you will learn something about the young people who did.

Sujets

• Historical
• Lettres et linguistique
• All You Need is Love
• Biography
• Independent Women
• Peace
• Gypsies
• Autobiography
• Haight-Ashbury
• Love
• Hippie
• Paix

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 01 février 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781663213600
• Langue: English

Extrait

Other Books by The Author
Love and Loathing in the Islands, Searching for Gau guin
Love and Redemption in the Tropics, Missing Gau guin
CONFESSIONS OF A HIPPIE
 
ALWAYS SEARCHING FOR LOVE
 
 
 
 
ADRIANA BARDOLINO
 
 
 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A HIPPIE
ALWAYS SEARCHING FOR LOVE
 
Copyright © 2021 Adriana Bardolino.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
 
 
iUniverse
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Because of the dynamic nature of the internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6632-1359-4 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-1361-7 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-1360-0 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020925766
 
iUniverse rev. date: 06/13/2023
We do not all walk along the same path in life, but life itself can be the path.
 
 
 
CONTENTS
Preface
Chapter 1 THE DISCO VERY
Chapter 2 THE OFFICIAL SUMMER OF LOVE, 1967
Chapter 3 FEAST OF THE SEVEN FI SHES
Chapter 4 SURVIVAL B READ
Chapter 5 THE TREE WAS ALIVE, LIK E ME
Chapter 6 AMERICA THE BEAUT IFUL
Chapter 7 THE ZOFIA L ODGE
Chapter 8 THE YELLOW H OUSE
Chapter 9 THE BEST-LAID PLANS DISRU PTED
Chapter 10 GOING TO CALIFORNI A -A GAIN
Chapter 11 BACK IN THE FOLD
Chapter 12 THE R IVER
Chapter 13 THE HOUSE OF EL CAPITAN MOR ALES
Chapter 14 INDEPENDENT W OMEN
Chapter 15 MAKING LOVE IN A ME MORY
Chapter 16 A FORCE OF NA TURE
Chapter 17 WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE AT DEER C REEK
Chapter 18 STORMY’S PUB
Chapter 19 A COSMIC JOKE
Chapter 20 VISIONS OF GAU GUIN
PREFACE
T he main story of this book focuses on an eight-year period in my life, 1967 to 1975, when I was in my twenties. I kept journals that have great detail of my experiences and my feelings. After my mother passed away, I found the journals and the letters that I had written to her during those years, which she had kept. I am not sure what her motivation was in saving them, but I am thankful she did. Reading through my letters and journals was a roller-coaster ride of emotions—a lot of laughter and a lot of tears.
During that time, the Vietnam War was still raging, although it was near its end. The war began in 1955 and ended in 1975, amid huge protests. The country was divided, and it was a time of upheaval and unrest. A counterculture developed, where the catch-phrase “Turn on, tune in, and drop out,” made famous by Timothy Leary, was adopted by many people, myself included.
A love movement was going on and something called “Flower Power,” which was displayed sometimes at antiwar demonstrations by hippies giving a flower to a soldier holding a gun. It was also the beginning of the free-speech movement, which began in Berkeley, California, where I was living in the late sixties. “Free love” was a general practice, and the word freedom was in the lyrics of many songs that were popular at the time. It was a time when psychedelic drugs were the rage, which drove people toward introspection, questioning society’s norms, and the meaning of life itself.
My journals include poems I wrote, watercolors, and drawings. I jotted down excerpts from books I was reading and described dreams I had. I copied lyrics of songs with words that expressed what I was feeling, perhaps better than I could express them myself. Some paragraphs in this book are directly from the entries in my journals. I have thousands of photographs and slides—some are black-and-white photos I developed myself when I had my own darkroom. In fact, when I discovered I’d written very few journal entries in 1969, I was able to fill in the blanks with my letters, photos, and slides, which were stamped with dates. I found letters from friends glued in the pages, and there were drawings and passages they had entered themselves. Of course, I also had my memories.
When I began reading through my letters and putting them together with the journals of corresponding years, I found an outline I’d written for this book, which was almost exactly the same as the outline I had just jotted down. At some point, many years ago, I guess I had attempted to write this book, but life got in the way. After I retired I had plenty of time to delve into the project.
I want to confess that I fell in love with the characters in my life all over again. I was tossed into the past in such a way that I felt love, anger, happiness, hurt, and depression, just as if it was happening now. Some of the people in the book are dead now, and some are still friends today. Names have been changed, but I imagine that those who experienced these years with me will know who they are. I ask them to remember that these were my experiences and feelings and may not have been theirs.
Siri and Alexa became my assistants with dates and places of events from those years. I also had help from friends who read my original drafts of chapters. A few of the main people, who experienced a great deal of this right along with me, contributed their memories and stories. We are all tied together by the experiences we shared.
There was so much more, and so many more people I could have included. I attempted to limit the story to concentrate on the events, the people, and the relationships that were the most important to me during that time in my life. I would ask readers to keep in mind that I recorded these experiences when I was in my twenties; it was how I perceived the world, the people around me, and love itself, at that time. For me it was a time of innocence, hope, mysticism, idealism, and, of course, my youth played a big role.
I hope that readers can relate to my story, written from a woman’s perspective. Those who are too young to be familiar with that era will learn something about that time and about some of the young people who lived in it. All in all, writing this book was a joyful process, and I loved every minute of it. Looking back, it was certainly a wild and beautiful ride.
ONE THE DISCOVERY
“Secret Love” by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster
Just like in the song I was hiding a secret, a secret love. I held the secret for many years until one day it was set free
I t was October 1995, and I was visiting my mother in the Bronx. It was her birthday, and we were planning all the things we wanted to do while I was there. She recently had spent three months with me in Hawaii, where I had been living for a long time. We were discussing the possibly of her moving there permanently with me.
She laughed and showed me her calendar. “You know, when you get to my age, it’s all doctor appointments.”
She had called me about a month back, telling me that she wasn’t feeling well.
I had only been in the Bronx a few days when she had a stroke and was hospitalized. After five depressing and grueling weeks, during which my mother slowly deteriorated, she passed away.
I received the phone call from the hospital, telling me that my mother had died. I rushed to the hospital, wanting to see her one last time, as if I could catch her spirit before it left her body. I touched her face and neck, which were still warm. I hugged her and cried. I kissed her goodbye and stroked her face. I sat there next to her bed for a while. She had such a peaceful look on her face, despite what she had been through over the past weeks.
When she was still able to speak, she had said, “Adriana, go home. You have a life.”
I’d stroked her forehead and responded, “I’m not going anywhere without you.”
Eventually, I got up and touched her lifeless body again. I turned to her and said, “I’ll see you on the other side.” I closed the curtain around her bed and walked to the nurses’ station. I thanked them for all the attention they’d given my mother, and I left the hospital. I walked to the bus stop in a daze.
The next week was filled with funeral arrangements and calling family members, which I seemed to get through like a robot whose wires had been short circuited. I am an only child, and my father had died less than two years earlier. I went through my mother’s dresser drawers and observed how neatly her undergarments were placed, and how orderly her clothes were hung in the closets. It was almost as if she expected someone would be going through them. Just a few days before her stroke, she had shown me a dress she had set aside for her own funeral, which I thought was weird.
She had said, “Adriana, I don’t want anyone to see my feet. I want a half-opened casket.”
I turned to her with a frown and said, “Ma what are you saying? She didn’t answer me. Perhaps she’d had a premonition.
It took three months to go through the apartment where my parents had lived for thirty-two years. I found crazy things in the closets—Styrofoam heads with wigs, a gas mask, and boxes of fabric she had saved for me from her dress factory. The fabric was so old it disintegrated as soon as I touched it.
In the closets I found tissues crumpled up in the pockets of jackets with her jewelry