The cast of Hair played at the Coconut Grove Playhouse. We are all hanging out in Peacock Park with them one night late after the performance. NASA or someone had gotten the looney idea to shoot a rocket into the Van Allen radiation belts and release strontium and barium to see what would happen. Say, what? Gee, what if our physics was not as advanced as we thought. If studying environmental science had taught me anything, it is that you cannot do just one thing.

I am telling them about this looney idea. It was scheduled for that night. If we stayed up late enough we just might see the Northern Lights as far south as we were towards the Equator. They started asking what could happen. I said that if the idiots were stupid enough and did not understand the consequences sufficiently, and the Belt failed, that we would all be fried to a crisp from the bombardment of the solar wind at the least, if not every other cosmic particle coming our way. It is important to remember that living with the bomb as long as we had in those days, we were primed to believe any apocalyptic scenario. It was a major theme of the science fiction of those days. Maybe that’s why everything seemed an excuse for sex. Just like people going off to war, you needed some life affirming act. Maybe you wanted to be sure you got it one last time!I had grown up in Dade County. I well remember the nuclear air raid drills they put us very imaginative ten-year-olds through. We crawled under our desks, turned our backs to the windows so flying glass would not get in our face, wrapped our hands with fingers interlocked behind our neck to protect our jugulars, and closed our eyes so we would not be blinded by the flash. What they should have done and did not was to teach us how to reach our ass with our lips so we could kiss it goodbye. Believe me, though, that was the message we were getting.We lived in West Miami, just a couple of miles from the International Airport. Jets had begun flying passengers, but no one had any sense of noise abatement then. They were quite loud. Picture this. The kid has just been put through one of these Armageddon drills, and he is in bed late at night and hears one of those jets. Is it the Russians? Is it all over? I defy my age cohorts to deny that they did not have us living in fear.

Then what do they throw at us? Try troops in the streets with tanks and mobile missile launchers. That’s right. I am fourteen when the two Mr. K’s had their little Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember standing in front of our house as the massing force of the US Army paraded by. This was the height of asininity of course. They should have been held hundreds of miles back, spread all over kingdom come, and prepared to move fast to repel the invading bearded Cuban infidels. Of course, the Russians had hardly any troops in Cuba, so what was that all about? It merely reinforced the hell out of living in fear and loathing in Amerika.

We’re in Peacock Park in the Grove waiting for the greatest light show in history.  It gets well past the scheduled time. We all start to head home. This six-foot-tall blond Valkyrie from the cast says to me, “I don’t want to be alone tonight. Take me home with you!” I did. We did. The sixties marched on. In the morning we discovered the Jet Propulsion Lab loonies had delayed the launch till that night. By then it was anti-climactic (there go those funny word choices again), there was no light show, and no one even noticed.