(insert name and wear over heart)

By Liza Williams

Nov. 17, 1967

Play with me, why not.

What’s so serious anyway, on the world hemorrhaging, grab a bit of surface and clench your hand, see how the blood flows in designs, swirls like the inside lining of old books, marbleized, looking at it that way, it’s all psychedelic, isn’t it?

Play with me in time, five minutes of mutual oblivion, dance a little or longer along with the record, band, whistler on the corner, play with me, who cares.

Engles (the other half of that old time rock and revolution band) said/wrote…. Freedom is the recognition of necessity… do you did that? Some other sage said… Necessity is the mother of invention… That’s a goodle, too. Robert says it’s all a sandbox, does he intend to bury his head or make castles, and when does the park close? I say whatever comes into my fingers, which is my way of saying, what do you say?

Sometimes, when they set this column they mad big boo boos, I get very upset, why? Am I hungry for immortality, sure. Also I like to be the one who says what I say, but then, does it matter, maybe.

I get letters from readers, who have had the same (?) experiences, and tell me so. I like that, it’s a void I am always shouting into, or so it seems, and then it isn’t by virtue of response. Three issues ago, this paper printed a letter from a girl who wrote about the Hippiebum column and refuted some of the things she thought I said, only I hadn’t said them, still, maybe we are never heard to say the thing we think we speak.

I want to tell you about something sad. I went to an auction of Indian relics in Orange County (which looked like any other place really() and listened to the bidding. Baskets got high prices. So did a saddle encrusted with beadwork. Someone got the money and someone got the relics (which is a sad word by itself). What did the Indians get? In the relic collectors’ world is the only good Indian a dead Indian?

Painters used to grow rich and famous posthumously. Not so much any more because anything done by hand these days is a prestige item. Have you looked at paintings at Aaron Brothers? At the Akroa? I knew a girl who took a painting back to Aaron Bros, to have the brown part removed, as her living room color scheme was blue and green. It only took them a week to renovate it to suit her need. That’s service, isn’t it? Is it Art? Why not, she liked it!

We have a house on a hillside in Los Angeles where we can sometimes see the trees in spite of the smog. We have two cats and a new dog. Yesterday the vet told me the dog has distemper. This is the second dog I’ve had from the Humane Society that turned out to have distemper. Before they would let me have the dog, they inspected my yard, and demanded a five dollar “donation.” They gave me a slip of paper that said that the dog had had its shots. Have you ever seen a dog die of distemper? Apart from holding dogs for “ransom” and infecting them with diseases, what other games does the Humane Society play?

Do you still want to play with me? My friend, Rose Lopez makes to order the most beautiful Indian kickapoo shirts. She makes ones with ruffles and ribbons, ones with tucks and ribbons. She says the Indians copied the ruffles from the English officers. When I wear my shirt I fell like a beautiful person, which is faulty logic perhaps but a conditioned reaction. In Southwest Africa the herrero women (Africans)  wear shirts made of German Print. German Print is cotton material with small flowers and patterns, mostly in dark blue on white. They sew rows of tiny tucks along the bottom, wear aprons with braid borders, white blouses, black scarves on their heads , and resemble the style of their 19^th century conquerors.

Lawrence Lipton has a happening on Thursday nights called the Experimental College. It meets at UCLA. Usually there is a rock and roll band that plays at the beginning of each session. One Thursday, we made paper hats out of pages from magazines and propped them on each others’ heads. It was a very relaxed and groovy way to spend a Thursday evening, grooving is a lousy word. So is psychedelic. So is hippie. So it beatnik, over-used still, it’s common coinage, can you suggest a substitute? This is not a contest, still, if you send some words in ma7ybe I will list them in one of my columns. Columns long tubes that support… what?

One more question. Does a frozen turkey make a thanksgiving dinner?