THE GOOD OLD DAYS…
…OUR BRAVE NEW WORLD
Remember the 60’s? Television was very limited at the time, so live theater was a great place to be entertained. Like Cosby and Roseanne date the 80’s and 90’s, there was a musical in the theater that 
radiated everything special about the 60’s. Ask your dad, “What stage musical would define the 60’s?” I bet you a fiver he says, Hair.
That first year we met, when we were busy sharing every special new experience together that we could think of, your Dad insisted that I had to see San Francisco. So off we went in his ’66 Chevy pickup truck, parked at Dolores’s hillside apartment, and dashed away to explore “the city.” 
And, of course, we bought tickets to see Hair. There was a special excitement to seeing Hair because it had been “banned” in Phoenix. We weren’t supposed to see it, respectable people said. It wasn’t that San Francisco was disrespectful, rather it was open-minded, and we had that special grownup feeling, knowing that we were more open-minded than most of Phoenix. We were also curious about all the naked people.
Now this was in the days when it wasn’t really polite to even say naked in public. Mary Tyler Moore slept in a separate bed from her husband on television, nudity in the movies was an actress in a lowcut strapless gown, and passion on T.V. was a hug and a peck on the cheek, in the movies, a lip-to-lip kiss. So imagine the expectation of seeing a stage full of 20 live, breathing, real, here-and-now naked people. What would they be doing? Would I be able to look at them, or would it all be wasted because I turned my head in embarrassment? Just to think that I could tell people in Phoenix we had actually gone to Hair. Of course, there was a storyline to Hair.
Oh, yeah, the storyline. I don’t remember that. I remember sitting way back and way up in the balcony, struggling not to plug my ears. It didn’t make any difference anyway, because the sound was so loud and so muffled that no words could be picked out from the noise, no melody or lyrics discerned in the ‘music.’ Of course, we paid too much for the tickets to admit that, so I spent the evening just ‘enjoying the experience’ and reading the program over and over again, trying to soak in the plot line and meaning of the play. I was also wondering, big time wondering.
In alphabetical order on the cast list was a familiar name, William Winsome. Could that be Bill Winsome from my high school class just 2 years graduated? I kept inspecting the pinhead people way down there on the stage, trying to figure out which act from the program they were playing, and trying to figure out which of those people might be William Winsome. His character should be in scene 3 of act 1, but is this scene 4 or 5, because they are singing some kind of song, and I can’t hear the words of the song to know if it is the one from scene 3, 4, or 5, and then whoosh… the actors flee the stage, and…did they just change scenes, or is this part of the scene they just did, and maybe that other guy upstage left is William. I had almost forgotten about the naked people.
Almost, I say, because there was the added intrigue…if this William was indeed Bill…did that mean I would see Bill Winsome naked?
Now Bill had been the leading “Tom Cruise” of Arcadia High School. He had taken the male lead in The Fantastics and The Music Man, 
and he had played the “Elvis” character in Bye, Bye, Birdie with enough panache to convince the high school he was Elvis. He sang in the small and exclusive singing group, Chorale, that I belonged to and was a singing partner any of the girls would have wanted to stand next to. None of these girls had seen Bill naked (I think). Was I to be the first? Of course, the effect would be diluted a bit because naked Bill would be seen by me and an audience of 500. I was growing impatient. One hour of ear-piercing noise and a passel of indistinguishable fairy goblins flitting on and off the stage later…was this Bill…and where were the naked people?
And finally, there were my 20 naked people on stage, standing upright, scattered about the stage like pine trees in the forest, singing another unintelligible song. Yes, I looked…eyes open…but I couldn’t see their tiny faces to distinguish Bill’s face, so any other interesting parts of their bodies were impossible to make out, song finished, last scene of last act, curtain calls, actors gone, lights up, and it was over. 
Just that fast…the naked part was fast…the rest of the one and a half hours had stretched to days in my mind.
I had whispered to Vic (actually, shouted in his ear) during the play that I wanted to go down to the stage at the end of the play to find Bill. When the first people rose from their seats, we were off and down on the stage in a minute, before actors could disappear. I scanned faces, but right in front of me as my eyes pulled closer, there he was? Bill? He recognized me, so it must be he. I was shocked at the sight. Instead of the healthy, virile Elvis hunk, there stood a friendly, thin, string bean, collapsed chest pulled tightly over ribs, a shrunken pallid face with fiery eyes, topped with a dull matted 8 inch brown Afro. Yes…Bill.
Over the years, I have inquired of high school buddies I met, “Have you heard from Bill?” My mother met his mother several years after Hair, but my mother said Bill’s mom avoided discussion of his status, and Mom didn’t press. To this day I still hold Bill in my thoughts and worry about what happened to him. I told him that night, “Bill, I’m worried about you. Are you O.K.?” But the crowd on stage shook us apart, although, as we could tell when we looked into each others eyes, we were already miles apart in our personal worlds and lives.
The only memory I really have of the musical Hair was a song frequently played on the radio during the 60s, where you could understand the words. Easy to Be Hard could be sung by any college age person of my generation. It wasn’t just sung, though. It was sung with sincerity. In my long straight hair, flared and baggy jeans, tank top, clogs, wire rim glasses, leather choker, and dangling gold hoop ear rings, at a moment’s notice, I could hum and then drift into Easy to Be Hard, complete with a sincere voice, sincere eyes, and sincere tilt to my head. 
This was the first time in the history of the world (are you smiling?) when the young people had uncovered the cruelty, hypocrisy, injustice, and insincerity that had been hidden by the old people…our parents.
Don’t mistake my humor for sarcasm. I cringe a little at the embarrassing memories of my “pseudo-hippie” ideas back then, but I remember them with fondness, too. We had high hopes for bringing the world back to Love. What the World Needs Now Is Love Sweet Love. Make Love, Not War.
Our ideals were honorable. What we lacked, somehow, was follow-through.
I was 20 years old, your dad 23, in San Francisco, watching Hair. We, and those of our generation,
sang Easy to Be Hard as a mantra. We had great dreams for the future: love the whale, free love, brotherly love, free thinkers…we were going to move out of the chains of our parents into a brave new world. We had the vision.
My mistake, our mistake, was to think that a small emaciated shadow of Bill Winsome was a statement of the power of our vision. In repudiating the greed and gluttony, false values, hypocritical meaninglessness of our parents, we had latched onto the love vocabulary…love labels…without inspecting the messengers with the “new” love labels as closely as we had inspected our fathers.
Standing in front of Bill Winsome, his eyes and hair sailing out in all directions, I felt fear for his future. It is a fear that I should have held for my future, too.
I still wonder where Bill is. One of my fears is that he died early from a ‘free’ lifestyle nurtured by San Francisco drugs, sex, and theater life. My deepest fear is that he simply faded out of life, repudiated by his parents and unnoticed by the people of my generation.
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How can people be so heartless
How can people be so cruel
Easy to be hard, easy to be cold
How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be proud, easy to say no
Especially people who care about strangers
Who care about evil and social injustice
Do you only care about the bleeding crowd
How about a needing friend, I need a friend
How can people be so heartless
You know I’m hung up on you
Easy to give in, easy to help out
How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be hard, easy to be cold
Easy to be proud, easy to say no
Music: Galt MacDermot
Lyrics: James Rado and Gerome Ragni
Hair opened April 29, 1968, at the Biltmore Theatre, New York City.
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Mother Teresa
Introduction by Jose Luis Gonzalea-Balado
It would be a mistake to look for literary gems in an anthology of thoughts by Mother Teresa. She has never felt compelled to write a literary work, not because she doesn’t appreciate literature or is incapable of writing, but because to do so would detract from the natural beauty and intimacy of her thoughts and convictions….Who among us doesn’t know that Mother Teresa’s main objective has been to do all the good she can for the least of Jesus’ brothers and sisters? Her feelings for the less fortunate were not arrived at by abstract reasoning, however, All she has done, in her own words, is “follow Jesus’ word.”
Mother Teresa:
I think that the work of the church in this developed and rich Western
Hemisphere is more difficult than in Calcutta, South Yemen, or other areas where the needs of the people are reduced to the clothes needed to ward off the cold, or a dish of rice to curb their hunger–anything that will show them that someone loves them. In the West the problems the people have go much deeper; the problems are in the depths of their hearts. 
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The demands, and consequently the needs, are the same, or very similar, no matter where we are in the world.
In spite of everything, I think that in the West, in general, the needs are mostly spiritual. Material needs, in most cases, are taken care of. Rather, there is an immense spiritual poverty.
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God pays attention to our love.
Not one of us is indispensable. God has the means to do all things and to do away with the work of the most capable human being.
We can work until we drop. We can work excessively. If what we do is not connected to love, however, our work is useless in God’s eyes.
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When a poor person dies of hunger, it has not happened because God did not take care of him or her. It has happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed. We have refused to be instruments of love in the hands of God to give the poor a piece of bread to offer them a dress with which to ward off the cold. It has happened because we did not recognize Christ when, once more, he appeared under the guise of pain, identified with a man numb from the cold, dying of hunger, when he came in a lonely human being, in a lost child in search of a home.
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