Pubdate: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 Source: Athens News, The (OH) Copyright: 2002, Athens News Contact: http://www.athensnews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1603 Author: Jennifer Hinkle SPIRIT OF 'MERRY PRANKSTER' LIVES ON IN FESTIVE ECLIPSE EVENT Ken Kesey pulled him into the bathroom, grabbed a vile of pills from the medicine cabinet, and slapped one into his hand. "Take this," Ed McClanahan recalls Kesey telling him. "We're going to the movies." A little while later, as the two sat in the front row of an opening of "West Side Story," Kesey's pill, packed with mind-altering psilocybin, started taking effect. Decades later, McClanahan remembers not the story, but the vivid colors and the charged musical numbers. "He told me afterward that I sat there like I was frozen," McClanahan says over a decaf in Perk's Coffeehouse on Friday. "I was afraid to move. I thought, 'Any minute now, the little men in white coats would show up to haul me away.' "When it finally said 'the end,' I thought, 'Whew! I made it,'" McClanahan says. "I'm not on the funny farm." That was Thanksgiving Day of 1962, as McClanahan's friendship with author and '60s icon Kesey was just beginning to blossom. Nowadays, McClanahan is one of the few people who recall a more intimate side of Kesey, who remembers more than The Furthur Tour and the "electric Kool-aid acid tests" that made Kesey an icon of the 1960s' counter-culture. "He was seeing things that you were missing," McClanahan recalls. "He made life a constant surprise." In Athens Friday, McClanahan shared these memories of Kesey during an afternoon reading and a "Still Kesey 2002" extravaganza that evening. About 120 people, many clad in imaginative costumes, gathered for the poetry readings, music and dancing at the Eclipse company town near The Plains. "What it looks like is the really early acid tests," McClanahan says of his surroundings Friday night. "Appropriately funky." The strange decor -- lights, colors swirling from a film projector, whimsical art -- as well as the bands, dancers and McClanahan visit, was largely organized by Ohio University history doctoral candidate Rick Dodgson. The event fell between the anniversaries of Kesey's birthday and day of death, celebrating the life that brought us LSD-spiked Kool-aid parties and the novels, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion." "Cuckoo's Nest" became the Oscar-winning film starring Jack Nicholson, while "Sometimes a Great Notion" resulted in a Paul Newman-directed and starring film. Kesey was the man who befriended Hell's Angels, stunned the eye with deft magic tricks, and in the 1960s led the Merry Pranksters on a drug-filled, chaotic trip across the country in a 1939 International Harvester school bus. "I have always been really sorry I didn't go," McClanahan says of the day in 1962 when he waved goodbye to the psychedelic Furthur bus pulling out of LaHonda, Calif. The two had been friends for some time -- they met though mutual acquaintances from Kesey's days at Stanford University -- but McClanahan had other obligations. He was a husband, a new father, and busy writing "The Natural Man," which wouldn't be published for 20 years. He also expected the Pranksters to get busted. In reality, the trip was as hard at times as it was entertaining, McClanahan says. They had little to eat, people lost money, and the school bus was hot, slow, uncomfortable and ill equipped for tripping on acid and smoking a lot of marijuana. But McClanahan didn't miss much of that decade's revolution. He partied with Kesey and the Pranksters, followed the Grateful Dead, and lived with Jerry Garcia and Mountain Girl. He graduated from Free University and devoted much of his life to writing. With four books out and one underway, McClanahan perches in a chair glowing from black light at Eclipse and considers the way drugs have shaped his life since his first acid trip in Palo Alto, Calif., some 40 years ago. "I heard music for the first time, found myself looking at artwork differently, trying to make art," he says. "It probably changed my writing as well." Kesey's shadow was as big as his personality, the place where most of his followers ended up. "It may have been a problem for some people," McClanahan says. "At times it got annoying." By the time the acid revolution had made its way from the East Coast to the national mainstream, Kesey began urging his followers to move past psychedelics. He hosted an "LSD graduation" that drew national news attention. Later in life, Kesey preached to an Oregon congregation about the perils of drugs and alcohol, as captured on film and revealed Friday during "Still Kesey 2002." "Though we may not think of it, every drop of water is important, for without that multitude of drops all joining together, there would be no mighty river," he preaches in the film, raising his voice to the hymn, "We Shall Gather at the River." Kesey's sermon drew from Revelation 22, which describes the River of Life. "Friends and neighbors you know that when you drink whiskey, you are just doing the work of the devil," Kesey says. "And what are the wages going to be? The wages of sin are death. Are you going to work for wages like that?" In the film, Kesey tells the congregation that he's ready to be "called home." He wants his followers, some of whom had followed Kesey's trailblazing into LSD, psilocybin and peyote, to be ready as well. "You're not ready," he says. Just under a year ago, on November 10, 2001, Kesey died from complications of liver cancer. McClanahan visited his friend, Prankster and fellow writer in the hospital days before his death. He showed Kesey a book with pictures of the gang, and later, Kesey slipped into a coma. "A nurse told us he could hear, but I didn't believe it," McClanahan says. Kesey's brother Chuck was there, and they bid goodbye to the character who could "fill a whole room," McClanahan adds. "I stood by his bed, and I kissed him on his forehead. On his big, bald, beautiful forehead," McClanahan remembers. "I told Chuck, I didn't think he liked it much. He didn't kiss me back." After Kesey's memorial services, before he was permanently laid to rest in a psychedelic casket on his farm, McClanahan spontaneously placed an 1886 silver dollar in Kesey's shirt pocket. "I thought he ought to have something to amuse himself as he traveled," McClanahan says. For Kesey followers, the goodbyes haven't ended. Memorial parties like the ones at Eclipse Friday have been popping up on the East Coast and other parts of the country, confirms Dodgson, whose dissertation subject is Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Before leaving the party Friday, McClanahan recited a second piece about Kesey. "The government says we should just say no," he reads. "But I think we should just say 'Thanks, thanks Kesey." - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens