The Indian Background Index | Soul Rush Index
Soul Rush
The Odyssey of a Young Woman in the 70s'(Excerpts)
by S. Collier. Published in 1978
Previous Chapter
Next Chapter
Chapter 13: Soul Rush.
"YOU GUYS ARE A BUNCH OF GODDAMN FANATICS. YOU'RE GOING
to ruin this festival with your bongo ideas."I whirled around to see who had said this, the most sensible thing I had heard in weeks. The speaker appeared to be a skinny teen-aged boy, but upon a second look I realized it was a young woman, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three. "Who's that?" I asked a person standing next to me.
"Oh, that's Lola Jackson. She's in charge of Soul Rush." Soul Rush. I'd been hearing about it for quite a while, but I was never sure it would get off the ground. The idea behind Soul Rush was to have a traveling show that would tour several major cities to promote the festival in Houston. The show would consist of three parts: in the late morning, a colorful parade peopled with local premies and the 500-member Soul Rush staff (who would be following the tour route in buses); in the afternoon, a one-act musical created by a small Boston theater company; and in the evening, a three-hour rock-and-roll performance by Blue Aquarius, a fifty-five" piece band that brought together all of the big name premie musicians. All of this would be put on for free.
Seeing the vast amount of energy and money that was needed in Houston, I thought it was unlikely that the Soul Rush tour would ever get rolling. But now, right here in the Millennium offices' lunchroom, was a sensible-sounding young woman trying to pull it together.
The person standing next to me filled me in on Lola's past activities in DLM. "She was general secretary in Boulder for a year. The only woman local director at that time. She's also the only ashram resident who Maharaj Ji told to go to college. She's smart and a good friend of Bob Mishler's . . ."
Well, it always helps to have friends in high places, I thought, tuning in on Lola's conversation again.
"Bob and I are together on this," Lola said in no uncertain terms. "Soul Rush is going to be run cash-on-the-barrel. No credit for us. You can run this Houston scene any way you want to, but when I'm running the show, we do it my way: cash."
The credit arrangements for the festival had troubled me. A friend in the "finance" department told me that we already owed $230,000-and it was only July. Our debts were not long-term notes, either; everything came due right after the festival. If there was ever an unsound financial plan, this was it.
The person to whom Lola was speaking immediately recognized her authority. "Of course you are right, but only for Soul Rush." He began to defend the Millennium office's credit arrangements. "When a tour comes through town, it's there maybe for a day; then it leaves, and people forget. They are not going to give money later. But Millennium is going to be big, really big. People will give us the money afterward. Bal Bhagwan Ji said . . ."
Lola seemed to bristle at the mention of BB. "You don't know that," she interrupted. "If you can't get the money now, there isn't much reason to believe you'll be able to get the money then." Lola looked at her watch. "I have to go now. I've got a meeting and then I'm flying up to Boston. We're setting up our offices there."
"I wonder if there are any openings on the Soul Rush staff," I asked the person with whom I had been speaking before I saw Lola.
"I don't know, but I think Lola's leaving this evening.
Why don't you go see Susan Gregory? She'll be here a few weeks tying things up before going to Boston herself."
I'd met Susan Gregory before. She was Rennie's old partner from the peace movement. One of Diana Stone's first writing ideas for me was a profile of Susan, focussing on the theme, "What are the New Left leaders of the Sixties up to now?" The article never came through, but I had several long talks with Susan while preparing it. We liked each other.
"I love the idea of this tour-how can I get on the staff?" was my first question.
"Maybe you can do the Soul Rushers' laundry," she teased me. Then, "This is politics," she said, her tone more serious. "I know the personnel department in Denver is going to assign someone, but it probably won't be you. It will be someone they know better . . ."
"But you know me," I protested, reminding her of our two-week association.
Susan smiled and then answered, "You get to Boston without getting kicked out of the ashram and we'll put you to work."
If the personnel department was already in the process of assigning someone to Soul Rush, I knew I'd have to act quickly. I knew of a ride going north, almost to Massachusetts.
With my yippie moxie still intact, I walked past the secretary into the middle of a high-level meeting in Rennie's office. "Rennie," I spoke very fast, "I can save the mission two hundred dollars if I go to Boston now, rather than wait until later. I know of a ride, but I have to leave right now."
Rennie looked at me blankly. "Oh . . . sure, good. Go to Boston. I give you my okay." It never occurred to him that I hadn't even been assigned to Soul Rush.
Boston Debs See The Light was the headline in the society section of the Boston Globe the day I arrived in Boston. Poss, my old friend from Maine, showed me the newspaper at the Divine Sales store, a secondhand outlet he ran for the mission in Boston.
"Well, Poss, you finally got to live in a real ashram," I said, remembering how much he used to talk about the value of monastic life when we both lived in our commune in Portland. As we talked, we relaxed on an old couch outside the store and waited for my ride to the Soul Rush offices in another part of the city. Springs popped up out of the couch's cushions on either side of Poss's knees. Around us were the day's "bargains": racks of old clothes, furniture that matched the couch if not in styling then in repair, and an old mirror.
Inside the store, premies were haggling over prices with customers and running after street children who were forever finding their way into places they shouldn't be. "Hey! Hey!" we heard behind us. One child was now standing on top of an old oak dresser. "I'm Superfly!" he shouted, leaping to the ground.
"This place is really some scene," I said, noticing that Diana Stone, the woman who rescued me from the laundromat in Houston, was coming down the street.
"Wow, it's a celebrity," Poss said, pointing out that Diana, originally from Boston, was one of the "debs" mentioned in the Globe's article.
"What are you doing in town?" Diana and I asked each other at the same time.
We swapped stories. She was here as part of a fund-raising tour, "visiting millionaires." Diana had an almost inbred feel for the business of tact and cultured salesmanship. Her father was a high-ranking official in the U.S. State Department. Throughout her childhood, Diana had traveled with her family to many parts of the world while her father represented the United States. When she joined DLM, she was living in India with her parents. News of her conversion spread quickly.
"It didn't take long before all of the diplomats in New Delhi knew that the daughter of the American charge d'affaires was into some young guru," Diana related. "An Italian told me, 'Everyone knows about Diana.' Even the Ambassador from Mongolia indicated to me one day in passing he'd been keeping up on my activities. It showed his intelligence officers were in good order."
After Diana joined the mission, her mother came and learned to meditate, too.
Diana, Poss, and I had chatted a while when our ride pulled up. "Late!" Diana said. In the car were Lola, Pat (Lola's assistant), and Newt (another Soul Rush organizer). They were all smiling and finishing up the last bites of ice-cream cones.
The Soul Rush offices were located in an old Boston residential building. The sidewalk outside of it was brick, and around the door and roof was worn-but-still-fancy stonework. A black metal fence enclosed a tiny front yard which was full of ivy and had a full-leafed chestnut tree that had grown up as high as the third floor window; it stretched out, shading the street. Lola, Pat, Newt, and I would all live as well as work here. Bringing in my bags, I found comfortable quarters under the printing press.
Our office space, which took up the entire floor, was not only our temporary headquarters, it was also the permanent office of the local Boston DLM chapter and the permanent home of a number of members. It was rather small.
In the six weeks I worked there, I got to know the space very well. Around the office there were stacks of leaflets, telephones, typewriters, and telex machines at every turn. Walking through the office end to end, in one room you might find an intent audience listening to precise instructions about some project they were about to embark on. Next to them, people would be industriously typing, folding, and addressing letters. There'd be a young man speaking sincerely into the telephone, trying to calm some disturbed member of the flock: "I don't know, man, it's hard to understand why people are the way they are, but you must meditate, find that peaceful place inside . . ." In another room, there might be another group returning tired, giving each other back-rubs. In the kitchen, way in the back, several people were chopping vegetables for the evening meal. Spiritual discussions were, of course, going on everywhere, in varying degrees of intellectual depth.
Gradually our Soul Rush plans translated into hotel accommodations, parade permits, and auditorium bookings. There were eight cities, including Boston and Houston, on our final itinerary. Our route went from Boston to Plymouth Rock (on the list largely for its symbolic value), then south to Philadelphia, where we got a permit to meet at Independence Place. In Washington we were going to have a candlelight procession around the White House and a free concert the next day at the Washington Monument. After D.C. we turned to the west: to Columbus, Ohio; then south again through Indianapolis; Kansas City, Missouri; and finally Houston.
We planned to stay two or three days in each city. The first day after we arrived, the Soul Rush 500 were going to pass out leaflets and participate in media events our advance people had set up to promote the tour. On the second day in a city, we would carry out our "basic blitz": parade in the morning through the downtown area, musical one-act play in the afternoon in a downtown park, and then a free concert with Blue Aquarius in a large auditorium in the evening.
Because of the lack of time, most of our coordinating efforts were done on the phone. People called up at all hours. I took to sleeping with the phone turned way down and next to my ear, so that I could answer it within a split second of a brring and avoid waking up everybody else in the house. I enjoyed the early morning callers; sometimes they had interesting news from some distant outpost of the movement, and sometimes they were just lonely. BB called up on his own birthday, so I got everyone up and we sang "Happy Birthday" to him over our conference phone and then told him to go to bed.
As the date of the tour drew closer, the main thing the premie volunteers did was put up posters and give out leaflets all over the city. One hundred and fifty, sometimes two hundred people were out every night with buckets of wheatpaste and posters, creating billboards in every available space.
One night while I was leafleting in East Boston, I met Louise Day Hicks, the anti-bussing advocate, hurrying down the street. "Listen, kid," she told me, looking over the leaflet I had just handed her, "this event you are having is in the center of the city. We never go there. This is our home," she concluded, stamping her foot on the terra firma of East Boston. As she walked away I experienced a moment of doubt. Our gentle meditation plan seemed rather small and powerless in the face of the strong views Ms. Hicks represented.
At our public programs and on the street we tried to concentrate on telling people the value of meditation and Guru Maharaj Ji through our own experiences with them. Even though subjects like inner peace and communion with the infinite are pretty intimate stuff to talk about on Copley Square, I thought this was a fair way to go about proselytizing. For instance, if I say meditation means a lot to me and you try it and it doesn't mean much to you, fine. I haven't cheated you or led you on through false claims. We're different, that's all.
But as good as this approach sounds, in practice it is very frustrating. After months of telling people about the profound experience I was gaining through meditation and then having them stand back and smile like pleasant parents and reply, "How nice for you, as long as you are happy . . ." I began to see that this approach was like saying, "I get a thrill out of bowling." It really doesn't do that much except explain why you are down at the alley every weekend.
Because of this frustration most premies started to develop a more flashy variety of witnessing to communicate their message. People would go out of our office with a stack of "Who is Guru Maharaj Ji?" leaflets and discreetly tell everyone who would pause long enough to hear that this Guru Maharaj Ji, age fifteen, was another Jesus Christ Here In The Flesh To Save The World. While this type of promotion appears to be a frontal attack on fixed beliefs, it did attract many people.
Justine, a top model, beauty consultant, and friend of the late Charles Revson, told me of the time when she first saw a DLM poster, circa 1972, which blatantly declared, "The Lord is Here." "That's someone who can help me," Justine thought, and wrote down the number. She is still associated with DLM today.
In addition to our on-the-street promotion of Soul Rush, we decided to have fund-raising events to promote Millennium among the premies. At one of these I was speaking, giving a typical satsang rap. (If you have traveled around in spiritual groups, you have probably heard this analogy many times to explain the existence of a hierarchy in the organization.)
"Divine Light Mission is like a body," I began. "And in a body all the elements must work together. The mouth eats, but every part of the body benefits. It is the job of the eyes to see and of the feet to walk, but none is greater and none is lesser. In the same way, in Divine Light Mission each person has a role. Some of us are the hands and some of us are the eyes . "
At this moment I was interrupted by a heckler. "And some of us are the asshole," he yelled from the back, referring to me. Immediately I appreciated this remark. Wherever I find an anarchist, I feel at home.
The night before Soul Rush was ready to roll, I went down to the bus depot and watched our painters do up the buses in the exquisite rainbow colors we had chosen. Standing next to Lola, I realized that we were halfway home. Our tiny organizing crew with the average age of 20.7 had done it. We'd raised the money, got the people, and the next morning we'd be ready to go.
Of course, there was no resting that night. The faithful wheat-paste crew, whose posters had attracted 8,000-plus to see Maharaj Ji at a program he gave in Boston, was out at work. Pat was making the final scheduling decisions. I was compiling this information into a Soul Rush manual. "Betty Boop," a friend of ours, was typing the manual on a stencil and Newt, stripped down to his undershirt, was working as a relief printer, helping the other printer who'd been working at the press sixteen hours straight. As soon as the ink was dry, people from the theater company were collating them into books, and a couple of sweethearts were binding them up. Imagine all of this happening in a 1,200-square-foot space on a warm autumn night.
The next day the "pilgrims" (our name for the Soul Rush tour personnel) started to arrive, lining up at the hotel to be checked in. They looked beautiful standing together waiting to get a hug with their orientation packets and room assignments. On the tour itself, I spent most of my time with the troops. While the other organizers were often busy with "more important things" like going out to lunch, I was left to direct the Soul Rush 500 through their day. When lines got long at mealtimes, I began a chain of stand-up back-rubbing-until eventually the whole hundreds-of-people line was transformed into a caterpillar of care in motion as each premie rubbed the back of the person in front of him. If the buses were late, I led group singing. When luggage was lost, I crawled into the luggage-carrying bellies of the buses . . .
As Susan Gregory had predicted, I was also in charge of laundry. I taught my simple, infallible, never-lose-a-sock method of laundry to a crew of fifty, and together we did the wash all night. Standing on top of a washing machine, I made my debut as a comic, telling wacky stories from my childhood.
Once, during a parade, while I was passing out issues of the newspaper I had written, a woman, astonished by the colorful good spirits of the marchers, opened her wallet and handed me all the money she had, twenty or thirty dollars. "If this is what I see on these kids' faces," she said, "I want it." A true contact high.
A number of reporters were assigned to cover Soul Rush. One of them was a seemingly charming young woman named Marilyn Webb. I was particularly fond of her because she was doing an article for my hometown paper, New York's Village Voice. Another group of reporters was a video crew. It seemed that every time something weird would happen, or some premie would make a dumb, fanatical, or ill-considered remark-flash-on would go the TV lights and they would start filming.
When the Soul Rush caravan rolled into Houston it was the middle of the night. We were all exhausted. The Soul Rush premies were supposed to get hotel accommodations, but I was astonished to find that they had been assigned to the "Peace Plant," an ancient Coca-Cola bottling plant which had been slightly renovated to house some of the festival staff. With this miserable omen, I went to bed with the other Soul Rushers on the floor of the "Peace Plant."
In the morning I went to the Dome for the beginning of the festival. As I expected, there were not 400,000 people there. There were plenty of premies, about 20,000, but even this number, impressive in an open field, seemed small in the vastness of the Astrodome.
In general the festival was a bore. I enjoyed seeing all of the friends I had met in other parts of the DLM community, but from a theatrical point of view, I was disappointed. Maharaj Ji's remarks were undistinguished, and I noticed his words were slurred. There were a few light notes, though, in the three days. As a joke on BB, someone tacked up a sign that said "Mars" around an empty section of seats, parroting the signs premies of France, Sweden, India, Spain, etc., had put up to announce their country of origin.
The high point of the event for me was some beers I had with Lola and the Village Voice reporter, Marilyn Webb. As I sat and sipped, the two of them ranted about what a disappointment the Millennium event had turned out to be. (As I discovered later, we were not the only ones for whom some alcohol was the festival's high point. Bob Mishler told me Maharaj Ji got "sloshed.")
Previous Chapter
Next Chapter
![[Dividing Line Image]](div.gif){kind=small}