Drop Out! Drop Out!
by Ron Kolm
Back when I was enrolled in Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, I studied drama, and the professor who taught the class was a total, radical freak. He actually wanted to be regarded as a “hippie.” He would wear torn T-shirts and dangle a large peace symbol from a chain around his neck. Because he had written a book on James Joyce years ago, the college administration let him get away with it.
He would charter buses to the Port Authority in New York and then walk us over to Times Square to see plays. He always chose the most outrageous ones because he was trying to teach us to rebel against the status quo. His favorite playwright was Bertolt Brecht. After class, we’d shoot the shit, and we all pretty much agreed that our professor, on some level, considered himself to be Brecht reincarnated.
One of the plays he took us to was Hair. That evening kind of shocked me because the actors and actresses were telling us to be free and live the hippie life, but the audience was basically men and women in tuxedos and evening gowns. There was such a disconnect! The alternative lifestyle the theater was pretending to sell was propaganda. What they were really after was big bucks from their wealthy patrons. At the end of the night, we took a bus back to Pennsylvania, and resumed our boring, scholastic lives.
Ron Kolm’s books include A Change in the Weather, Duke & Jill, Welcome to the Barbecue, The Bookstore Book: A Memoir, and The Verities of Love. He's had work in The Brownstone Poets anthologies, The Opiate, Maintenant, Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts, NYC From the Inside, and The Silver-Tongued Devil anthology. Ron’s papers are archived in the New York University Library.
