The Doors of Perception

I'm getting emails alerting me to yet another Miami high school reunion. They seem to pop up every ten years like overdue tempests, authored by enthusiastic ex-students with too much time on their hands. I assume for some folks those were their glory days; being elected prom queen (and now employed as a dental hygienist) or catching the winning touchdown pass (and currently selling insurance). Forgive my attitude, but I find the whole business pathetic. I detested high school and couldn't wait to escape.

The Miami I lived in wasn't the land of neon, disco and Versace. It was the territory of Nixon lit by the 15 watt bulb of Anita Bryant, a conservative ex-Miss America and orange juice spokesperson who was pretty much against everything popular then; homosexuality, student protests, working moms and Jews for starters.

There was plenty going on in America at the time: Kent State, Vietnam, Cambodia, Woman's Lib,…. but what preoccupied the press in South Florida was one lone character, Jim Morrison. Jim had the unfortunate luck of playing with his band, The Doors, one night in Miami where he showed up onstage drunker than usual and then proceeded to berate the police and most of the audience. The concert lasted all of fifteen minutes until the cops shut it down. Jim was later charged with public drunkenness and indecent exposure. The former was a given; the latter untrue. I know; I was there.

The newspapers went crazy and someone (probably Anita) got the idea to organize a student counter-protest titled "The Rally for Decency." The papers played it up big and student groups from all the major high schools and church groups were invited to an organizational meeting to plan the event. Those invitees included my friend, Jimmy and his friend Michael, both members of AZA, a Jewish fraternity. (Whoever sent them an invitation obviously hadn't checked first with Anita.) Coincidentally, Michael had just moved from Los Angeles and happened to be acquainted with Jim Morrison.

They both sat passively in the back of the meeting room while the attendees railed and hooted about the scurrilous sociopath who had soiled their beloved hometown. When the student organizer, also named Michael, declared "Jim Morrison is also a queer!" Michael #1 had had enough.

"Listen," he told the gathering, "I know Jim Morrison and he is about as far from a queer as a guy can get. He simply had too much to drink that night and should've known better than to get onstage. I think it best that we all just let this rest and ask him for an apology, OK?"

Michael #2's response was, "You know Jim Morrison? If you know Jim Morrison, then you're a queer!" And that was that. Michael #1 and Jim politely excused themselves and left in a hurry.

The rally, of course, went on as planned. Thirty thousand students sat in the Orange Bowl Stadium giving testimony to their objections to obscenity and other like mannerisms, while being entertained by such luminaries as Jackie Gleason (look him up), The Lettermen (look them up and have a barf bag with you) and, you guessed it, Anita Bryant.