anyone else remember The Source? HELP 24 hou vegetarian restaurant?

mosrt of you are younger than I am (I graduated high school 1974) ..my parents weren't hippies whenI was in junior high and high school but I was,and my aunt was too...
anyone raised in any of these groups? or know someone who was?


we had "Jesus freaks"crawling the streets where I went to jr high in
Hollywood,all over the Boulevard. they looked jsut like hippies but
they;d surround you if you tried talking back,suddenly five
people,generally young, long-haired, bearded guys maybe a woman with
long straight hair and a granny dress or patched jeans,jsut likeWE
liked to dress, , all nice looking people in their 20s, telling you
literally on bended knee that Jesus Christ was waiting to take me in
His arms and promise me a banquet I could barely imagine despite my
filthy rotten sins and how could I turn him down. I wondered if God
Almighty was also a natural foods chef.

speaking of natural foods banquets and cult behavior:

there was the Source, which was about the weirdest New Age cult of all
(thoughthat's a difficult honor to uhold without some serious
competition, har har) ,on Sunset Boulevard but a decent vegetarian
restaurant.I'll post some about this another time-childhood friend
Mandy called me last week to chat and she told me a book about the
Source had just appeared about the Brotherhood of the Source, by one
of leader Father Yod's (nee Jim Baker, but not the Christian
evangelist of PTL) "fourteen spiritual wives" who is still devoted to
his memory. it originally ran an asn article in LA WEekly;I read it
on line. hmmm, a bit of a puff piece when i was hoping for something a
little more analytical: there was one other article in LA Weekly by
another reporter who was a hit more objective, while evoking the LA
hip scene ofmy youht pretty well....as soon as Mandy told me the
author of the was "Isis Aquarius," I kind of expected as much.

quite a blast from the past. the Source was the temporary spiritual
home of a LOT of disaffected upper middle-class LA kids. I knew ite a
few fromym junior high and high school eyars who were there for
varying lengths of time,and you;d recognize the celebrity names of
their "earthly parents" as they came to refer to them in contrast to
Baker who was their "earthly spiritual father." I hadn't known until
I read the article by this other reporter (sorry, have to look up his
name) that Earl Warren's niece was around my age and a Source-ite
too...this is when Warren. former California governor, was chief
justice of the US Supreme Court (and probably the most
progressive-minded chief justice we have had in my lifetime.)

as long as we are on LA New Age vegetarian restaurants, I can;t omit
the Fairfax District's infamous HELP (serving HELP: Health, Education,
Love and Peace" 24 hours a day.) it was a great place to go for
simple,usually tasty organic food if you got home from a camping trip
at 2 AM...but lemme tell you the crowd that was out for veggie burgers
in 1971 or so at HELP at those hours of the night was likely to be
there because the flying saucers were about to pick them up and take
them to their True Home...


raw foods food prep ( almost said "cooking") hadn't gone as techno or
skillful as it would 30 years later, of course, and some of it was
pretty hard to digest, at least for me as a teen. there was this one
night I was there with friends and maybe one person's parent? can't
remember exactly who was in the party now. but I sure remember what I
ate...restaurant food was relatively inexpensive then, as was life
even in California cities, , and i had a part time job and some
spending money, and we liked going out to the trippy natural foods
places around town, like Organicville and Aware Inn and HELP and even
the Source(which was as I say a cultural phenomenon and a New Age
church too).I ordered, and ate a large, all-raw vegetables "dinner
salad." whew, I always ate a lot of veggies, though when I was
gorwing up my dad didn't like broccoli and cauliflower and steamed
greens and most beans,so I mostly learned to prepare and chow down on
those after I'd been cooking on my own fr a few years...well,this
salad was comprehensive and RAW..I'd never had slices of raw
sweetpotato before, and raw broccoli and green beans and other starchy
things along with my tender lettuce and grated carrots and
whatnot...made myself chew through it all,woke up in the middle of the
night feeling like I was going to explode. took a pinch of baking soda
in water though it wasn't a acid ingestion type of feeling as much as
feeling like I had a balloon in my gut pressing on everything it could
find south of my diaphragm and north of my butt.. yow...felt some
better, burped loudly (maybe those two in opposite order, said I
wasn't going to try eating raw sweet potatoes or raw squash again for
a LONG time.

but the place was a hoot, HELP was, and some of their food was pretty
good. the UFO crowd tended to wear rainbow-colored air brushed long
johns a lot, and drawstring pants.

and my mother, when she was only moderately exasperated withme, would
say,"okay,I give up,you can go live at The Source!" especailly if I
was wearing white clothing, like the SOurce-ies all did then, knowing
I wasn't the type,or Earthly Spiritual Father wasn't MY tupe )(both
really) we liked to get in a laugh at them, my friends and Iwhodidn;t
join,especially when our friends got with them, and they came to
school in white embroidered Mexican clothing on a raw foods diet
themselves, sporting spiritual cliches such as "well sometimes we do
like to go to the movies after meditation and eat popcorn and just
sink into the world of Maya (illusion)"

oh they were TIMES then, yes...


Igotta get on with my day.see y'all soon!

love Judith