hiding in an underground shelter. But some people refused,
and they were arrested. I remember writing to Judith Malina
of the Living Theatre when she was in the Women’s House of
Detention in New York City for refusing to take shelter and I
was a junior in high school. The thrilling thing was that she
wrote me back. This letter back from her was absolute proof
that there was a different world and in it were different people
than the ones around me. Her let er was a lot of different
colors, and she drew some of the nouns so that her sentences
were delightful and fil ed with imagination. Since I had already
made myself into a resister, she affirmed for me that resistance
was real outside the bounds of my tiny real world. Her letter
was mailed from a boat. She was crossing the ocean to
Europe. She wouldn’t stay in the United States, where she
was expected to hide underground from a nuke. She was part
of what she called “the beautiful anarchist nonviolent revolution, ” and I was going to be part of it, too. I'd follow her to the Women’s House of Detention, though my protest was
against the Vietnam War, and then to Europe, because I could
not stay in the United States any more than she could. She
probably didn’t have my relatives, who were so ashamed that
I went to jail; and she probably didn’t have my mother, who
said I needed to be caged up like an animal - bad politics twice
over. I would not meet Judith for another fifteen years, but
she remained an icon to me, the opposite of the loathsome Miss
Fox, and I knew whose side I was on, where my bread was
but ered, and which one I would rather be. I did not care what
it cost: I liked the beautiful anarchist nonviolent revolution,
and so did most of my generation - even if “anarchist” was a
hard word and “nonviolent” was an even harder discipline.
There was another kind of bomb scare. Someone would
phone the school and claim to have hidden a bomb in it. The
students would be evacuated and, when the teachers got tired
of keeping us in lines, left to roam on the grass. There never
was a bomb, and there was no context of terrorism, and the
threats seemed only to come in nice weather - otherwise we
might al have got en cranky. We discussed whether or not the
grass under our feet felt pain, which teachers had infatuations
with each other, how we were going to thrive on poetry and
revolution. These were the good bomb scares, after which
we’d be remilitarized into study hal s and classes and time
would pass slowly and then more slowly. There was never anything good about the nuclear-bomb scares, and even the conformists with elbows over ears did not like them. I was appalled that the United States had used nuclear weapons and
