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"We're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside!" declaimed Allen Ginsberg. And then he and Peter Orlovsky, his golden-tressed travelling companion, went on to sing about our outsides, a good deal less lovely.
As eight stolid generations of Lowells glared from their dining-room portraits and a squad car plus three University fuzz stood vigil beside locked Lowell House gates, the poets lovers pronounced a record 74 utterances that were, as Orlovsky shyly put it, "not dirty, you know, just unsanitary." That doesn't count metaphors.
some more squeamish Cliffies field the hall, their dates in tow. But most stayed and sought, with Ginsberg, "the thrill delicious," which might sometimes be merely "playing with myself unbeknownst to the entire population of Far Rockaway."
Chanting Indian songs to the drone of a harmonium, blessing his guru, encompassing and blending into all the cosmic trivia he records, Ginsberg emerged at last, the Hippie Siddhartha--half desperately earnest, half just Putting on the Squares.
Orlovsky's paramount contribution to the evening was a little "sex experiment." He typed with his left hand while using his right hand on Allen. "Hey, what would happen if we all got naked?" Ginsberg mused.
But Orlovsky hastily reassured 700 discomfitted Cantabrigians. "I'm not giving you anything live," he said. "This is all on paper."
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