From Livelihood, Bachelor trainee and Hills Commune

See also TV Stagehand II (8/76-11/77)

Coming home to Los Angeles after my adventures in the counterculture, my newly acquired carpentry skills acquired at The Farm came in handy. My parents helped me get a job as a stagehand and carpenter in the TV studios, through a customer of theirs who was the call steward for IATSE Local 33. 

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Mom drove me from the bus station back to the house…She kindly but very firmly let me know that I could stay in my old room, but there were two conditions. The first was I had to get a haircut and clean up. She would drive me to the barber shop in Topanga Plaza as soon as we were done talking. The second was that I would have to get a job to pay my way. She and my dad told their regular customers that their son was looking for work. One of the customers, who was an official for the TV stagehands union, asked them if I had any construction experience. I told them about the carpentry apprenticeship I had done on the farm, and he said send him in, we’ll give him a try. My parents loaned me the money for a set of tools and a cheap car to get to work at the various studios. I could pay them back out of my first pay checks.

Excerpt from Holding Gently

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My first call as a stagehand was quite a contrast with my hippie life. It was a Julie Andrews special at ABC on Prospect Avenue. We were there for 12 hours mostly just watching,and eating great catered food, moving a little scenery around every so often. The word was that Miss Squeaky Clean Image liked to have fun with the stagehands by rehearsing her dance numbers with no underwear. There was a big band made up of all the top session musicians in town. I was amazed to see that with all these heavyweights, the drummer was Cubby O’Brian, the former Mouseketeer. He was definitely up to the task.

I now slipped unnoticed into a very fun loving community of cowboy freelancers playing their role inside the mass media juggernaut. I did this for about a year and a half until I started moving toward a career as a psychotherapist. But when I lost a job on that trajectory, I went back to the studios in August of 1976.

After working  as a stagehand for a month I visited ZCLA for a Thursday night talk and moved in across the street the next day, to stay for 28 years. That’s where we go next.