wear to what to eat, believe, and read.
In just a few months, I was wearing all white: long gauze skirts, white peasant tops, and sandals, almost like a yogi. I tried fasting for days on only apples. I’d never been so miserable, and it was years before I could eat apples again.
I began practicing yoga with Lilias, Yoga and You, a TV show on PBS hosted by Lilias Folan. My friends and I hiked in the mountains surrounding Phoenix at night, under a full moon.
It was a time when hippie men began apprenticing in the silver and turquoise jewelry trade as the state’s many large and small turquoise mines experienced a boom. I came to appreciate the different kinds of turquoise and Native American culture and arts and crafts. I learned to enjoy desert ecology and nature. I found those in Arizona had the same affinity for wild places that my little hippie-ish (at least in dress) friends and I did in Alaska.
Throughout the remainder of my teens, I traveled between Arizona and Alaska. I slowly developed a style of dress and an attitude that said “hippie.” Inside, though, I was still very much your all-American teenager.
My friends and I talked about living on a commune, where we would bake our own bread, make our own pottery and dishes, grow our own food, and milk our own cows. In addition to being essentially a calling for all hippies from that era, to a city kid like me who had never lived a rural lifestyle, this seemed a romantic notion.
When I say “all-American teenager,” I mean I didn’t fall for the hippie belief in free love. I now like to joke that such a thing was only an excuse for ugly guys to get girls to sleep with them. I still believed in saving myself for that special someone.
I once watched in horror at a party when suddenly someone announced “orgy time,” and a bunch of young men and women began taking off their clothes and running around the house naked. I left.
I believed in what other young teens believed in: love, rainbows, and maybe unicorns. In Arizona, that didn’t change. It wasn’t as if guys were beating down the door to ask me out. I considered myself attractive, but I was never that interested in male attention. I was pretty smart and terrified of the opposite sex. While I had lots of crushes, none went anywhere.
I think my hesitation stemmed from having a father who sold sex. I grew up around women who were victims of the sex trade and nude-dancing business. Although some of them were intelligent and quite nice, and a rare few were college graduates, I knew that most were trapped in a life they hadn’t chosen. That wasn’t going to happen to me.
I found the hippies and the idea of getting back to nature appealing. It was a trend, but given what I grew up with at home, it made sense. It was my rebellion against my father’s lifestyle and the exploitation at the 736 Club. In Arizona, I experienced a personal renaissance. I also discovered Be Here Now, the 1971 book on spirituality and meditation by Western-born yogi and Harvard professor Ram Dass.
PHOENIX WAS ALSO the largest city I had ever lived in (aside from Los Angeles when I was an infant). Every major rock or popular music act came through. To a teenager who practically worshipped contemporary music, Phoenix was heaven.
I got a copy of the concert schedule for one of Phoenix’s landmark venues, the Celebrity Theatre, a round theater with a revolving stage and intimate setting. Everybody I listened to on the radio seemed to be coming through Phoenix the winter of 1974–75. I decided to stay.
As my original Arizona contact, David, had promised, I found a home in Phoenix. David’s older sister had invited me to stay with her, her husband, and their young son. They lived in a small apartment that had only one bedroom, and yet they put me up on their couch that fall.
When that arrangement got to be too much for all of us, I met a beautiful high school sophomore who decided I was to be the sister she never had. In keeping with the times, Donna had changed her name to her chosen yoga name, Anandha Moon. I met her at a George Harrison concert in Tucson, where David took her for their first date. I was dumbstruck when I first saw her—lithe, with hip-length straight brown hair and large almond-shaped eyes, wearing a button-down 1940s-style jacket and long skirt. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.
As if the meeting and the concert weren’t enough, that night my two companions and I camped overnight outside Tucson. I had no idea where we were going. We arrived at a campsite way after dark. Somehow, we managed to pitch our tent, unroll our sleeping bags, and fall asleep.
In the morning, when I awoke and stepped outside, I was stunned to see that we were in the middle of Saguaro National Park. All around were towering saguaro cactuses standing like soldiers at attention.
It wasn’t long after that meeting that Anandha convinced her family to let me live with them. That fall, I enrolled in the neighboring Maryvale High School. Because I had arrived late, I had to wait a few weeks for the quarter to end before I could begin classes. I went to the school library every day because I was afraid I would fall behind. There, I read magazines, books, whatever caught my interest. And I wrote, one essay after another. I wrote and wrote.
Once in school, I was invited to join the school newspaper—probably because I was new and enthusiastic and one of my teachers who advised the paper liked my work in class. Before long, I was one of its main reporters and writers. I not only did news copy, I wrote poems and essays, including one love poem for the Valentine’s Day issue. Looking back, it’s pretty embarrassing to read; if nothing else, I had the passionate, overwrought heart of a teen girl.
There, at Maryvale High, with its handsome campus of interconnecting indoor and outdoor halls and walkways, I got to be a carefree teen again. There, I thrived. I developed a couple of crushes—one on a quiet, handsome boy named Buck, and another with curly, shoulder-length hair named Barry. The former I helped get a poem published in the newspaper while the latter talked about finding me “hot.” It was hardly the image of myself that I cultivated. I also became friends with the editing staff of the newspaper, and they invited me to their homes. To all at Maryvale High, I was just another teen—no one knew about my dad or what he had done for a living or what had happened to him. I felt free of that yoke, and an amazing thing happened: I earned straight A’s in every single class. My English teacher liked one of my essays so much that she even entered it in a state competition representing the school.
My Maryvale High School ID in Phoenix.
Many of my fellow students were bored in school. I was gung-ho simply because I had experienced the absence of school, which was far more boring. I learned then that showing up was everything; just doing the work and showing some enthusiasm impressed the teachers. From the student newspaper advisor to my ceramics teacher, I got nothing but encouragement, support, and a strong belief in myself, at least for a time. I excelled and I thrived.
To the delight of one devoted art teacher, I decided to build a tall rope urn in the shape of a fish. I found a photo of an ancient Egyptian clay work with the most gorgeous turquoise-blue glaze. I was determined that my fish vase be the same color. The teacher must have worked with me for weeks to recreate a color from the time of the pharaohs.
I discovered country rock music and Linda Ronstadt, and thus began a love of singing and the desire to sing professionally.
I began to sense that I would live a life in the arts, though I wasn’t sure exactly what I would be doing. Somewhere along the way, I even began to think I might end up living in a utopian society.
Anandha had friends who purchased a large chunk of land in central Arizona. Others, including Anandha, bought into what was simply called
