Teen-age sophisticates can snicker as much as they like, but Mrs. John Mitchell's first experiment with marijuana was a sure enough bad trip. The Attorney General's wife offered to help dramatize a Bureau of Narcotics briefing for Justice Department wives by taking a whiff of some marijuana leaves burning in a pot. "I stuck my head right over it," Mrs. Mitchell recalls, "and no sooner had I got my head up off the stuff than my eyes started running and my throat was all irritated." Despite medication, a violent 24-hour allergic reaction set in, leaving her looking, she reported, "like I had been burned around my eyes and cheeks." That very day Anthropologist Margaret Mead was testifying on Capitol Hill that pot wasn't harmful. Said Mrs. Mitchell: "I was dying to get her on the phone and say 'You should see me.' "
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No lady should have to compete with a bullhorn, even if she has the vocal equipment to drown out a dozen of them. Policemen in a Tampa, Fla. concert hall were trying hard to restrain a surging, frenzied audience reacting typically to Janis Joplin's Try a Little Harder. The cops resorted to a bullhorn, and that annoyed Janis. "Listen," she shouted, "I know there won't be any trouble if you'll just leave!" The officers refused and sounded the horn again. That did it. Janis, as a fan reported, "simply went nuts," blistering the air with a string of oaths and obscenities, whereupon the cops hustled her off to jail on charges of using profanity and indecent language. Free on bail, the queen of hyperthyroid blues insisted: "I say anything I want onstage. I don't mind getting arrested because I've turned a lot of kids on."
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A Temple University audience that included many clergymen and nuns was stunned by the sex, brutality and abrasive language of a play called The Meteor. Nor did the playwright ease their discomfort, as he accepted an honorary D.Lit. before the final performance at Temple's Tomlinson Theater. Friedrich Durrenmatt, 48, irreverent son of a Protestant minister, read his acceptance speech seated on a rumpled bed on the play's set—the same bed where, a few minutes later, a naked woman sprawled as her husband painted her portrait. Said the Swiss dramatist: "My academic career has now been successfully completed. I broke it off 23 years ago to write my first play instead of a dissertation, because I came to believe that one can think not only in philosophy but on the stage." Added Durrenmatt: "My first drama caused a scandal. I still thrive on this start."
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