The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

I originally wrote this a couple of years ago to help me remember Dr. King's dream. It was revised a couple of times since. January 15 and April 4 are still sacred dates in my calendar.

I heard the loud thumping of footsteps coming up the ­basement stairs of my parents' home in Silver Spring, Md. Something was very wrong. My girlfriend Marie appeared at the kitchen entrance, distraught and out of breath. Martin Luther King has just been shot dead in Memphis. It's all over the news. Come downstairs. Now. ­ A terrible primal rage boiled up from somewhere deep in my consciousness. Not Martin Luther King. Not King. For God's sake, not him.

I stood for a moment overcome by a terrible anger then said," They're going to burn America to the ground tonight. And I'm glad."

I wasn't kidding.

­ ­Estelle Carol and me in front of the­ Lincoln Ave Commune-1974 ­

In the early 1970's I was a member of a political commune based in Takoma Park, Maryland. Our small wood frame house was located in some leafy woods between Piney Branch Road and Maple Avenue. Sligo Creek Park was about a quarter mile away with its rocky swift flowing creek.

­A number of people were associated with the commune as residents and overnight guests. Following the example of poet and sage Bob Dylan, I have (for the most part), rearranged their faces and given them all other names.

Although named after "Honest Abe", the Lincoln Avenue Commune began with a lie — a monstrous fraud perpetrated on the landlady Mrs. Chu. You see, we didn't think that we could find anyone who would rent to a gang of ruffians like Betty, Becky, Joey, Chet, Sarah, Greg and me (Bobbo) .

I recently read Cathy Wilkerson's  memoir, Flying to Close to the Sun about her days in SDS and Weatherman. She was in Chicago a few months ago giving a reading from her book. I attended and here is my report.

Riding the Red Line up to Women and Children First Bookstore had my stomach tied in knots. Cathy Wilkerson was going to give a reading from her new book Flying Close to the Sun.

Thinking about Cathy brought back painful memories of the breakup of SDS, the murder of Fred Hampton­, the bloody civil war that tore apart the Black Panther Party, the townhouse explosion that killed three SDS leaders, the splitup of the Mother Bloor Collective.... all of which  happened around the last time I had laid eyes on Cathy Wilkerson.

1968 was not a good year. War, assassination, political violence and creeping fascism fell over the land like a gloomy shadow. It was however, a very good year to read J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings for the first time.

Tracy Turnblad and the gang are back in this latest version of the John Waters classic about desegregation in Baltimore, Maryland during the early 1960's. Hairspray was originally a 1980's film starring Ricki Lake as Tracy Turnblad and then turned into a hit Broadway musical. The 2007 film is based more on the musical than the John Waters original film. Waters does make a brief cameo in the new movie as a flasher pervert. Anyone who has seen his Pink Flamingos will appreciate the irony.

The story of Hairspray was based on the real life civil rights protests at Baltimore's Gwynn Oak Amusement Park and at the Buddy Dean Show, a dance program modeled after Dick Clark's more famous American Bandstand.

I  was born in DC and was a baby and toddler at 13th and Clifton NW.  We eventually moved out of inner city DC into the working class Glenmont  area of suburban Maryland. I stayed there from 1951-1961. In  the summer of 2005, I walked through my old neighborhood to see how it was doing.

My partner Estelle Carol and I emerged from the cool semi-darkness of the Glenmont, Maryland Metro station into the blazing August sun. Glenmont  sure looked different from the newly bulldozed subdivision that had been cut out of the rolling hills of the Piedmont in the early 1950's. Back then, Georgia Avenue was a two lane country road narrow enough that I could bomb commuter cars with pine cones from a tree limb that stretched over the southbound lane from the adjacent Denley farm.

As a kid and well into my college years, going to YMCA Camp Letts near the Chesapeake Bay was one of my central life experiences. One of those experiences was confronting Dixie style segregation.

YMCA Camp Letts sits at the end of a peninsula jutting out into the Rhode River near Edgewater, Maryland. On a clear day, you can see all the way to where the South River meets the Chesapeake Bay.