Toronto
We're loose in Toronto!
August 17
What a cool city! A perfect place to go a little bit further... than we've gone before. The Bus cruised into town to discover its citizens were pedestrian. It is always a good sign to see people walking around. Vacant space is weird. Toronto is not vacant! The excitement among the Merry Pranksters is significant. We are not holding back our enthusiasm which is spilling out in every direction from the Bus that is deep into the canyons of high rise and low rise marvelous architecture. We were just in time for cocktail hour, a favorite Prankster pastime!
Has anyone seen the lost Bozos???
The Bozos had not been seen since Jerry died and the Grateful Dead stopped playing. Their last sighting before showing up at the Phish concert was that they were wondering aimlessly out of the parking lot at Soldier Field in Chicago, where the Dead played their last concert. Perhaps they would make an appearance in Canada.
The Canadian
National Exhibition is like a grand state fair with much more than cows.
The scale is BIG! The pavilions are spectacular. The Bus with its Merry
Krewe wobbled and joked its way through the traffic into the Exhibition
grounds escorted by a Canadian greeting committee... Kesey and Company were
on a diplomatic mission to inform the Canadian citizens that the word F
U N is still in the vocabulary. The Exhibition displays goods manufactured
in Canada most of which are owned by the Molson's. Clare and David Molson
are the family matriarch and patriarch to eveything Canadian. 
You have probably
drank their beer from which they have used the proceeds to buy and create
everything in Canada! Molson had donated the dough to create a forty foot
truck called the Web Truck located adjacent to the spot where the Bus would
park for three days while Kesey and the Pranksters did their thing. The
Web Truck had a dual ISDN line and ten Sun Java work stations for logging
into the world wide web. We could Zyberjam right on the spot.
The Bus gleefully saunters through the millions of Canadians
walking around the Exhibition grounds with the sound system playing I WANT
TO TAKE YOU HIGHER by Sly and the Family Stone. Artfully, George parked
the Bus in its designated spot right in front of the glass hall adorned
with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum fifty foot banner Mother
Merry Furthur had placed on the Queen Elizabeth Theater. 
In the spirit of the sixties, the Merry Pranksters were visited by one of their offspring who had moved from Oregon. The No Doctor Babbs helped deliver this hippy child into the world in a cabin on Kesey's farm. Original Prankster Page Browning's daughter, Pleasure Belle, was now living in Toronto studying film making and here she was live and in-person happy to visit with her roots and family!
The Canadian National Exhibition is not a small gig. Two
million people attend over a three week period and at least a hundred thousand
were there on our first day. 
Babbs immediately springs into action with his
riffs and raffs and buttons accompanied by Swan and Eli on guitars. HELLO
CANADIANS, IT'S A PLEASURE TO BE HERE. Many of these Canadians had not a
clue what this was all about but if they staid around long enough to watch
the show, they would be treated to readings and rock and roll. It was a
beautiful day in the Canadian neighborhood... nice to see ya'! What's your
name?
So
excited was Hagen to be in Canada, that he promptly stepped off the back
of the Bus and spilled the entire contents of his business card box onto
the ground. The breeze started blowing the cards across the grounds. We
were laughing so hard watching him struggle to pick up his Prankster debris
and someone commented that it was an unusual method of distributing propaganda.
Highly appropriate was the Web Truck decorated with a far out cartoon adding to the backdrop against which the Pranksters would cavort for the next three days.
The first day here was good! The Bus drove the Pranksters back downtown to the hotel for an evening of carousing and fun. Kesey was enamored with a video arcade on Young Street just outside the hotel and he led all of the Pranksters inside where Mother Merry Furthur broke out rolls of quarters and away we went competing with each other at the video races!
The Bus sneaks out into the night!!!
Canada is Prankster Conducive!
See what else we did...
