Goddard College Trail Map, 1979

I picked up this map of the trails on the campus of Goddard College when I was a student there from 1978 to 1980 (the map is dated "Spring 1979"). I knew all of these trails well, and even added a few items to the map and key: two of the improvised treehouses where free spirits could enjoy a vertiginous sojourn, the "Puppeteer's Grave" (this was a memorial to Bill Dalrymple, a key early member of the Bread and Puppet Theater), and the "Zen Garden," established -- along with mysterious wooden xylophones and flutes made out of PVC piping that hung on strings -- by Dennis Murphy, music professor and wizard of these woods. You can also download this map as a .pdf here.

The Great God THOOM

Here is a portrait of one of the most important mentors I've ever had in my life, a true Gandalf to my Bilbo: Dennis Murphy. Dennis was my teacher at Goddard College, where he worked with me on a set of guitar solo versions of Irish fiddle tunes, many of which ended up on my 1980 LP, "Neither Here Nor There." But he was also much much more than that -- trained as an ethnomusicologist, he built the first full Javanese Gamelan in the United States, using old oil drums, tin cans, and scrap wood; he invented his own god (THOOM) and his own language (THOOMESE); he also wrote and directed original Javanese shadow plays, a series of "theatre of the absurd" plays such as "The Goat Painter," and a song cycle (which he called an "operina"), "A Perfect Day," based on the different animals who represented stages in human life. Dennis -- or "Das" as we often called him, was a professor of music at Goddard -- but he was also, more than that, a wiz of a wiz. Here you see him in his garb as a priest of THOOM, on the stage of the Haybarn Theatre at Goddard.