Looking for Utopia

Abstract

Halley is a playwright, dramatist, and truck driver f rom Detroi t who wrote and produced Werewolf of Grosse Pointe, Canary House, and numerous articles, skits, and irate letters to the editor. In 1973 I decided that I had to start writing for the Fifth Estate, Detroit 's revolut ionary, paper; or become a werewolf and fade into some wilderness unknown. The times were ablaze with change, and the world was but a t inderbox only waiting for the right match. I had been on the road, a la Jack Kerouae, for six months, hi tchhiking up and down the West coast; singing for quarters on street corners from Vancouver , British Columbia, down to L.A. and in major cities be tween Detroit and the coast. My little theatre troupe, Shadow Peoples also took me around the Midwest where we performed wild skits and bizarre assaults on Western Culture on the streets, in cof fee houses, bars, and outdoor conce r t s -whereve r and whenever we had the slightest oppor tuni ty to vent creative spleen. In a word, I was afire. But working for a biweekly underground paper was a more disciplined pursuit , with deadlines, heavy scheduling, and editorial responsibilities that forced me to hone my writ ing skills and adapt to compromising with a collective of equally imaginative and fermentat ive individuals.~ I couldn' t be as crazy, yet I could be more ef fec t ive because we had a wider audience with the Fifth Estate, and other members of the collective were very talented people with experiences in teaching and writing. One fellow, Michael Neiswonger, was a former head of the English depar tment at Cuss Technical High School in Detroit; another, Bob Hipple, was the fo rmer editor of the Univers i ty of Michigan's college paper; another guy had a Ph.D. in economics, and so on, and all of us had a slightly d i f fe ren t view