You might think this is no laughing matter.
But what else could it be?
It was the early 90s. The usual number of people were suffering from plunging self-esteem. For the past decade, the book shelves had been bursting at their pressboard seams with every conceivable fix.
Misery sucks. Hope sells. A sucker is born every minute. Yes, indeed … so much idiocy. So little time. Someone was making some serious bucks.
It was as if a huge portion of the American public — putatively a tough crowd, raised as rugged individualists, beneficiaries of get-the-job-done street smarts and frontier survival skills — had become a bunch of helpless, whiny, self-pitying pre-toddlers, who couldn’t stop wetting the bed, regardless of how many toys or sugar-laced treats were dangled before them. Things had simply gotten out of control.
Psychiatrists were booked up for months. Gurus were turning them away at the door. Lifestyle coaches were rolling in dough from workshops, book sales, self-help tapes, videos, tête-à-têtes, seminars. High priests, low priests, monks, ministers, astrologers, palmists, psalmists, phrenologists, hypnotists, aura readers, astral pocket jockeys, harmonic wave surfers, all were the rock stars of a new age of enlightenment.
People were hanging like laundry in gravity boots, glueing crystals to their private parts, dangling power stones around their Botoxed necks, floating in sensory deprivation tanks, packing into ashrams and monastic cloisters, poring over psychic readings and astrological prognostications, doping on anti-psychotics and mood elevators, self-asphysiating, hyper-ventilating, snorting spirulina, swimming with dolphins, communing with space rocks, party-crashing past lives, channeling dead souls, priests, witches and saints. Folks were quantum praying, astral planing, orbit planking, meditating, primal screaming, curling up in fetal position and sucking on latex prayer balls, naked ecstatic dancing, light bathing, drinking their own body fluids, eating the afterbirth. They left their inhibitions and common sense at the door, plunging headlong into uncharted and incomprehensible territory. Come one come all, lose control to take control.
But the zaniest of all of the obvious signs that the world had gone completely mad and people would embrace just about anything or anyone in a desperate attempt to fix themselves, was the lady we will meet on the pages which follow. Unorthodox? How about Alice in Wonderland strange. Weird. Off the charts. Totally whack. We’re talking about …
Dr. Joy Smothers, the folksinging psychologist.
My my! What a gimmick she had! Sling a guitar over her shoulder. Spread some love and happy talk to the sweaty masses.
So . . . this is her story. The heady early days in Los Angeles, just as “Dr. Joy mania” was just taking hold.
As you hold this questionable book in your hands, wondering how you got roped into buying it, wondering what could possess you to actually read it, wondering how this affects your already shaky reputation . . . always keep in mind Dr. Joy’s oft-quoted, widely-heralded mantra: