SPIRIT OF 'MERRY PRANKSTER' LIVES ON IN FESTIVE ECLIPSE EVENT

Ken Kesey pulled him into the bathroom, grabbed a vile of pills from the
medicine cabinet, and slapped one into his hand.

"Take this," Ed McClanahan recalls Kesey telling him. "We're going to the
movies."

A little while later, as the two sat in the front row of an opening of
"West Side Story," Kesey's pill, packed with mind-altering psilocybin,
started taking effect. Decades later, McClanahan remembers not the story,
but the vivid colors and the charged musical numbers.

"He told me afterward that I sat there like I was frozen," McClanahan says
over a decaf in Perk's Coffeehouse on Friday. "I was afraid to move. I
thought, 'Any minute now, the little men in white coats would show up to
haul me away.'

"When it finally said 'the end,' I thought, 'Whew! I made it,'" McClanahan
says. "I'm not on the funny farm."

That was Thanksgiving Day of 1962, as McClanahan's friendship with author
and '60s icon Kesey was just beginning to blossom.

Nowadays, McClanahan is one of the few people who recall a more intimate
side of Kesey, who remembers more than The Furthur Tour and the "electric
Kool-aid acid tests" that made Kesey an icon of the 1960s' counter-culture.

"He was seeing things that you were missing," McClanahan recalls. "He made
life a constant surprise."

In Athens Friday, McClanahan shared these memories of Kesey during an
afternoon reading and a "Still Kesey 2002" extravaganza that evening. About
120 people, many clad in imaginative costumes, gathered for the poetry
readings, music and dancing at the Eclipse company town near The Plains.

"What it looks like is the really early acid tests," McClanahan says of his
surroundings Friday night. "Appropriately funky."

The strange decor -- lights, colors swirling from a film projector,
whimsical art -- as well as the bands, dancers and McClanahan visit, was
largely organized by Ohio University history doctoral candidate Rick Dodgson.

The event fell between the anniversaries of Kesey's birthday and day of
death, celebrating the life that brought us LSD-spiked Kool-aid parties and
the novels, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great
Notion." "Cuckoo's Nest" became the Oscar-winning film starring Jack
Nicholson, while "Sometimes a Great Notion" resulted in a Paul
Newman-directed and starring film.

Kesey was the man who befriended Hell's Angels, stunned the eye with deft
magic tricks, and in the 1960s led the Merry Pranksters on a drug-filled,
chaotic trip across the country in a 1939 International Harvester school bus.

"I have always been really sorry I didn't go," McClanahan says of the day
in 1962 when he waved goodbye to the psychedelic Furthur bus pulling out of
LaHonda, Calif.

The two had been friends for some time -- they met though mutual
acquaintances from Kesey's days at Stanford University -- but McClanahan
had other obligations. He was a husband, a new father, and busy writing
"The Natural Man," which wouldn't be published for 20 years. He also
expected the Pranksters to get busted.

In reality, the trip was as hard at times as it was entertaining,
McClanahan says. They had little to eat, people lost money, and the school
bus was hot, slow, uncomfortable and ill equipped for tripping on acid and
smoking a lot of marijuana.

But McClanahan didn't miss much of that decade's revolution. He partied
with Kesey and the Pranksters, followed the Grateful Dead, and lived with
Jerry Garcia and Mountain Girl. He graduated from Free University and
devoted much of his life to writing.

With four books out and one underway, McClanahan perches in a chair glowing
from black light at Eclipse and considers the way drugs have shaped his
life since his first acid trip in Palo Alto, Calif., some 40 years ago.

"I heard music for the first time, found myself looking at artwork
differently, trying to make art," he says. "It probably changed my writing
as well."

Kesey's shadow was as big as his personality, the place where most of his
followers ended up. "It may have been a problem for some people,"
McClanahan says. "At times it got annoying."

By the time the acid revolution had made its way from the East Coast to the
national mainstream, Kesey began urging his followers to move past
psychedelics. He hosted an "LSD graduation" that drew national news attention.

Later in life, Kesey preached to an Oregon congregation about the perils of
drugs and alcohol, as captured on film and revealed Friday during "Still
Kesey 2002."

"Though we may not think of it, every drop of water is important, for
without that multitude of drops all joining together, there would be no
mighty river," he preaches in the film, raising his voice to the hymn, "We
Shall Gather at the River."

Kesey's sermon drew from Revelation 22, which describes the River of Life.

"Friends and neighbors you know that when you drink whiskey, you are just
doing the work of the devil," Kesey says. "And what are the wages going to
be? The wages of sin are death. Are you going to work for wages like that?"

In the film, Kesey tells the congregation that he's ready to be "called
home." He wants his followers, some of whom had followed Kesey's
trailblazing into LSD, psilocybin and peyote, to be ready as well. "You're
not ready," he says.

Just under a year ago, on November 10, 2001, Kesey died from complications
of liver cancer.

McClanahan visited his friend, Prankster and fellow writer in the hospital
days before his death. He showed Kesey a book with pictures of the gang,
and later, Kesey slipped into a coma.

"A nurse told us he could hear, but I didn't believe it," McClanahan says.
Kesey's brother Chuck was there, and they bid goodbye to the character who
could "fill a whole room," McClanahan adds.

"I stood by his bed, and I kissed him on his forehead. On his big, bald,
beautiful forehead," McClanahan remembers. "I told Chuck, I didn't think he
liked it much. He didn't kiss me back."

After Kesey's memorial services, before he was permanently laid to rest in
a psychedelic casket on his farm, McClanahan spontaneously placed an 1886
silver dollar in Kesey's shirt pocket. "I thought he ought to have
something to amuse himself as he traveled," McClanahan says.

For Kesey followers, the goodbyes haven't ended. Memorial parties like the
ones at Eclipse Friday have been popping up on the East Coast and other
parts of the country, confirms Dodgson, whose dissertation subject is Kesey
and the Merry Pranksters.

Before leaving the party Friday, McClanahan recited a second piece about Kesey.

"The government says we should just say no," he reads. "But I think we
should just say 'Thanks, thanks Kesey."