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at WBAI and a few other radio personalities who had their own shows on different stations, informing them of the Anarchists' Ball and asking them to make spot when-and-where announcements about the party to their listeners who were all to be told they were invited. " 'N tell 'em to bring their own refreshments!"

So many people showed up at the Avenue B loft that night that the Anarchists' Ball had to be relocated across the street to Tompkin's Square Park with everyone telling everyone else they had been invited by "Emmett Grogan" whom nobody could find because he wasn't there. He went to the movies to see The Thief, a modern quasi-silent film starring Ray Milland, which has only a bit of dialogue and is seldom revived in theaters since it was made over twenty years ago. The estimated crowd of three to four thousand at the Anarchists' Ball had the cops freaked and thinking that there was about to be a riot or that some sort of gang war was going to happen. The Anarchists were delighted that their Anarchists' Ball had really turned into something chaotic and a true expression of their love for Kropotkin, Proudhon, and nihilist Dadaism, and they all agreed that Emmett Grogan was an anarchist extraordinaire. Since so many people who didn't know what he looked like were looking for him, one of the head Anarchists, Paulsky, assumed the name "Grogan" and went around through the gathering, passing as Emmett and shaking hands and making cracks about how the cops, who encircled the streets bordering the park with lines of bluecoated reinforcements from neighboring precincts, were all scared shitless by the mob.

There was certainly no doubt that the cops were definitely confused and perplexed by the large gathering of people, who were in a cheerful party mood, chugging wine from half-gallon jugs, toking on reefers and dancing to music being blared from several portable radios. Perplexed because at least half of the crowd were not from the immediate area, having traveled there from sections of Brooklyn, Queens and even Staten Island. Throngs of neighborhood young people whose cheap transistors were tuned in to either Latin or rhythm-and-blues stations dead-eyed the middle-class hippies who swarmed into their turf for a night of dancing to the songs of the Loving Spoonful and the Mamas and the Papas resounding from the FM bands of their more expensive wireless receivers.

The black and Puerto Rican kids kept their distance from the clean-faced strangers, but they didn't just stand around staring at them. They jumped and shouted, danced and laughed to prove to [end page 345]