Andy's Treasure Trove Andy Moore

Andy interviews Rusty Frank, author of “Tap! The Greatest Tap Dance Stars And Their Stories, 1900 to 1955.” Rusty interviewed over 30 tap dance legends for this book, including Shirley Temple, Ruby Keeler, Fayard Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers, Gene Nelson, Donald O’Connor, Ann Miller, Fred Astaire’s choreographer Hermes Pan, and many, many others. It’s a deep dive into pop culture of the first half of the 20th Century, and a close-up view into a cherished American dance form that swept the globe and is still popular worldwide.

In addition to being a writer, dance historian and preservationist, Rusty is an accomplished professional dancer and choreographer, specializing in tap and the Lindy Hop. She teaches dance online and at her school Lindy By the Sea. She produces dance shows, and she has a dance club called Rusty’s Rhythm Club in Los Angeles.

Check out everything Rusty is doing at rustyfrank.com, and consider buying her book “Tap! The Greatest Tap Dance Stars And Their Stories, 1900 to 1955," which has a foreward by Gregory Hines. Even if you’re not interested in tap dancing you’ll be fascinated and enlightened by the stories inside. See below for more information about the people that Rusty talks about in this episode.



Above: Rusty Frank (center-left) teaching tap dance at UC Santa Cruz; with tap students including Tom Lehrer (right), 1976.



Above: Rusty Frank and Andy Moore in El Segundo, California, 2021.
Mentioned In This Episode:
Rusty Frank
Tom Lehrer
Mary Holmes
Charles Selberg
Cindy Catlin
Jon Zerby
Katie Zerby
Louis DaPron
Miriam Nelson
Gerald Nachman
Shirley Temple
Fayard Nicholas
The Nicholas Brothers
Leonard Reed
Willie Bryant
Frances Nealy
Gene Nelson
Toy and Wing
Bill “Bojangles” Robinson
DaCapo Press
Peg Leg Bates
Wayne Doba
Rodney Price
Six Feet – A Tap Trio
Stepping Out
The Lindy Hop
Patti Meagher
Walter Freeman
Babes In Arms
Dames At Sea
42nd Street
a...

Come along with Andy and his friend Brooks Collins of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) as they search the hills near San Francisco International Airport for the wreckage of Flying Tiger Airlines flight 282, which crashed there in 1964, right near the spot where Gaspar de Portola's 1769 expedition became the first Europeans to behold San Francisco Bay. Brooks is a great conversationalist and he’s knowledgeable in an astonishing number of topics, so our conversation ranges from air wreck adventuring and archeology to particle physics, mirages, Nike missile bases, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, tunnel boring, raptors, and many other topics. Andy, as usual, asks a lot of questions and makes quirky attempts to be amusing.
Check-six.com page for this crash: http://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/Flying_Tiger_282.htm
Lockheed Constellation:
Wreckage from flight 282:



Brooks Collins:

What to do during the COVID era when it's too dangerous to interview someone in person? Get a bunch of your poet friends to read their poems to your listeners. I realized that I have at least ten friends who are poets, some of them highly celebrated poets, and I had already recorded some of them reading their poetry. Several other poet friends wrote new poetry for this show and sent their recordings to me. Most of the poets you’ll be hearing are from California, and I live in Arizona now where I know only two poets (so far) so I’ve also included several poets from this year’s Tucson Poetry Festival, which occurred a few weeks ago, on-line because of the COVID crisis.

List of poets/poems:

Neil Harvey – Zoom Word

Jon Hammerbeck – Accidental Droppings

David Hammerbeck – 4-3-20

Susan Thackrey – Selections from Andalusia: The Farewell / How do you…; Mourning in Al Andaluse / Alba; Walnut / Eyelid; The Moon / Look How…

Ralph Jack (Ralph Gutlohn) – Acceptable Limits; Be Like Concrete; At The Bottom Of A Glance

Ken Paul Rosenthal – Where Icarus Flew

Kara Daddario Bown – Graceland; Safety in Numbers

Waz Thomas – Falling Water; I Walk, I Stumble, I Fall; Susanville; No!

William Pitt Root – Ways Water Has; Ode To A Frog

Pam Uschuk – Green Flame; Cracking 100

Bojan Louis - Huzzle 8

In the last episode, number 23, we heard from visionary ethnobotanist, mystic and writer Terence McKenna, and from Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association For Psychedelic Science.
This episode, number 24, is a continuation on the same topic, the increasing use of consciousness-expanding substances, also called psychedelics or hallucinogens, for health and personal growth. People around the world are using LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and a whole range of other psychedelic substances to treat conditions ranging from allergies and anxiety to substance abuse and alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, and many other problems. Some people use these substances in tiny doses to enhance their everyday life, work, and play. Some use them in higher doses for more profound experiences. This topic has been getting more attention these days due in part to Michael Pollan’s recent book entitled How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.
Today we’ll hear from Ralph Metzner, Timothy Leary, Andrew Weil and an anonymous friend "Don" under the influence of a “micro-dose” of LSD.
Ralph Metzner, the German-born American psychologist and pioneering LSD researcher at Harvard University, and the author of The Well of Remembrance, The Unfolding Self, and Green Psychology, was speaking at the New Living Expo in San Francisco in 2012, and my friend Margie Lewis gave me a ticket to see him there in a panel discussing “the re-birth of psychedelic culture.” Right before the panel started, I asked Ralph for a brief chat as he was waiting to go onstage, to talk about psychedelic drugs as medicine to strengthen the body-mind connection.
Then we’ll hear a few minutes from Timothy Leary’s talk at the University of California, San Diego, in 1976, recorded using the little cassette recorder that I recorded lectures with at the time.
Then, Dr. Andrew Weil speaks at a MAPS conference in 2012 in San Jose, CA, about how he used LSD to help cure himself of allergies vis-a-vis the mind-body connection. After that comes my interview with Andy in 2012.
[caption id="attachment_2886" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Andy Moore and Andy Weil in San Francisco, 198? (Photo by Jack Walsh)[/caption]
Next, hear my interview with a friend who asked to remain anonymous when discussing taking LSD to enhance his life and work. An hour or so before this interview occurred, he had taken what is called a “micro-dose” of LSD.
[caption id="attachment_2902" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Let's call him "Don."[/caption]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This episode is dedicated to Dr. Norman Zinberg and Dorothy Zinberg.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Part 1 of a two-part program about the increasing use of consciousness-expanding substances, many of them illegal, for health and personal spiritual growth. People around the world are using these consciousness-expanding substances, also called psychedelics or hallucinogens, to treat conditions ranging from allergies and anxiety to alcoholism and addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, and many other problems. Some people use these materials regularly in low doses to enhance their everyday life, or they may use them more occasionally in larger doses for a more profound experience. This is a topic that has gotten more attention these days, due in part to Michael Pollan’s recent book entitled How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, which includes accounts of his own personal experiments with LSD, psilocybin and DMT.
I thought that now would be a good time to dig into my trove of recordings and play you some that I’ve made on the topic of psychedelic drugs over the years between 1976 when Timothy Leary came to speak at my college, and just a couple of weeks ago when I recorded an interview with a friend who was under the influence of LSD at the time.
In this episode I’m going to start out by playing you part of a recording that I made in 1991 of a talk given by Terence McKenna at the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco. Terence was a visionary explorer and writer, and a singularly engaging speaker. He wrote books like The Archaic Revival, Food of the Gods, and True Hallucinations, all of which I own and recommend. He also happened to have gone to high school with one of my best friends in San Francisco, so I’m lucky to have gotten to know Terry personally a little bit too, and I treasure a letter that he sent me a short while before he died.
After Terence McKenna, we’re going to hear from Rick Doblin, the President of an organization called MAPS (which stands for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies). Rick will talk about that organization’s work to bring currently illegal psychedelic materials into the light of science so that they can be studied properly and used to help people. You’ll hear Rick speaking to doctors, therapists, researchers and other members of MAPS at a MAPS conference in San Jose, CA in 2010, and then you’ll hear Rick in conversation with me, at MAPS’ former headquarters in Ben Lomond, CA, where I met him for the first time.
In the next episode, episode 24, which is also available now, we’ll continue this psychedelic journey and you’ll hear my brief chat with psychologist Ralph Metzner, one of the early LSD research pioneers at Harvard University along with Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (aka Ram Das), Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil. Ralph talked with me just before going onstage at the New Living Expo in San Francisco in 2012. After that I’m going to play you a short bit of a recording of Timothy Leary lecturing at my college, UC San Diego, in 1976 or 1977, talking about psychedelic drugs, pleasure, and human destiny. After that we’ll hear Dr. Andrew Weil at that same MAPS conference in 2010, talking about how he cured some of his own allergies using LSD, and then we’ll listen to a personal conversation I had with Dr. Weil around 2012, about the mind-body connection and how consciousness-expanding substances can play a role in optimizing that connection. Finally, I’ll have a chat with a friend here in Tucson Arizona, who, as we talked, was under the influence of LSD. He tells about the subtle ways that it is influencing his perceptions and his engagement with his art-making.
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Come along with me on a personal tour of the Writers Guild Foundation's Shavelson-Webb Library, the only library in the world focused entirely on screenwriting. Our guide will be Head Librarian Karen Pedersen. This library is a Los Angeles institution stocked with printed matter that is literally “the stuff that Hollywood dreams are made of,” and it hosts many public events with screenwriters.