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T A B L E_T A L K
What makes you cry? Join a discussion of this all-too-human expression in the Mothers Who Think section of Table Talk
R E C E N T L Y Remembering Carole Sund Tell me the truth Breed old, die late and leave a beautiful brain "Jungle Book" fever A life without play dates - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
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One big dysfunctional family A FORMER MEMBER OF THE SYNANON CULT RECALLS THE "ALTERNATIVE LIFESTYLE" THAT SHAPED HER, FOR BETTER AND WORSE. BY FIONA MORGAN | Young Deborah Swisher was too much for the public school staff to handle. A highly creative and boisterous child, she couldn't submit to the traditional teaching structure and erupted every time she had to leave art class. Her Jewish mother had divorced Swisher's African-American father (Swisher and her sister hardly saw him, thanks to his alcoholism and his family's refusal to accept a white daughter-in-law) and found she wasn't suited to mainstream life and hourly wage jobs. She was drawn to an "alternative lifestyle" community called Synanon that had started in San Francisco. After attending several meetings on her own, Swisher's mother decided to bring her two daughters to live in one of Synanon's group homes. There, Swisher learned to read in two weeks and to nourish her creative streak while her mother gave up smoking and joined a group where she truly fit in, a racially integrated commune where her biracial daughters could be protected from the complications of the outside world. Thus began Swisher's long experience in the cult that coined the phrase "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." From age 7 until the day she walked out the door at 18 to pursue a college education, it seemed normal to Swisher to live on donated food, clothing and books; abstain from all controlled substances, including alcohol; and move from campus to campus as the group's elders dictated, even when that meant long-term separation from her mother and sister. And when everyone in the community shaved their heads in solidarity with Synanon's founder, young Swisher shaved hers, too. Today, Swisher is an actress and stand-up comic in New York City. Her new show, "Hundreds of Sisters and One Big Brother," is based on her experience at Synanon. She plays all of the characters, from her chain-smoking, well-meaning mother to the "demonstrator" who taught school, to the buffoonish first lover the community foisted on her as part of a hilariously public coming-of-age rite. In her portrayal of Synanon (referred to as "The Group" in the show), Swisher looks at the successes and perversions of a new-age social experiment through the eyes of a sharp-witted child. And despite the painful separations from her family, mandated by the Group's insistence on communal rather than nuclear-family bonds, Swisher's tale makes clear that the Group is indeed still her kin -- one big dysfunctional family. One of the most fascinating aspects of Synanon life was a ritual called "the game," a no-holds-barred forum for expressing feelings no matter how negative or critical. "The game" was the center of Group life, used to instill discipline, increase morale and teach members selflessness. But one day the teenage Swisher found herself the target of "the game." In a cruel effort designed to break the spirits of the high school's unruly students, a Synanon member who regularly worked on the rehabilitation of junkies and ex-cons into the group's society singled out Swisher as an example of "damaged goods," claiming her spirit had been polluted by a negative attitude. The mentally brutalized Swisher began to see the dark side of Synanon. Later, she would learn more about the group's founder, Charles Dederich, who pleaded no contest to charges that he conspired to murder a lawyer who was suing the organization by putting a rattlesnake in his mailbox. She would learn that the former drug addicts who tried to leave Synanon to get a fix were often physically coerced to stay. Still, Swisher's link to the group remains strong. Even after both of her daughters had left Synanon, Swisher's mother stayed on for another 10 years. As a result, Swisher's perspective goes beyond the standard critique of cults and their followers to a positive, if realistic, appraisal of the ideals and practices of the community that shaped her. In a recent visit to Salon's offices, Swisher discussed her experience and its lasting impact on her family. You start and end the show with phone calls you get from people who are worried about you whenever something goes wrong with a cult, like when the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, were killed in the standoff with federal agents. I hate getting those calls. I hate that they feel like they have to call me to check in to see if I'm OK, like I'm some patient who might go off their medicine five years later. But then I also hate that it's happening. I am angry when I see the government aggressively try to close down a cult. I might not even know what the business of the cult is, it could be bad and should be closed, but I just hate the way I have seen it happen over and over again in society. Like the MOVE organization [a radical Afrocentric group in Philadelphia whose building was bombed by police] -- brutal. This movie on Waco that was nominated for an Oscar last year ["Waco: The Rules of Engagement"] uncovered a huge government coverup about how this thing was apparently pretty much an ordered massacre. I'll never know the truth, but when I saw that film, a lot of things made sense. It's just an overall prejudice. Cults might not ultimately be good, but there are good cults. But you don't even hear about them because that's not going to make headlines. Living in Synanon, we started to get slanderous media. We were called a cult. That was such a horrible word. And when they told us what it meant, it just didn't sound like us. Really? That's what I am, a cult follower? It felt like an insult. When you grow up in a community, you think that the things that it is doing are right and are helping the world. You don't have the big picture of what's not working in your lifestyle. So you think that the media is going to say, "Hey, great, you're doing a great job," and when they say, "You're doing crazy things in there, you're a kooky cult, you guys are out of control, you're hitting people," it's shocking. I can't speak for a lot of stuff that happened in Synanon because I was a child and didn't see it. A lot of stuff was revealed to me years after I left. N E X T_ P A G E: Why Synanon school was better than public school |
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