Jerry Rubin

Your Buzz staff had heard that Jerry Rubin, the Chicago 7 member-turned-yuppie entrepreneur, had moved to Los Angeles from New York. A Social Climes photographer and reporter ran into him at a recent celebrity gathering. It was an indelible experience. Spying the photographer, Rubin stopped and demanded, "Don't you want to take my picture?" When he was told that a picture had already been snapped, Rubin asked for a copy and said, "When is it going to run?"

Let's clear this up instantly. There are two Jerry Rubins. One is a Venice peace activist who makes $6 an hour potting orchids. The other is a Famous Ex-Radical who paid $85,000 in personal income taxes last year. The Venice Rubin is relatively soft-spoken and says please and thank you and had to resort to potting orchids because peace is ruining his paid anti-war activism. The Other Rubin jumps in your face waving health powders like "Wow!"

It doesn't require a mountain of qualifications to be a city councilman, as members of city councils throughout Southern California have demonstrated for years. It helps if one can tie his own shoes and remember where he lives, but even the inability to do that isn't an obstacle to holding public office. I know for certain that Jerry Rubin can do both. I have personally witnessed him tying his own sneakers and I also know that his wife, Marissa, has trained him to find his way home.

Yippie-turned-yuppie Jerry Rubin has a new moneymaking scheme: selling an earth-colored drink packed with ingredients like kelp, ginseng and bee pollen. The 51-year-old Rubin, an independent marketer for the Dallas-based Omnitrition International, has been recruiting salespeople for his headquarters in Wallingford. They will sell a nutritional drink called Omni IV.

What's the hottest thing on ice since Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan? The American flag. Most of the fuss surrounding the Stars and Stripes usually involves burning it in protest, but one Venice community activist has taken the opposite approach: freezing Old Glory. Jerry Rubin's dime-store flag hit the ice as a protest June 28, the day the House of Representatives approved a constitutional amendment that would give Congress and the states the authority to ban desecration of the U.S. flag.

Determined to save 54 ficus trees in Santa Monica, activists on Thursday appealed a judge's ruling allowing the city to remove the trees along 2nd and 4th streets as part of an $8-million beautification project. At issue is the legal question of when activist Jerry Rubin and others should have filed the lawsuit challenging the city's plan, said the group's attorney, Tom Nitti. A lower court judge sided with the city, ruling that the group should have sued within six months of the October 2005 approval of the streetscape plan.

On the day Jerry Rubin died I called his home telephone number for comment from someone close to him. No one answered, but his message machine clicked on and Rubin's voice exploded in my ear, full of the relentless energy that characterized his life. "I'm back in town, and looking forward to talking to you and everything's great and I'll call you back and make your day fantastic!"

Venice Beach is an amiable blend of healers, hawkers, psychics, musicians, peace activists, environmentalists, hug therapists, artists, jugglers and cosmic mind-trippers who gather on weekends to shake a few bucks out of the tourists and compare astrological signs. It's a free-floating carnival without portfolio, but a low key one at that. No one hustles too hard, beach-goers have some fun, entertainers make a little money, peace wins some adherents and the tourists go back to Allentown, Pa.

The editors of The Book Review consulted poet and etymologist John Ciardi (featured on National Public Radio's Morning Edition) with regard to the origins of the term yuppie (young urban professional). Ciardi surmises that the word grew out of a progression of terms-- hippie, yippie, yuppie. His theory: hippies believed anyone over 30 was the enemy. Inevitably, you turned your coat, passed 30 and became your own enemy; Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and other yippies (from their Youth International Party)