The Young Plotnik

There he is, The Great Plotnik long before his Conversion to Plotnikkism, when he was just another beer-drinking kid sitting on the floor of the Frat House next to Mary Jane Burns. This photo turned up yesterday, from the Internet bowels of the Memory Network.

The year appears to be 1964. JFK is dead, Martin and Bobby are not. The Young Plotnik still thinks he's Bob Dylan. (Of course, Bob Dylan probably thinks he's Mick Jagger.)

Look how happy that kid is, to say nothing of his frat brothers in madras shirts and all those girls with the bobbed hair. Mary Jane Burns's father sold YP a portable record player that he still had when he met Ducknik in New York six years later. He still had that brown sweater too.

Several of these kids ended up in Vietnam a few years after this picture was taken. One got shot up pretty badly, several others have suffered the rest of their lives with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Of the two boys holding the cute little blonde on their lap, one went to Vietnam and became a poet, the other got sent to Korea and became a lawyer. The tallest kid in the back joined motorcycle gangs and is dead. The guy in the white shirt on his knee was Young Plotnik's roommate. Last Plottie heard, his friend was selling organic mescaline in Florida. He has disappeared.

What happened to the girl in the middle with the beer cup on her head is unknown.