Psychedelic Women

Rainbow Valentine talks with her mom’s friend, Julia Brigden, aka Girl Frieberg, who married musician, David Frieberg of the Quicksilver Messenger Service at the age of 17 to avoid returning to Juvenile Hall. Julia Girl Brigden did reckless things in the 1960’s like hitchhike to Mexico to trip with psychedelic mouthpiece, Tim Leary (coiner of Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out) before being sent to reform...

In a mini episode of Smuggler Family Album previously only avail on Patreon, Rainbow Valentine’s mom, Taffy Lemur aka Kathy Mason Lerner, from Psychedelic Women and Disorganized Crime, shares true stories about an infamous 1960’s San Francisco prostitute known as The Dragon Lady and an ergotomine tartrate smuggler who had a secret cellar of treasure and strangely, a fake tire store. Plus, the hist...

Before she became one of the first female DJ’s in America, Dusty Street was babysat by San Francisco’s most iconic Madam, Sally Stanford and the brothel’s cook, Juanita, who became the Bay Area’s most colorful restauranteur.  These historic women and Dusty’s Communist/cocktail waitress mom taught Dusty to be a badass trailblazer who was on the air continuously for over 30 years.    Host, Rainbow V...

You can’t buy your way into the inner circle counterculture - you behave your way in; plus what’s difference between outlaws and criminals?  In this hybrid episode, host, Rainbow Valentine talks counterculture greed, loss, trust and betrayal with her psychedelic pioneer mom, Kathy Mason Lerner (subject of eps 1 – 6) and Kira and Jasper Thelin, whose family opened the first headshop in America.  RV...

Don’t everyone’s parents have smuggler friends who disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle? In the subculture host, Rainbow Valentine grew up in, yes, but the rest of the world, maybe not. And because of this, RV shares ho-hum lunch convos with her and her former pot-smuggler counterculture parents from the podcast, Disorganized Crime. In this trio of Lunch with the Lemurs, RV's parents tell us true s...

Before she was a 17 year old groundfloor member of the 1960's San Francisco counterculture, Rosie McGee was the child of French Holocaust survivors who, after WW2, flipped a coin on where to emigrate and as Rosie says, “I won” because San Francisco in the early 60’s was a city of beatniks melding into hippies – the perfect place for a teenage detective to become a psychedelic woman.  Before she wr...

“You can smuggle anything except for drugs and guns…” These were the rules laid down by a Brazilian beauty queen to her Uraguyan Jewish husband, who smuggled everything from hi-fis to Hindus.  In this episode of Smuggler Family Album, host Rainbow Valentine chats with her Brazilian drummer friend, Pedro Strasser, whose father (also named Pedro) was a smuggler during the Brazilian dictatorship of t...

In this bonus episode host, Rainbow Valentine, continues to put the psychedelic puzzle pieces of her culture together as Dr. Maria Mangini, PHD, co-founder of the Women’s Visionary Congress, nurse practitioner and psychedelic historian, tells RV and listeners about her friendship with Nicky Scully, subject of Episode 10 and takes us down some serious counterculture rabbit holes.  Topics include in...

Cults! Kidnapping! Concubines!  This epic bonus episode of the Radiate story (Eps 1 - 6) with Rainbow Valentine and her Zelig artist mom, Kathy Mason Lerner aka the Astrologer’s Daughter, gets into RV’s mom’s life before she gave her signature fur hat to Janis Joplin.  True stories of RV’s mom’s godparents who were California Bohemians of the 1930s, 40’s and 50’s, astrologers and friends with Frid...

How many counterculture brides can say that Janis Joplin sang at their wedding?   At least one and her name is Nicki Scully and host, Rainbow Valentine’s mom made her wedding rings.  Shamanic healer, Nicki Scully was an LSD-taking teenager who arrived in San Francisco during the 1967 Summer of Love, where she met and married Goldfinger, the infamous, one-handed smuggler who kept Nicki doped up and...

What do you call a deranged smuggler who asks you to stash a brick of gold under your pillow for 6 months?  A friend or an acquaintance?  Rainbow Valentine’s mom’s art patron, Goldfinger, was a one-handed smuggler who regularly moved thousands of pounds of hashish from Lebanon to the US before being busted by the CIA, which only turned him into a fugitive. Goldfinger was a bigger-than-life real ou...

When your parents tell you about a real one-handed smuggler named Goldfinger who lost his hand in a smuggling trip gone wrong, there’s only one thing to do: dive deeper.  In The True Saga of Goldginger Part 1, Rainbow Valentine talks to psychedelic woman/counterculture, groundfloor member, Raechel Donahue (wife of Big Daddy Tom Donahue), about Goldfinger - the larger-than-life, counterculture smug...

A lo-fi, stripped-down convo with Rainbow Valentine and Dr. Maria Mangini, PHD, co-founder of the Women’s Visionary Congress, Hog Farm Member & psychedelic historian.  RV and Dr. M talk about the true stories in  Eps 5, 8, 9 and Bonus ep 2, including RV’s mom’s shocking revelation about Dizzy Gillespie, human trafficking, teenage hysteria of Beatlemania, the Lovin' Spoonful’s pot bust, peyote, the...

Don’t everyone’s parents small-talk about MDA chemists bleeding out while fine dining or argue about which LSD chemist had a live/work space in a defunct nuclear silo and reminisce about a one-handed, fugitive smuggler named Goldfinger?  If you grew up with the psychedelic pioneers of SF’s 1960’s like Rainbow Valentine, then yes, probably during breakfast your elders can harken back to that big Le...

Can you imagine process-serving the Beatles? Raechel Donahue, SF's acid-rock radio pioneer, was a psychedelic second away from doing just that because she and her husband, Big Daddy Tom Donahue, produced the Beatles very last concert in North America and it didn’t go quite as planned.  And that’s just the first 5 minutes of this episode which includes Raechel’s life in swinging 60’s London where i...

Imagine life without free radio.  If you lived in America before 1967, that was reality… there were no free radio stations until a group of misfit artist visionaries high on LSD decided to recreate their psychedelic record parties onto the airwaves.  In this episode, RV talks to her mom’s pal, Raechel Donahue - the pioneering woman who trained and employed the first women in America to be radio en...

Part 2 of a deep dive into Radiate episodes 4, 5 and 6 with RV and Dr. Maria Mangini, PHD, co-founder of the Women’s Visionary Council, nurse practitioner and member of the Hog Farm Commune.  Be a psychedelic fly on the wall as Dr. M tells RV the story of the Wild West Festival, an epic failure of a music festival that was supposed to be the West Coast counterpoint to Woodstock, plus the physiolog...

Part 1 of a deep dive into Radiate episodes 4, 5 and 6 with RV and Dr. Maria Mangini, PHD, co-founder of the Women’s Visionary Council and member of the Hog Farm Commune.  Listeners get to be a psychedelic fly on the wall as RV and Dr. M discuss the Grateful Dead’s origins, the downfall of the Quicksilver, the history of women in radio aka KMPX’s chick engineers plus an insider’s story of San Fran...

In a very intimate bonus episode to the Radiate story, RV’s mom shares what she calls “the gritty stuff”, revealing never-before-heard, shocking revelations about her marriage to mid-century modern jeweler/drug dealer to the Jazz greats, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis…  Plus a teenage bullrider, a thief named Crazy Sal, murder and more.  Pull up a pot bale seat at the Anonymous Artist’s table whe...

A deep dive into Radiate Eps 1, 2, 3 with RV and Dr. Maria Mangini, PHD, co-founder of the Women’s Visionary Council and member of the Hog Farm Commune.  In an intimate After-the-Episode Chat, RV and Dr. M. discuss the Hippie Family Tree, the Haight Ashbury, The Diggers, hippie kids, outlaws, rock stars, Margo St. James, Carol Doda, the Domino Club,  San Francisco’s laws around nudity onstage and...

In behind-the scenes convos with her former pot-smuggler parents, Rainbow Valentine takes a walk down counterculture memory lane with stories about beat poets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti & Alan Ginsberg, obscenity trials and banned books plus dining with smugglers, counterculture chemists, an airplane full of LSD VIPS, the history of Marin County, California’s sushi and an unsolved murder in the high e...

In a new branch of Psychedelic Women, Rainbow Valentine presents Smuggler Family Album, conversations with her counterculture smuggler friends and family.  In this episode RV’s parents (from the podcast Disorganized Crime) tell us about Juanita, a shit-talking restaurateur/brothel owner with a wild west heart of gold who ran her infamous restaurant from her bed; plus stories about the people and p...

In the final non-bonus episode of RV's mom's story, Psychedelic wisdom galore is dropped as Kathy Mason Lerner dishes more trippy stories from her decade on the groundfloor of the world-famous San Francisco counterculture between 1960 – 1970.  True stories about the Beatles, Joan Baez, the CIA, the Charlatans, Stoneground, Altamont, the Avalon, the Jefferson Airplane, Howard Hesseman, a trip-to-Ha...

On June 12th, 1943, Susi Ramstein became the very first woman on planet earth to take LSD and she took the tram home (while tripping).  To commemorate Susie Ramstein’s tenacity, the world’s leading women-centric psychedelic organization, the Women’s Visionary Council, launched a new psychedelic holiday: Tram Day!   In this episode (which drops on Tram Day) Rainbow Valentine talks to psychedelic hi...

The late 1960’s in San Francisco unfold and it’s tumultuous. In 1967 the Summer of Love brought 100,000 wannabe hippie teenagers to the City hoping to join RV’s mom’s friend group and the scene starts to fall apart.  RV’s mom is still in the center of the psychedelic revolution, working with KMPX, the first rock radio station in the country, Chet Helms and the Family Dog and the pioneering improv...