Alice in Wonderland Amber Alert
By Mike Marino

Unlike the film "Debbie Does Dallas," Lewis Carrolls 1865 childrens classic fantasy about Cheshire Cats and Mad Hatters,Wonderland Does Alice! In this fantastic tale a young girl falls down the rabbit hole of pubery (euphimism for loosing her virginity according to Dr. Marino) and lands in a fantasia world that would have been Mainstreet USA to Timothy Leary. The imagery and characters have a certain psychedelic panache surrounding them and has been immortalized in Jefferson Airplanes, "White Rabbit" and has become part and parcel of the LSD counter culture of the tie-dyed Sixites and Haight Ashbury. Having lived there myself for years, I can attest to the fact that one pill does make you larger and one pill makes you small.

"Alice in Wonderland" is just one in a long lne of storybook children that would end up as a missing child on a milk carton with a full Amber Alert going viral on the web. Other "fantasy" candidates who would be placed on the promiscuous pedestal hit parade of abduction along with the Elizabeth Smarts would be Little Red Riding Hood who is captured by a ravenous transvestite wolf but manages to escpape by ebing saved by the John Walsh Woodsman of the woods in a bonifide "America's Most Wanted" moment. Then we have Dorothy of Kansas, whisked away to the land of Oz against her will and falls into the fast company as a streetwalking gingham clad prostitute on the famed Yellow Brick Road which in fantasy land is the Mustang Ranch of the Horse of a Different Color. She manages to kill her pimp, the wicked witch of the north, and begins to wear ruby red slippers and fishnet stockings as she entertains the troops with her Flying Monkey Act. Snow White, obviously a blonde, is held captive by a gang of gangbanging dwarves for whom she is forced to take turns turning tricks as a Hi Ho! Peter Pan leads young boys to Never Neverland for a life in the rough trades. Hansel and Gretel would share a milk carton as missing in action and are almost eaten alive by Hannibal Lechters lecherous aunt. She wanted to put them in the oven and bake them with the brownies she was heating up, in fact a whole troop of them as an appetizer after a dinner of Girl Scouts and their cookies! Children always seem to go missing in fairy tales and fantasy stories like Alice in Wonderland and we insist of reading about them to scare the hell out of our own kids. "Don't talk to strangers" ...yeah Alice, that Mad Hatter is about as strange as they come..."Just Say NO to Drugs" and here is your DARE t-shirt Alice...so what does she do...spends time with a hookah smoking caterpillar. Promiscuous? Of course she was...she only got larger so those below could peek up her gingham and gander. Watch out...that rabbit is looking for a hole! So the next time you read one of this stories to your own children...dont be surprised if some of them want to wear lipstick and enter a beauty contest or wants to go to Bangkok to be a teenage pole dancer. So save those milk cartons...you never know when they might become part of your family album.

"Alice in Wonderland" was written by an Englishman named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson who adopted the pen name Lewis Carroll. If you think Alice's adventures where tripped out, the story of Lewis Carroll himself who wrote the book for ten year old Alice Lidell, daughter of a friend of Carrolls. He not only wrote it for her but named the lead character after her. Soon Carroll fell down his own personal emotionally disturbed rabbit hole and spent his time photographing young Alice Liddell and some of her other 10 year old friends in the nude frolicking with one another (yes full frontal photos exist as proof in his letters and memorabilia) He soon devloped a crush on young Alice and went so far as proposing marriage when he turned 33 to her when she turned 11. It was his way of having her chase his mad hatter hard on so he could put a rabbit into a different kind of hole... Alice! We'll get back to Carrolls obsession with young Alice and his burning desire to experience carnal fire in the hole later, but for now..drop a hit of acid or mescaline and turn on and tune into Wonderland...don't forget to bring the hookah and the condoms Amigos, along with Alice's training bra!

Carroll told the tale to young Alice as a bedtime story, and as a little girl she was so enamoured with the story of a bored little girl who goes off in search of adventure that she asked him to write it down for her so she could read it over and over to herself. I guess even she noticed his preoccupation with her. "Is that a mad hatter in your pants, or are you happy to see me?" He wrote it down, took Alice for a boat ride and read it to her. As he read it aloud he made changes...the dreaded re-write process. When the final manuscript was completed he found an illustrator for the book and gave it to Alice to read and approve. Even then a writer has critics and editors to either add flair to a work or completely fuck it up. Alice it turns out loved it..why not...it was about her written by a smitten suiter who could have been her father, he then added the Cheshire cat and Tea Party segment as an afterthought and submitted it for publishing.

Carroll was a teacher, so his internal radar homing device zeroed in on the fact that these unspoiled minds were ripe for lecture and ideas that you could fill the empty cranial cups with. He was by all accounts an interesting man and made education exciting to young students who were mesmerized by his presenations. He was a boffo hit SRO in the classroom, but on the stage of reality he had his failings. In the case of the marriage proposal to 11-year-old Alice Lidell that turned out to be the final straw and the cause of the break in friendship between Carroll and the Lidell family. Gee..Do you think? As for the nude photos of Alice and her friends that Carroll took, it turns out that in Victorian times, there was this prevailing "child cult of innocence" that was acceptible and nude photos of children were an expression of the pure innocence they possessed. Explain that to John Walsh and the authorities today.

Carroll didn't limit his romps with Romper Room juveniles. His appetite was smorgasbordian in nature and he also hungered for teen and adult females and prefered the company of married ones although single legal females did not escape his roving eye. In his relationships with children though...those would generally end when they turned 14 years old. Over the hill by Wonderland standards no doubt. Just retain all this information the next time you hand your child a copy of Alice in Wonderland...and to think schools ban books like War and Peace and books by Mark Twain. At least in Twain, Tom Sawyer didn't open Becky Thatchers hatch to get a piece of ass. Now Huckleberry Finn might have attempted it but he was too busy being a pirate and only had pillage and plunder on his mind.

Carroll had quite the imagination redlining in overdrive, but it did turn out a curious piece of literature that had a plethora of amazing and bizarre characters. Mock Turtles, flamingos as croquet mallets, a dope smoking caterpillar and everywhere signs...Eat Me! Drink Me! but none that said Bite Me or Fuck You. Alice manages concurrently to grow in size and shrink in size (how cool is that?) and it even has a courtroom scene with stolen tarts stolen by a Knave of Hearts who is about to loose his head to the Queen of Hearts. My favorite charaters are the Mad Hatter, the Caterpillar (must have been the hookah that hooked me) and the Cheshire cat sporting that wonderful Lenny Bruce shit eating grin as if he just got back from Disneyland and had a corn dog and ate Mickey on a stick whole in one giant gulp.

Alice was not abducted to some colorful land of wizards and witches by a gang of roving gypsies or a tornado with a personal grudge against people from Kansas. In fact, Alice left home on her own, hormones raging no doubt, and decides to step through her own pubescent looking glass in search of adventure and literary promiscuity. As she is sitting on a river bank with her sister, they are obviously passing the hash pipe back and forth as she happens to notice a full clothed talking rabbit with a pocket watch race by them. I know a few of us out there have experienced the same thing or something similar while in a drug induced alter state ourselves. Of course she pursues the rabbit down a rabbit hole free falling all the way or according once again by Dr. Marino, she is coming down off her high. Confused she ends up in a hallway with more doors to open then Monty Hall has. Or even the Halls of Montezuma.

She finds a key, unlocks one that leads to a garden, probably of marijuana but she is too big, in fact she is a giant and can't reach the ganja so has to go gonzo to get the goods. She sees a bottle that says Drink Me, probably a bottle of skid row booze from a Bukowsk bum wine stash. She empties the bottle with the style and grace of Tom Waits on downers, and damned if she begins to shrink and her qualms are calmed by a handful of Quaaludes. The problem now is that she is too small to reach the key to the garden on the table high above now that she is the size of Thumbelina. Thankfully there is a piece of cake that says "Eat Me" on it...I've said that myself a time or two, both in anger on the street as well as passion in bed. I prefer the bedtime version.

She eventually gains entry to the Ninth Gate of Wonderland Hell and begins her trek with a pair of loosers, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumber...and even listens to a lecture on William the Conquerer. Now I know that there is a dildo named William The Conquerer just as there is one named Steely Dan, not to be confused with the group of the same name...they named themselves after William Burroughs Steely Dan the Dildo...what does that say about their music?

Now it gets real Cheech and Chongy as she runs into a blue caterpillar with a hookah. The damn thing also talks and like any good pusher in a school yard offers her free samples of a mushroom guaranteed to get her blasted higher than a kite, while the other piece will bring her down to size. All this growing and shrinking has to be playing havoc with her tampon which doesnt shrink as does her body...especially during the shrink process ..she probably looks like a bomb pop popsicle on a stick. Or to the Mad Hatter as a sexy creamsickle to whet his appetite.

Then there is the Cheshire Cat with the Lenny Bruce overdose on the toilet shit eating grin and the Queen of Hearts who in another life could be the lexbian madam of a bordello of young girls who are forced into sexual slavery with the battle cry of Off With Their Heads. You don't have to be Fellini to figure that one out. Eventually the Alice's purple hazed double dazed acid trip comes to an end and she is laying prone with a deck of giant cards falling on her in large enough to be parts of the Twin Towers collapsing in New York. At that very moment...Alice's sister wakes her up. Seems Alice had fallen asleep on the riverbank and the entire episode was no more than a dream that was obviously brought on by some left over brown acid from Woodstock..remember "Don't eat the brown acid, man...it's poison!"

Wonderland was no Woodstock, you can be certain of that. I've taken mucho acid in my time and saw the Space Needle in Seattle melt before my very bllood shot eyes...I saw Haight Street lift up off the ground and fly into the air...and I even floated encased in a soap bubble over Golden Gate Park, but ,damned if I ever smoked a bowl with a blue caterpillar or did smack with a talking cat. I don't know what Alice was on but we would have paid any price for a hit of that shit...

The tale of Alice has been told over and over in film and animation from Disney to Depp...but given the proclivities of Lewis Carroll it't author I'm still waiting for the lost vault version directed by Roman Polanski and starring Nastasia Kinsky! Polanksi and Kinsky = Kinky!