8515 Penfield Ave
Winnetka, CA 91306
Founded in 1987 by Terry Brussel and Brian Gitt
Based on the philosophy of Family Synergy,
Founded 1971 by Hy Levy and Pat LaFollette
LIVE THE DREAM FOUNDED 1987
UPCOMING EVENTS
Saturday August 21, 2021 10AM – 4PM Zoom 11AM-1230PM
Harrad Experiment and Proposition 31 by Robert Rimmer:
Couple Meets Couple, They Fall in Love and Get Married
ALL LTD MEETINGS ARE NOW LIVE & ON ZOOM!
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/3175971626?pwd=NWVjU3A2M0I2Q29IUkI4L1lMRzd2QT09
Meeting ID: 317 597 1626 Passcode: Heinlein
Find us Always here on the 3rd Saturday from 11A-12:30P Pacific Time. This will be our Zoom ID from now on.
Please visit the Live the Dream website at www.livethedream.org to view current events, past articles, etc. Terry Brussel-Rogers is a Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist, Life Coach, & a 4th generation Matchmaker. We provide poly relationship counseling, hypnotic jealousy release, success coaching, and other services. See www.acesuccess.com or call (800) LIFE MATES (543-3628)
EVENTS
All Live the Dream LIVE events are 11am-4pm on 3rd Saturdays at 8515 Penfield Ave in Winnetka, Ca. 91306 (unless otherwise specified)
For all events: RSVP/more info call the LTD Hotline (818) 886-0069
The silver lining of Safer at Home experience: From now on, all our meetings will be available on Zoom for those who can’t get to us in person. Some will be hosted by speakers in other areas, too. We are doing both Zoom and Live — Zoom 11-12:30 and Live 11-4.
Donation In Person Only $10 for non-members, $5 for members. Join day of meeting $25 singles, $40 for couples or groups of one household includes meeting that day.
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Live the Dream is an education and support group for those who, originally inspired by the writings of Robert Heinlein, Robert Rimmer, and Marion Zimmer Bradley, are now ready to LIVE such alternative lifestyles as cooperative living, open relationships, and group marriage. Many of our concepts on multiply committed relationships come from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Live the Dream also sponsors a nest of Church of All Worlds, the real life, over fifty-year-old spiritual movement inspired by Stranger in a Strange Land.
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We had hoped to have a FAMILY SYNERGY 50TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION at FreedomAcres on July 17, 2021 at the same location where its 40th anniversary took place. When the resort did not open by May of 2021, it was decided to have the event at our usual location in the West San Fernando Valley, Unfortunately, we just found out it is PERMANENTLY CLOSED– More on this in the article below.
FAMILY SYNERGY 50TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION will be a Zoom/Live event at our home in Winnetka. The Zoom event will go on from 11AM until 5PM. Those who come in person will share pot luck lunch Saturday and order food from a local restaurant for Saturday night dinner. We’ll break for hot tubbing and evening events at 5PM. Brunch Sunday morning will be served to all who stay over. Presenters will include Pat LaFollette, co-founder of Family Synergy, Oberon Zell, founder of Church of All Worlds based on Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (both on Zoom).
Glen Olson, Terry’s co-author of the book Fifty Years of Polyamory in America
(Through Our Eyes) will be presenting with Terry in Person.
If YOU are coming in person (or just want more info), do let us know by calling our hot line. 818-886-0069
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Saturday July 17, 2021 10AM to Sunday noonish in person
and 10:30AM to 5PM Saturday Only on Zoom
FAMILY SYNERGY 50TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
with Special Guests Pat LaFollette, Co-Founder of Family Synergy and Oberon Zell Founder of Church of All Worlds
The planned schedule is:
10AM Live Meeting Starts—Decide on Dinner arrangements (all contribute to ordering out), who sleeps where, etc. Must RSVP to attend in person and to arrange to stay over. Limited crash space available inside. Tents ok in Back Yard, by arrangement only.
10:30AM Zoom Meeting Starts…Zoom and In Person attendees introduce themselves
11:30AM Pat La Follette Keynote Speech; Family Synergy Founding, Philosophy, and Personal experiences with forming a triad in the 70s and raising kids as a triad. View of Polyamory in the Future
12:30PM Potluck lunch and informal Q&A—Do please have lunch with us virtually if you are attending on Zoom.
In person: LTD provides Salmon and Tuna salad + Pot Luck. You bring a dish big enough for 10 as well as snacks for yourself and to share. We will use what you bring throughout the weekend and add to it so no one starves… Not in the house of a certified Jewish Mother.
1:30PM Fifty Years of Polyamory in America (Through Our Eyes) presented by co-authors Glen Olson and Terry Brussel-Rogers. How has polyamory changed over the last fifty years as we have watched? What does that tell us about what paths Polyamory will travel in the Future?
2:30PM Eileen Maxfield will be interviewed by Terry on Poly Day Camp Experiences, Present Experiences in Semi Residential Triad Sungaia, View of Polyamory in the Future particularly in cooperative living arrangements.
3:30PM Oberon Zell, Founder of Church of All Worlds, How Stranger in a Strange Land effected the real-life Church of All Worlds and View of Polyamory in the Future among Pagans and Neo Pagans
4:30PM Q&A Panel including all presenters
5PM End of Zoom part of meeting
5:30PM Dinner ordered out will be delivered.
6:30PM Sensitivity Exercises verbal and non-verbal lead by Terry Brussel-Rogers
8PM Clothing Optional Hot Tub
9PM Guided Group massage with Celtic harp music playing. Massage table available 8 pm on.
Those who are staying over are welcome to join us for Sunday Brunch omlettes deliciously produced by Craig Brussel Rogers.
Technical Staff for Zoom and in person: Audio Engineer Paul Gibbons assisted by Craig Brussel Rogers and Athena Gibbons.
THANK YOU TO ALL WHO ARE HELPING MAKE THIS EVENT A SPECIAL ONE!
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Saturday August 21, 2021 10AM – 4PM Zoom 11AM-1230PM
Harrad Experiment, Proposition 31, Love Me Tomorrow & more by Robert Rimmer:
Couple Meets Couple, They Fall in Love and Get Married
Robert Rimmer wrote many fictional books on multiple committed relationships from the dating stage to the group marriage stage. Harrad Experiment takes place at a supposedly fictional university (except that we had a housemate who went there) which features co-ed rooms, classes on sexand love and co-ed naked gym classes. There is a lot of excellent instruction in this on how to handle polyamory as the college students who deal with the usual jealousies involved in dating more than one person deal also with the complications of one of them being your assigned roommate to whom you are expected to make love. It eventually evolves into a six-way group marriage. Proposition 31 starts with what looks like a familiar relationship train wreck as a married man impregnates his married lover leading to the threat of divorce of both marriages. Except it winds up with the kids from both marriages getting a new sibling and extra parents instead of losing those they had. The wife who did not get pregnant attempts to get group marriage legalized as the story proceeds…not a bad idea when you look at the alternative.
Robert Rimmer himself was in a four-way group marriage which lasted 25+ years but was kept secret due to his co-husband’s work situation until the man passed on. Bob claimed throughout that his stories were fictional. He was an honorary member of Live the Dream and gave us a couple of meetings by speaker phone after all this was no longer secret.
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FAMILY SYNERGY 50TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
EXCERPT FROM FIFTY YEARS OF POLYAMORY IN AMERICA
BY GLEN OLSON AND TERRY BRUSSEL-ROGERS
Glen Olson is a long-time member of the polyamory community. He has given many talks and seminars on the history of our community. He is also a retired fire captain, paramedic, technical writer on disaster preparedness, and fiction writer. Not surprisingly, poly themes tend to crop up a lot in his fiction writing.
Synergy-Noun: the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects. (Free Merriam-Webster online/Webster’s unabridged Dictionary of the English language, 1978)
An engineer by profession, in the bustling California technical world of aero-space, Hy Levy was looking for something different to bring into his life. He and his wife Joyce had already built a loving marriage, created a suburban family lifestyle with two children. They were definitely not looking to join a commune, or to make a political statement about planetary resources, or create a model for co-operative living- others were already doing that.
They were actually inspired by the utopian novels of Robert Rimmer (The Harrad Experiment, Proposition 31, Love Me Tomorrow), an author who proposed that group marriage, built by couples, who would find other couples and marry them- could work and be a powerful and joyful lifestyle. They wondered if that could possibly be true, and were on quest to find out.
“In those days it was very hard to meet people,” Levy says, “the only way to contact other like-minded people was to put an ad in the LA Free Press and wait for someone to answer it, or answer someone else’s ad.”
Eventually, after answering a large number of ads and putting in one of their own they met Pat and Ann Lafollette. Hy remembers, “We met each other, we liked each other, in fact Pat and I got along fabulously well.” The Lafollette’s, though they were younger and did not have children yet, had also read Robert Rimmer’s novels and were looking for the same things the Levy’s were.
Pat already had an extraordinary background that would prove beneficial in shaping the organization to come and its philosophies. He was a trained scientist, a biologist and had also acquired a degree in sociology. He had lived as a hippie in San Francisco and was a participant in the Summer of Love. He understood the concept of intentional community from the inside out.
Pat Lafollette and Hy Levy had often stated they were looking to build a “synergy” in their lives, create stronger, vital relationships based on their marriages and to provide a stronger family experience for the adults AND the children.
It hit Hy, and perhaps Pat also at the same time they were talking about Family. Obviously the organization should be called Family Synergy. Later they would invent the term “expanded family” to denote those adults and children that you spent a lot of time with, celebrated birthdays and holidays with and did family activities with. These people were Family but who did not happen to be related to you by blood. [The water sharing ceremony presented in Stranger in a Strange Land is another way to consciously create Expanded Family connections]
In 1971, after an initial meeting which drew about a dozen people, The Levy’s and the Lafollette’s attended a convention at which Robert Rimmer spoke. They found a way to get invited up on stage with Rimmer and made the announcement of their upcoming meeting to put together a local group based on his philosophy. Pat recalls, “At that time I was a professional artist and had a huge artists loft in the skid row area of Los Angeles. It was four or five thousand feet. We held the next meeting there just in case we got a good turnout.”
In fact fifty or sixty people showed up- and Family Synergy was in business.
By the early 1980’s there were more than two dozen Family Synergy inspired groups around the continental US with branches in Canada, England, Scotland, Australia and New Zealand. Remember that the original goal of Family Synergy was to discuss the possibilities of group marriage based on already married couples coming together with other couples, how to grow those group marriages and how to sustain them.
Hy recalls, “After a year or two we began to wonder if we were doing something wrong.” No group marriages had formed from the group, and they hadn’t heard of any forming anywhere else.
Although something interesting was happening and it was a quite unexpected. A number of people started joining the group who were already in committed long term relationships- but they weren’t built from four people- they were three.
“We started off advocating group marriages built from four party or multiple couples… we had never thought of triads, It was a totally new idea. Over time we moved to the concept that any kind of multiply committed relationship was ok”. No group marriages based on couples ever formed in Family Synergy and survived. In all the cases that Pat Lafollette and the authors are aware of, every four-person live-in marriage eventually turned into a triad or fractured further. Even though a four-person marriage, composed of two couples that had already weathered the strains of building a stable relationship was doable in theory, as proposed by Rimmer, in the real world this relationship configuration was highly unstable. The collapse of a foursome almost always happened in less than a year.
One of the original four would decide it was not for them and exit the relationship, leaving behind three people, who very often were able to make it a stable triad. [Pat speaks at this 50th anniversary celebration of the one in which he, wife Ann and co-husband Joe raised their sons—one by each father]
Terry: Over the years Family Synergy made a huge difference in many lives. My kids had the advantage of caring adults in their lives growing up, as role models and to introduce them to different ethnic cultures. I met my second husband, Paul (married 15 years and still my lover, water brother, and the audio-visual engineer for this 50 year Celebration) through Family Synergy. Many marriages and lifelong friendships grew through this organization. It gave us a way to meet kindred spirits and to know that the lifestyle we had chosen was not something we had to do alone or something which only existed in science fiction novels. The philosophy it taught and nurtured, that it is possible to love and be committed to more than one significant other, has inspired me to continue its good work through Live the Dream.
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TROUBLE AT FREEDOM ACRES
We just found out some horrible news!!! Freedom Acres has just been sold after 40+ years of being a nudist/sexual freedom-oriented resort to become a Truck Stop! As I write this, a call from one of its long-time residents just came in. The residents were not even informed of what was going on and plan to fight this injustice.
Texted to me from a concerned resident (and activist) at Freedom Acres after getting 30-day notice to leave his home:
“Hey Terri, I have some important but very limited information for us all. The club, Freedom Acres is closed, probably for good. But the hardest news, the Freedom Acres Resort is still closed, even after the covid excuse. We have had some news that the resort has been sold to a truck stop company. The intention is to tear it all down and pave it over. We are all going to lose on this. We need help, fast, the residents are uninformed and out of time.”
Fortunately, the recent legislation extending the Covid ban on evictions to September of 2021 means they are not quite out of time. Not much comfort for residents who have been there since it was Tree House or even Dear Park. Some have doublewides and actual houses on the property who can’t sell them because of this. While this is happening to the particular people on the spot, it is also a matter of deep concern to all of us involved in alternative lifestyle and/or social nudity. We have lost the battle for legal social nudity at Bates Beach. Lost Elysium long before that to a sale of the property which members tried to stop, tried to raise the money to buy themselves.
Those effected directly by this current attack on our chosen lifestyle are getting legal representation, but they also need moral support and perhaps people who will to show their support by attending a possible upcoming peaceful public demonstration.
If we do not all hang together to protect our freedoms, might we all be at risk of hanging separately? Call Jeff James for more information (or to share any helpful info you have): 951-275-3610
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Do you have a “What do you do when?” question for us, or any Poly related article for publication or WHAT EXPERIENCES/BOOK REVIEWS, ETC. THAT YOU CAN SHARE RELATING TO THE POLY LIFE STYLE? We’d like to run it here.
Please E-Mail to: newsletter@mail.livethedream.org Or mail it to 8515 Penfield Ave. Winnetka, Ca. 91306.
We will take any question with your solution or brainstorm and give it one or more of our own. Let’s have fun with this and learn from each other.
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Meet Ups & Other Group Events
NONE OF THIS IS COVID 19 UPDATED. GO TO THEIR WEBSITES TO SEE HOW EACH GROUP IS HANDLING IT.
Check out www.meetup.com/Loveopen & www.meetup.com/loving-more and other SoCal poly groups (40+ groups in the Greater LA Area!)
The Southern California Naturist Association Meetup http://www.meetup.com/nature-519
This is the largest non-landed clothing optional club in California
Other Poly info:
www.lovemore.com www.polyevents.blogspot.comhttp://openingup.net/resources/local-orginizations-u-s/
Other groups friendly to KARL HESS CLUB www.karlhessclub.org meets on the 3rd Monday at Dinah’s Family Restaurant, 6521 Sepulveda Blvd. (at Centinela), Culver City. Phone: (310) 645-0456 West L.A.
Burning Man Festival virtual or in person? For details www.burningman.com!
LTD DUES ARE $25.00 PER YEAR FOR ONE PERSON, $40 FOR A COUPLE, $10 EACH FOR ADDITIONAL PERSON(S) IN THE SAME HOUSE. DOUBLE THAT FOR FREE ATTENDANCE AT ALL REGULAR DAY TIME 3RD SATURDAY MEETINGS. TO BECOME A MEMBER OR TO RENEW YOUR MEMBERSHIP, PLEASE COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING FORM AND EITHER E-MAIL OR SNAIL MAIL IT TO THE ADDRESS LISTED BELOW. An E-Mail NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIPTION ONLY IS AVAILABLE FOR FREE. JUST BE SURE TO PROVIDE US WITH YOUR E-Mail ADDRESS. REGULAR MEETINGS ARE $5.00 WITH YOUR CURRENTLY PAID MEMBERSHIP CARD (FAMILY SYNERGY OR LIVE THE DREAM) WITHOUT MEMBERSHIP MEETINGS ARE $10.00.