p e n g u i n d e v i l

Ah yes, recently I sat down to a most entertaining documentary. Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox. And an apt name it is for, while it is about Dr Bronner. It is also about his company and his soap and his son Ralph. Dr. Bronner is, of course, the wonderfully idiosyncratic, brilliant genius behind Bronner’s Castille soap. A product that has been, without question, the most constant and consistent product in my home since I was a wee tot. I remember being fascinated by the labels when I was little and remaining fascinated until the current day. But about the movie…

I poo poo all of those who say that he is crazy, or say that this film makes him seems crazy he is just an intelligent and brilliant man who I feel always had the hope that people would start to wake up and see the world and people around themselves. Sure, he did tend to rant and rave, coming across as some kind of a fascist rabbi school teacher, and he certainly starts to seem a bit repetitive, where you feel like he has spouted slightly altered versions of the same few paragraphs for 40 years. But I’ve always been one to subscribe to the notion that the importance lays “not in how you say it, but in what you say”. And his message (regardless of the god stuff and the anti-communist ranting) says the right things about the earth and the environment and community. Argh! I digress! There is lots of film of him and his family members (who continue to run the company) and some footage from some terrible looking hippie documentary called “Rainbow Bridge” but we mainly follow around his son Ralph (who is pretty much the company’s one man marketing machine) as he travels the land giving away free soap, copies of the Moral A.B.C. and making speeches about his father. Ralph is truly one of those folks who can talk to anyone, and also get anyone to accept a hug.

Even though I have noticed that they have added a lot of products recently, seeing his grandsons running the company gave me the great feeling that his product line will continue the Castille soaps (peppermint and eucalyptus being my favorite) until the day I pass on. I found the documentary to be inspired and quite inspiring.



Speaking of odd old ducks, I also watched Surfwise… another story about a man on a mission who brought his family along with him. This time though, the mission was surfing and avoiding the middle-class thing. Dorian Paskowitz was a successful doctor in Hawaii who, in the 1960’s, decided to abandon his career and life-style and take his family (wife and 9 kids) away from it all… But which we mean “move them all into an RV and spend the next few decades driving around surfing”. On the way, they avoided school, stability and all of those other bourgeois things that other families do. It actually comes across as a fairly positive move, at least in the early part of the movie. But, in all honestly, the 11 of them did live for many years in the confines of a succession of small RV’s. As the film progresses the children (of course, all adults now) talk about an assortment of issues that came from being raised as part of a terribly close-knit group of 11 people living for many years in a privacy-free environment and not having the same reality as most children. But the parents certainly feel confident in their choice of family lifestyles and, now in his 80’s, old Doc is still going strong.