You can’t brush your teeth with Tide or wash your clothes with Crest, so how come you can get out “ring around the collar” and fend off gingivitis with Dr. Bronner’s all-vegetable, biodegradable castile soap? The health food store and camp store staple has 16 other marketed uses, too, and hundreds more — washing motorcycles, cleaning dreadlocks and diapers, etc. — that fans of the minty liquid have written to the company about over the years. But just who is Dr. Emanuel Bronner, and what’s behind all those cryptic messages of peace and hope on the label? The answers to these questions and a whole lot more about the visionary eccentric who founded the Escondido, CA-based company, are found at the Mill Valley Film Festival (mvff.com) October 5-15, where Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox will be screened. The film’s auteur — now LA-based performance artist/filmmaker Sara Lamm — is making an appearance, too, and she’s bringing Dr. Bronner’s 70-year-old son Ralph with her. Like his departed father, company vice president Ralph is an advocate of “responsible capitalism,” social justice, fair trade and world peace. He’s apparently a dynamite hugger, as well. How did Lamm find such a great subject? It’s almost like the other way around. “I was adapting the messages on the soap label for a solo stage performance in New York in 2000, and asked the company to send some free soap.” To her surprise, boxes of free soap arrived, and in thanks, she sent them a DVD of the finished show. On 9-11, Ralph called Lamm and asked if she would agree to pick up more cases of Dr. Bronner’s and take them to Ground Zero. She was hesitant at first, until he told her, “Everybody needs soap.” So she did. “After that, he called back and said he wanted to do a performance at my theater company about his father. That’s when I decided to pick up the camera,” she says. The documentary features Ralph, and includes archival footage of his father, who escaped from a mental institution in 1948 to create a one of the pioneering “green” companies that’s still going strong today, “Uniting mankind on Spaceship Earth,” and who also abandoned Ralph to a series of orphanages to do so. Check out magicsoapbox.com to see the trailer. — Todd Spencer
Reflexology Helps Cancer Patients Cope
A pilot study published by Michigan State University’s School of Nursing shows reflexology is an effective complementary treatment for late-stage breast cancer patients. The reflexology treatments, which coincided with chemotherapy appointments, reduced the typical dread patients have before heading to the hospital for their toxic treatments. Researchers tested reflexology, guided imagery, and reminiscence therapy (in which patients recall times in their lives when they’ve met and overcome challenges). Of those three, reflexology proved to be the most effective. “Reflexology is the one people stuck with the most during the eight-week protocol,” said Gwen Wyatt, a professor in MSU’s College of Nursing who headed the project. “It’s also the one that had the most positive outcomes. Women undergoing chemotherapy for late-stage breast cancer face intense physical and emotional issues, and reflexology treatments helped women adjust better to their chemotherapy. “Instead of dreading the next cancer treatment, patients were able to focus on the comfort measure provided during treatment. We saw things like a decrease in depression and anxiety, and improvements in spirituality and emotional quality of life,” Wyatt said. “We don’t really have a Western, scientific way of testing how this works. The mechanism is not clearly understood. But for us, we just measure the patient’s perception of change,” she says. Placebo Effect? Perhaps, but then why did reflexology prove more effective than the two other alternative treatments, which would have offered an equal potential for PE? The school is piqued enough to study it further. Using a $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, Wyatt and her colleagues at the nursing school will soon be examining the benefits of reflexology in a controlled study. — TS
Neutralize Your Emissions with SF’s DriveNeutral
Until you can afford that hybrid or set yourself up with a bitchin’ biodiesel, the next-best thing might be logging on to San Francisco-based website driveneutral.com. Headquartered in the Presidio, the service calculates your vehicle’s annual CO2 emission and then converts it into a dollar amount for you to invest “into third-party, verified, legally accountable, large-scale CO2 reduction projects and practices” somewhere on the globe. These projects include such things as renewable energy, agricultural methane disposal, and reforestation. It’s surprisingly affordable — $40 invested in one of their certified projects will keep 10,573 pounds of CO2 out of the environment, the same amount generated by a 1998 Ford Taurus driven the national average of 12,000 miles in a year. The site is the brainchild of students at the sustainability-focused MBA program at The Presidio School of Management. Their slogan? “Neutralizing climate change one car at a time.” So far, their highest profile client is progressive jazz trio Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey (jfjo.com), which offset greenhouse gases spewed during their heavy cross-country touring, including stops at Yoshi’s from their native Tulsa. “We can’t avoid touring the country doing what we love, but at least we can act now to balance out the bad effects,” says keyboardist Brian Haas. “I’m a huge fan of theirs, and I was thrilled when they called to say they’d offset their emissions through us,” says DriveNeutral Director Jason Smith. “Signing them on as our first carbon-neutral band was an honor.” In the meantime, Haas says the band is in the market for a biodiesel touring truck that they can run on French fry grease. — TS
Liquid Om
As a certified sound therapist, Kenny Mazursky has long utilized the “Om” sound from pre-1900 Himalayan singing bowls and gongs to teach meditation classes. Now he says he’s devised a way to infuse drinking water with the “Om” frequency. According to Mazursky, Liquid Om (liquidom.org) is affected at the quanta level by his infusion process, causing the water molecules to vibrate, similar to what occurs in a person’s body during a sound therapy session. “People are made up of 70 percent water, and water holds sound five times the magnitude of air; that’s why dolphins and whales can talk to each other miles apart,” says Mazursky. Still sound far out? He adds, “Studies have shown that vibration affects the crystalline structure of water and that water has the ability to ‘memorize’ frequency information.” Hmmm. In his practice, Mazursky uses the frequency of Om to help clients deal with pain, insomnia, vertigo and anxiety, and he hopes that absorbing Om through drinking water will have similar healing, harmonizing effects for the drinker. The Chicago-based company bottles in California, and uses a “proprietary six-step purification process.” — TS
School Daze
by Jim Hightower
You know what’s wrong with kids today? They’re just not getting enough advertising.
Take school. Sure, there are ads in the hallways, on classroom televisions and even in some of the textbooks. But, I ask you, what about school buses? Yeah, I know that there are ads on the outside of many buses — but, hey, the kids are on the inside. And they’re just goofing off as they ride to school in the morning and as they return home after school, letting a prime advertising opportunity go to waste.
Not for long, though. Two professional ad hucksters have had a brainstorm that they hope will blow more ads into the developing minds of school children everywhere. Calling it BusRadio, their dream is to pipe an hour-long program — including eight minutes of advertising — into the buses, which they say will be “a unique and effective way to reach the highly sought after teen and ‘tween’ market.”
Yeah, get ‘em while they’re captives in a bus and can’t get away from rank commercialism!
Well, say BusRadio promoters, our motives are not merely monetary, but also to provide a social service. They claim that BusRadio can be a behavioral nanny, that students are more likely to be quieter and follow the rules while the radio is on. And if they get a little boisterous, by gollies, the bus driver can cut off the radio to punish them. However, as one watchdog group notes, we also could keep the kids quiet “if we gave them cigarettes, but that doesn’t mean we should.”
This isn’t about providing a service, and it isn’t even about radio — it’s about using our educational system to compel children to absorb the commercial messages of corporations. Yet, BusRadio is planning to go national next year. It hopes to reach a million students, some as young as five. To find out how to help bring this runaway bus to a stop, call Commercial Alert, 503.235.8012.