Indeterminacy 163

Mr. Ralph Ferrara drives a Studebaker Lark
which is mashed at both ends.
Sometimes the car requires to be
pushed in order to run. One
Sunday when the mushroom class met at
10:00 A.M. at Suffern, Mr. Ferrara
didn’t arrive. Next week he
told me he’d arrived late, gone
to Sloatsburg, gathered a few
mushrooms, gone home,
cooked dinner, and two of his
guests were immediately ill but not
seriously. At the last
mushroom field trip, November
1, 1959, we ended at my
house, drank some stone fences,
and ate some Cortinarius
alboviolaceous that Lois Long cooked.
She said to Ralph Ferrara,
“Mr. Cage says that there’s
nothing like a little mushroom poisoning
to make people be on time.” He
said, “Oh, yes.
I’m always first in the parking lot.”

- John Cage

Indeterminacy 111

Lois Long, Esther Dam, Ralph Ferrara,
and I were in the Haverstraw cemetery gathering
Tricholoma personatum. An elderly lady with
a hat on, standing by while a man she was with
was tending a grave, happened to notice us.
She called out, asking what we were doing
there. We said we were looking for mushrooms.
Her voice rose slightly as she asked whether
Lois Long’s Volkswagen which was parked nearby
belonged to one of us. The next thing she
asked, her voice sharp-edged, was whether
we had loved ones buried there. Hearing no
one of us did, she spoke firmly and loudly.
“Well, I don’t like it; and I don’t
think any one else would like it. If the
mushrooms grow here, let them!” Meanwhile
the gentleman with her paid no attention.
He just went on doing what he was doing.
And we, walking dutifully toward the little
car, passed by quantities of our favorite
mushrooms, making not the slightest attempt
to pick them. As we drove off the woman
was yelling. “Get out!” she
screamed, “get out and never come back!”

- John Cage