Expecting to Fly A Sixties Reckoning

DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT IT FELT LIKE TO BE FIFTEEN? MARTHA TOD DUDMAN DOES.

It starts with a blue hash pipe in a shabby field and a hot, tight dance at the Mayflower Hotel, and rapidly accelerates against the kaleidoscopic backdrop of the Sixties.

Describing a time weirdly similar to today, “Expecting to Fly” recalls a conservative government embroiled in an increasingly unpopular war, racial tensions, and a generation of disillusioned young people looking for something meaningful to believe in — teenagers who, like Dudman, hurled themselves into a sea of drugs and sex they weren’t really ready for.

With the same passion and brutal honesty that she brought to her first book, “Augusta, Gone” — the story of her daughter’s troubled adolescence — Dudman re-creates her own wild ride through the turbulent Sixties, vividly recounting scenes you probably experienced yourself.

From the prim tradition of a posh girls’ school and debutante parties of Washington, D.C., to the snows of New Hampshire and the campaign for Eugene McCarthy, from living out of a knapsack in Spain to getting stoned on acid in Yellow Springs, Ohio, “Expecting to Fly” takes us on a blistering trip to a time when the only thing you couldn’t be was shocked.

Now, years later, Dudman reflects on that time and what it means: “Which was it — triumph, exploration, some important journey, or just a big stupid mistake, a total waste of time?”

You decide.