Silly - reaction, silly - freaked out, and silly - comical
The 19th April has three items giving rise to various degrees of mental perceptions, from the hare-brained, to hallucinatory, to hilarious. Each event performs in its own way.
On the 19th April 1927 Mae West was prosecuted on morals charges and was sentenced to ten days imprisonment for "corrupting the morals of youth", as a result of her play Sex. Sex is a 1926 play, written by, and starring, Mae West. It was very popular for about a year before the New York Police Department raided West and her company in February 1927. They were charged with obscenity, despite the fact that 325,000 people had watched it, including members of the police department and their wives, judges of the criminal courts, and seven members of the district attorney’s staff. West was sentenced to 10 days in a workhouse on Roosevelt Island (known then as "Welfare Island") and fined $500. The resulting publicity increased her national renown.While incarcerated on Welfare Island, she dined with the warden and his wife and told reporters that she wore her silk underpants while serving time. She served eight days with two days off for good behaviour. Media attention about the case enhanced her career. Her next play, The Drag, dealt with homosexuality and was what West called one of her "comedy-dramas of life". After a series of try-outs in Connecticut and New Jersey, West announced she would open the play in New York. However, The Drag never opened on Broadway due to the Society for the Prevention of Vice vows to ban it if West attempted to stage it. West was an early supporter of the women’s liberation movement, but stated she was not a feminist. She was also a supporter of gay rights.
On the 19th April 1943, Dr Albert Hofmann performed a self-experiment to determine the true effects of LSD, intentionally ingesting 0.25 milligrams (250 micrograms) of the substance, an amount he predicted to be a threshold dose (an actual threshold dose is 20 micrograms). Less than an hour later, Hofmann experienced sudden and intense changes in perception. He asked his laboratory assistant to escort him home and, as use of motor vehicles was prohibited because of wartime restrictions, they had to make the journey on a bicycle. On the way, Hofmann’s condition rapidly deteriorated as he struggled with feelings of anxiety, alternating in his beliefs that the next-door neighbour was a malevolent witch, that he was going insane, and that the LSD had poisoned him. When the house doctor arrived, however, he could detect no physical abnormalities, save for a pair of incredibly dilated pupils. Hofmann was reassured, and soon his terror began to give way to a sense of good fortune and enjoyment, as he later wrote..."... little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colours and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in coloured fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux ..."
The events of the first LSD trip, now known as “Bicycle Day”, after the bicycle ride home, proved to Hofmann that he had indeed made a significant discovery: a psychoactive substance with extraordinary potency, capable of causing significant shifts of consciousness in incredibly low doses. Hofmann foresaw the drug as a powerful psychiatric tool; because of its intense and introspective nature, he couldn’t imagine anyone using it recreationally. Bicycle day is increasingly observed in psychedelic communities as a day to celebrate the discovery of LSD.
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| Groening |
On the 19th April 1987 The Simpsons premiered as a short cartoon on Tracey Ullman Show. The family was conceived by Matt Groening shortly before a pitch for a series of animated shorts with the producer James L. Brooks. Groening created a dysfunctional family and named the characters after members of his own family, substituting Bart for his own name. The shorts became a part of The Tracey Ullman Show on 19th April 1987. After a three-season run, the sketch was developed into a half-hour prime time show and was an early hit for Fox, becoming the network's first series to land in the Top 30 ratings in a season (1989–1990).
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