Live the Dream

Founded in 1987 by Terry Brussel and Brian Gitt

Based on the philosophy of Family Synergy,

Founded 1971 by Hy Levy and Pat LaFollette

THE BEGINNINGS OF SYNERGY:

Multiply Committed Relationships, Group Living and Group Marriage

Excerpt from Fifty Years of Polyamory In America: A Guided Tour of a Growing Movement

by Glen Olson and Terry Brussel-Rogers

Synergy-Noun: the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects. (combined: Free Merriam-Webster online/Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, 1978)

Hy Levy and his wife Joyce were looking for something different. An engineer in his thirties, he recalls he and his wife were not looking to join a commune to make a political statement about planetary resources or create a model for co-operative living ‒ things that others were looking for. He was actually inspired by the utopian novels of Robert Rimmer (The Harrad Experiment, Proposition 31), an author who proposed that group marriage, built of couples finding other couples and marrying them, could work and be a powerful and joyful lifestyle.

He recalls that in the late 1960’s, early 1970’s, many utopian groups were trying to form, some advocating every form of sexual freedom, but after attending meetings put on by numerous groups, he and his wife realized they were looking for something else. They already had two small children and they were not teenagers trying to change the world, they were people looking to enrich their lives and the lives of others they cared about.

“It was very hard to meet people,” he says, “the only way to contact other like-minded people was to put an ad in the LA Free Press and wait for someone to answer it, or answer someone else’s ad.”

Eventually, after answering a large number of ads and putting in one of their own, they met Pat and Ann LaFollette. Hy remembers, “We met each other, we liked each other, in fact Pat and I got along fabulously well.” The LaFollettes had also read Robert Rimmer and were looking for the same things the Levys were.

A deep friendship developed. It became clear that the two couples, though looking for the same thing, were not quite the right mix to build a marriage together, so they went as a foursome to a number of discussion groups on communes.

About that adventure Hy states, “We blew people away because all they wanted to talk about is who takes out the garbage, or how to decide who takes out the garbage ‒ and we wanted to talk about being in a place where people cared about each other. The reason for being there was not political or economic, it was to live with someone you cared for… We ended up getting attacked a lot, because our views were so dissimilar to those of the rest of the room.”

The men were so dismayed at the reception they were getting they decided to put in an ad of their own, advertising a meeting to discuss the philosophies of Robert Rimmer. The meeting drew a group of about a dozen people and was supposed to be about three hours long.

But the idea caught fire. At the end of the discussion period no one was ready to leave so they adjured to a local restaurant for dinner and returned to continue the discussion.

Sometime late in the evening they decided that they should do more than just talk about the ideas of Robert Rimmer, it was time to do something about it. So they formed a steering committee, composed of everyone who was at the meeting, and resolved to go forward. Of course, the group had no name, a problem which would need a solution sooner than they realized.

One of the new steering committee members mentioned that Robert Rimmer would be in town the following month, giving a talk at a convention. He proposed they attend the convention to hear Rimmer speak ‒ and to advertise their existence to any like-minded people.

Now came the problem: they had a group, what to call it? In trying to define what they were looking for Pat LaFollette and Hy Levy had often stated they were looking to build a “synergy” in their lives, create stronger, vital relationships based on their marriages, and to provide a stronger family experience for the adults AND the children.

It hit Hy, and perhaps Pat also at the same time, that they were talking about Family. Obviously, the organization should be called Family Synergy. Later they would invent the term “expanded family” (like the extended family of Grandma, Grandpa, Mom, Dad, their kids and maybe some Aunts and Uncles with their kids) to denote those adults and children that you spent a lot of time with and did family activities with, who were family, but who did not happen to be related to you by blood.

The Levys and the LaFollettes attended that convention the following month and met Robert Rimmer. They remember finding a way to get invited up on stage with him and made their announcement. Pat recalls, “At that time I was an artist and had a huge artists loft in the skid row area of Los Angeles. It was four or five thousand feet. We held the next meeting there just in case we got a good turnout.”

In fact, fifty or sixty people showed up, and Family Synergy was in business.

In 1987, Live the Dream was formed as a spin-off of the Family Synergy special interest group Explore, Come Live with Us. The organizations were apart and then together again until Family Synergy’s 40^th Anniversary Reunion, at which point Terry Brussel-Rogers declared her intent to continue Family Synergy as Live the Dream. How did that happen and how is Live the Dream continuing to carry out the original vision of the founders of Family Synergy?