Dawn was born into a lower-middle-class reform Jewish family in Chicago during the 1950s. A precocious child raised in a rental apartment til 11 years old, a block from Lake Michigan. With a nose for adventure, unstoppable energy, and an incurable sense of curiosity, she develops an undeniable urge to grow up faster. The 1960’s ushers in a new era of life with the Hippie movement as well as a physical move when her father is finally able to buy a home in a nicer Jewish neighborhood.

Her exposure to another class of life coincides with her body transforming into womanhood. Friends arise from the fringes of this society and further afield. All things tabu become attractive, especially Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll. She makes even more friends with an older crowd while out exploring all the Hippie haunts in the city. One day Dawn meets the Hippie man of her dreams, and then he’s gone.

At sixteen in the summer of 1972, she initiates a journey to seek deeper meaning in life, and maybe that man who vanished. Hitchhiking to Colorado, then San Francisco she finds him in the heart of the Sunset Strip at The Source Family Restaurant and Commune, becomes Galaxy the Aquarian, and one of Father Yod’s 13 wives. The family moves to Hawaii in a quest for a utopian lifestyle only to lose it all during a tragedy they could not survive, and the Source Family dissolves. She finds herself caught up in the drug-fueled latter ‘70s. Everything she learned that made her life right disintegrates. Finally, she discovers her personal power after a crash and burn phoenix-like resurrection.