 Born Joshua Goldfarb in December 1950 to Dr. Mortimer, and Shirley Goldfarb residing in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. The Goldfarbs moved from South Shore to Glencoe, IL in 1966, when Mort started his highly successful cosmetic surgery practice in an upscale medical building in Highland Park, IL. By the time Josh reached his Senior year at New Trier High School, he had distinguished himself as a connoisseur of electric blues music and smoke. Along with his next door neighbor, Mike Bloomfield, Josh made frequent trips to the South Side’s famed Blues clubs for weekend adventures, In the fall of 1968 Josh started college at Washington University in St. Louis. It was in the dorms of Wash- U that Josh became Jupiter, so named by his new friends, after he took them on daily trips to outer space. By December of 1968 it was time for Josh to leave St. Louis, as he had the bad luck of having his picture taken by an FBI agent while setting fire to the campus ROTC building during an anti-war “demonstration”. Now on the run, Jupiter ended up in Nederland, Colorado, a small town nestled in the mountain above Boulder, Colorado. He soon landed a job at an organic produce store where his primary role was growing bean sprouts. Then after only 2 days on the job, disaster struck. Here’s what happened, in Jupiter’s own words… ” The Unfortunate Bean Sprout Incident…Yeah, the sprouts were growing really good, and I was eating a lot of them, and the room was small with no ventilation, and they give you , you know, gas, and I spent hour after hour in that little room, and I guess the gas built up in there and when the sun went down and I screwed the lightbulb in, well, the place just BLEW UP!” Aside from being asked to leave the store, Jupiter was hit in his left eye by a piece of flaming beansprout. “ That didn’t feel good man”. As luck would have it, Jupiter was walking back to the cabin he was crashing in, when he was offered a ride to Claremont California by a group of girls driving a VW micro bus out to the coast. They arrived in Claremont on Friday night and saw hoards of kids lining up for a Grateful Dead show. Jupiter didn’t have any money for a ticket, so he asked a roadie walking by if he could help out in exchange for a ticket. The roadie, impressed that Jupiter wasn’t another slacker doing the “ I need a Miracle thing”, set Jupiter up at the foot of the stage with an overhead projector, and told him to make cool patterns with the colored liquids during the show. After the show Jerry, came over to Jupiter and offered him a permanent gig making cool patterns at all the shows. Jupiter’s payment was to be free tickets to the Dead shows. On Tuesday Jupiter woke up and heard on the radio that Phish was breaking up. In Jupiter’s words..” This has been a bad week man. First Jerry dies, then Phish breaks up. All in one week!” Jupiter is presently managing the Swatch Kiosk in terminal C at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. |