MENDOCINO CO., 11/8/26 — November is Mendocino County Mushroom Month, and Leslie Krongold points to two accessible events on the coast.
Krongold runs Leslie’s Accessible Walks. She’s been to the Sonoma County Mycological Association’s SOMA Camp seven times and says she’d keep going if it were more accessible.
Two nights of comedian Adam Strauss
The Mendocino Art Center is bringing Adam Strauss to the coast for two shows to mark the month.
On Thursday, Nov. 12, at 5 p.m., Strauss performs “The Cosmic Laugh” at the Art Center on Little Lake Street. It’s stand-up comedy about microdosing. The Art Center describes it as an evolving piece about psychedelic experience, mental health and the tension between vulnerability and self-protection, in which Strauss “explores what happens when profound cosmic insight collides with the realization that you still have to pay rent.”
On Sunday, Nov. 15, at 7 p.m., he performs “The Mushroom Cure” at Matheson Hall on the Mendocino High School campus. That’s the solo show Strauss wrote about one man’s attempt to cure his obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, with psychedelics. It has played across the country and overseas, won the Overall Excellence Award at the New York International Fringe Festival and Best Solo Show at the Eddy Awards for Bay Area theater. Michael Pollan, the author, called it “brilliant, hilarious, and moving.” The New York Times said Strauss “mines a great deal of laughter from disabling pain.” Jonathan Libman developed and directed the show.
How the show started
Strauss said he started doing comedy about 18 years ago, after a friend took him to a show. He’d played music and written, and he’d never known a performer. “It just sort of clicked where it’s like, oh, this is what I want to do,” he said.
The OCD came first. “I had very severe obsessive compulsive disorder, and nothing had helped,” Strauss said. “I’d been on all sorts of conventional medications. I’d seen specialists. I was in, you know, group OCD programs. I really had done everything.” He said about half of people with OCD are considered non-responders to any treatment.
In the middle of what he called a particularly intense OCD spiral, he went looking. “I turned, as I say in the show, you know, to the place people turn when they’re lost and desperate, which is Google,” he said.
He found what he said was then the only study of a psychedelic for OCD, a small pilot study at the University of Arizona that gave patients psilocybin in a lab. “I had very little experience with psychedelics, but I was desperate, so I resolved to try to cure myself,” he said. “And that’s basically the jumping-off point of the show.”
He had just started doing stand-up, and once he survived, he said, he started telling the story in comedy clubs. Audiences were engaged, he said, but it wasn’t what they were expecting. “With stand-up comedy, you know, it’s a laugh every 30 seconds or so,” he said. “There’s a lot of laughter in the show, but it’s not stand-up comedy. It’s a story, it’s true, it’s this true story.” So he took it out of the clubs, to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, then the New York Fringe, then an off-Broadway run at the Cherry Lane Theater, then The Marsh in Berkeley and San Francisco in 2017.
Pollan came to a show at The Marsh in 2018, Strauss said. Pollan tweeted about the show, found Strauss’ email on the show’s website and wrote to him, with praise and what Strauss called a little constructive criticism. The two became friends. Strauss said they’re now turning the show into a film of the live performance, with Pollan as an executive producer.
Strauss hasn’t been to Mendocino, Krongold said in an interview she did with Strauss. He lives in a New York City apartment and said New York is a poor fit for him because he loves nature. “When I was a kid, my parents thought I was going to be a park ranger,” he said. When he’s in the Bay Area for shows, he said, he hikes Mount Tamalpais or Point Reyes two or three times a week. “I’ve already been hitting up AllTrails and familiarizing myself with all the spectacular hiking and nature you have around there,” he said.
Registration and tickets for both Strauss shows are at mendocinoartcenter.org. The interview of Krongold with Strauss is at youtu.be/2YaYBLdaIwk.