THE SQUARE is made for cosmic laughs. Jugglers and jackanapes, mountebanks and missionaries, charlatans and saints, revelations and rip offs contend for your attention. This summer promises to be cataclysmic in and around the Square. This article is humbly offered as an aid to the physical layout of the area- and a warning against a few of the more blatant institutional ripoffs.

But although this may mention a few things which you could do at some point in your summer, please do not look on it as a list of Things to Do. The Square is really the world's largest game board, designed for a game with no set procedures- it is equally suitable for making love, hawking wares, chalking slogans, hatching plots, and hanging out.

But the game has two sides, and the Square is not a safety zone. All around are banks and businesses, where the other team plans such things as layoffs, the rape of the environment, and the exploitation of the Third World. Their players wear blue. They probably do not like you.

Two teams have grasped the idea of the Square as Game, and they play it to the hilt. The most conspicuous is the Hare Krishna people. They have shaved heads with pigtails, wear long white robes, and chant HARE KRISHNA HARE KRISHNA KRISHNA KRISHNA HARE HARE/HARE RAMA HARE RAMA RAMA RAMA HARE HARE. They contend that this makes their lives sublime, and that it can do the same for you and me. They ask for money and distribute cards bearing the chant I have just outlined. Take a card, because it contains also an invitation to a love feast held every Sunday at their temple in Allston. Lots of free Indian food and skits explaining all about Krishna.

The second team is Process. They wear long black capes, come from London, and worship Satan. They also ask for money to further the cause, and in return they will give you some weird magazines about their beliefs. Neither of these teams matters a lot, but they play a good game of Square.

Other individuals join in the game, selling newspapers, bootleg records, pots of brown rice, stolen cameras, and dope. Some of the newspapers are very good. The Old Mole, published weekly by a group of Cambridge radicals, is probably the best. You can also buy The Black Panther, the Militant, and Broadside Free Press. The brown rice is pretty good also. Buying cameras and dope is probably not a good idea.

Stores

There are a lot of emporia along the game board. We are going to discuss clothes stores first, because I am eager to get in a word about Krackerjack's, which is the mother toadstool in the mushroom cellar of the Square.

Krackerjack's is every bad thing about youth culture and hip capitalism that you could imagine. DJs from WCBN (the local hip-rock station) slither in and out like sleek lizards, nattily attired in the latest $100 mod outfits. Everything in Krackerjack's is very expensive, and the store unconsciously parodies and shamelessly exploits every good thing the movement does.

During the Harvard strike in April, 1969, it sold strike armbands (which people were making in the Yard and passing out free) for 25 cents apiece. As I write, the store is displaying personality posters of Mao Tse-tung, Eldridge Cleaver, and other movement figures. In each poster a cunning slit has been made, and Eldridge is wearing a flowing Krackerjack's cravat, while Mao sports a pair of blue granny glasses.

It is interesting to note that Krackerjack's now has steel garage covers over its windows at night. This is probably because in the two recent riots, these windows were the most methodically and thoroughly demolished of any in the area.

You would probably save yourself a lot of money if you stayed away from Krackerjack's.

But there are a lot of places around to buy clothes, ranging from pretty expensive to pretty good. In descending order of interest:

Central War Surplus (433 Mass. Ave., in Central Square) is worth the walk. Jeans, t-shirts, and so on, are very inexpensive, and their inventory is large. You can also get mess kits, first aid kits, folding shovels, helmet liners, and gas masks there.

Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum (at Mass Ave, and Mt. Auburn St.) is a very good second-hand store, and it has a lot of bargains on new clothes. The owner is friendly and helpful. You sort of have to take pot luck there, because it's impossible to tell just what will be in at any given time.

The Coop is huge, and has everything for the young business student on the way up. Summer School students may join, which means that next November or sometime you get a check for about 5 per cent of everything you spend there. It's probably not your best bet for clothes, but they have other stuff.