Ingrid Lucia And The Flying Neutrinos

In the early 1980's Poppa Neutrino (aka David Pearlman), who was fighting for his life against an unknown illness, his wife Betsy Terrell (aka Capt. Betsy), and an extended family group which included 5 children, formed a family band and called themselves the Flying Neutrinos, first travelling throughout Mexico (they sounded pretty awful, but the Mexicans, God bless them, kept them in beans and tortillas), and later returning to their roots in New Orleans. Studying with street musicians in the birthplace of jazz, they eventually became good enough to earn a decent living, especially the two oldest kids, Ingrid Lucia and Todd Londagin, who took over the Flying Neutrinos band in 1994 and went on to highly successful careers as recording and performing artists.

On the way to the top, the family spent a good deal of time living on rafts they built of recycled junk, mobile living space that kept them out of the rent problem, and not incidentally, provided healthy living space on the water and multiple daily challenges to build strength and character.

Once the children were grown, Poppa Neutrino and Capt. Betsy went on to accomplish another of their dreams - with the help of family and friends, they built a scrap raft from the streets of New York City, the Son of Town Hall, and sailed it across the North Atlantic, with two Canadian friends, in the summers of 1997 and '98. This was the beginning of the Floating Neutrinos. The Son of Town Hall was only a trial run for their big dream, the Orphanage Raft, which was begun at the headwaters of the Mississippi River in the spring of 2000 as the Vilma B.

The Buoyant Neutrinos began when Ed Garry, one of the crew on the Atlantic crossing, set out to start his own project, the Absolute Absolution, a sailing catamaran raft, and was joined by June Donaldson, a native of Great Britain who was residing in France when the Son of Town Hall cruised through.