[Vision2020] A Different Romney, a Different Time . . .

[deb]

Thanks, Tom! Sometimes it is difficult to remember mindfullness, generosity, 
and that small steps create enormous benefits. I spent some of my morning 
collecting donations for the food banks, feeling sad that the need in our 
community is still so huge and that so many obviously NOT NEEDY people 
turned up their nose as they walked past... Some of the most generous told 
me they had been in situations of need, and wanted to pass along a blessing. 
Some of those looked like they could still use a helping hand (driving 25 
year old cars, while the Hummer owner flipped me the bird).
Reading this reminded me that the need is always/has always been there, and 
that a few hours of time is a drop in the bucket of the healing needed in 
our world.
Food stamps, basic health provisions, assistance to the mentally ill and 
disabled, funding for the public school system's free lunch programs, and 
help for our elders are under attack by politicians supported by those whose 
wealth and priveledge insulates them from reality, aided and abetted by 
those who are easily frightened by "otherness".

How are we different than any third world country whose citizens are in 
need? We are not. We as a nation have abrogated our moral and ethical 
responsibility in favor of instant profits, graft disguised as "free 
market", and the power of unearned/inherited  wealth to fuel political 
campaigns based on fear mongering and lies.

Wavy Gravy .....how simple it is when you stop believing the BS imposed by 
huge and greedy corporations/companies/banks/political parties.....just do 
some good in the world.
Debi R-S

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tom Hansen" <thansen at moscow.com>
To: "Moscow Vision 2020" <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Sent: Saturday, August 04, 2012 5:34 PM
Subject: [Vision2020] A Different Romney, a Different Time . . .


> Wavy Gravy (Hugh Romney) at Woodstock
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTIp9ABMbpY
>
> Courtesy of Wavy Gravy's bio at:
>
> http://www.wavygravy.net/bio/biography.html
>
> ------------------------------------
>
>


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Wavy Gravy, Hugh Romney, who is fast approaching official geezerhood, is 
more active and more effective in the world then he was decades ago. Back 
then when still known as Hugh Romney he stood on the stage of the original 
Woodstock concert and announced...." What we have in mind is breakfast in 
bed for 400,000!" He was at Woodstock as a member of an 
entertainment/activist commune known as the Hog Farm. Today, the Hog Farm 
still exists, collectively owning and operating the 700-acre Black Oak Ranch 
and hosting the annual Pig-Nic. And Wavy lives a third of the year in a 
Berkeley Hog Farm urban outpost, a big communal house he refers to as 
"hippie Hyannisport" But Mr. Gravy (as he's known to readers of the New York 
Times) has expanded his activities over the past two-and-a-half decades to 
include codirectorship (with his wife, Jahanara) of Camp Winnarainbow, a 
performing arts program for children which takes over the Hog Farm for 10 
weeks every summer, and the organization of all-star rock concerts to raise 
money for a variety of environmental, progressive, political, and charitable 
causes, most notably Seva, a foundation he cofounded in 1978, initially to 
combat preventable and curable blindness in the Third World.
He may be best known to millions as a cosmic cut-up and the inspiration for 
a Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavor â?" "I am an activist clown and former 
frozen dessert," he says â?" but it is because of his good work on behalf of 
the planet and its least fortunate residents that Wavy Gravy has achieved 
his own brand of sainthood. His friend and satirist Paul Krassner has called 
him "the illegitimate son of Harpo Marx and Mother Teresa." Wavy says, "Some 
people tell me I'm a saint, I tell them I'm Saint Misbehavin'."

"I'm sure that some people could regard Wavy Gravy as a leftover from the 
'60s crowd," says James O'Dea, executive director of Seva, upon whose board 
of directors Wavy sits along with a host of MDs and PhDs. "After all, here 
is this guy who is still hanging out with tie-dyes and seems lost in the 
'60s. But he really took the '60s idealism and made it his life, and 
practiced it. We live in a time when, in some ways, there has been a certain 
unscrupulous use of morality and family values and official religion and 
righteousness in the public domain. What a remarkable contrast to somebody 
who spends the summer with inner city kids and the kids of homeless people, 
teaching them circus performing arts. He is your board member who is always 
there, who comes to every event, and who is helping you raise money for the 
'eyeballs' in India, as he says. He is clearly a person who does his own 
inner spiritual work in a very persistent way and then matches it with his 
walk in the world."

Indeed, when you spend any stretch of time with Wavy Gravy, strolling around 
the Hog Farm during the Pig-Nic, hanging out with him at his "hippie 
Hyannisport" in Berkeley, observing him in action at a public function â?" 
you quickly discover that the man with the rubbery face and ever-changing 
costume is a walking public service announcement for positive social change 
and compassion. During an exploration of the Pig-Nic's "backstage" area, 
which encompasses a meadow with a labyrinth based on an ancient pagan model, 
a lovely wooded creek, and the magnificent oak grove where the Camp 
Winnarainbow teepees are pitched, the Balinese gongs of Berkeley's Gamelan 
Sekar Jaya are ringing through the trees. How many people does he think have 
migrated to Laytonville for the weekend? "I don't know, count the legs and 
divide by two," he says. Countless campers, coworkers, and admirers shout 
Wavy's name or greet him with "Hi, Boss," a title Wavy just as quickly 
bestows on others.

As Wavy carries a bucket of water from the creek to quench the thirst of the 
flowers in the labyrinth, it is boggling to imagine the paths he has trodden 
in his six decades on the planet: As a child growing up in Princeton, New 
Jersey (he was born in East Greenbush, New York), he took walks around the 
block with Albert Einstein; when he was poetry director at the Gaslight Cafe 
on MacDougal Street in New York City during the early 1960s, introducing 
"jazz and poetry" to Greenwich Village, Marlene Dietrich gave him a book of 
Rilke poems, and Bob Dylan shared his room upstairs, writing the first draft 
of "A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall" on his typewriter; when, still as Hugh 
Romney, he became a traveling monologist, "talking about weird stuff that 
had happened to me," he opened shows for John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, 
Peter, Paul & Mary, and Ian & Sylvia, and organized the Phantom Cabaret with 
Tiny Tim and Moondog; when Lenny Bruce was his manager, the infamous 
stand-up comic gave the then Al Dente and future Wavy Gravy a yarmulke to 
sew inside a cowboy hat that had belonged to Hollywood western star Tom Mix 
â?" "So I could say 'Howdy Goyim!" He also earned a part in the San 
Francisco improvisational group The Committee and later taught improvisation 
to neurologically handicapped kids in Pasadena.

In 1965, when he and his wife (then known as Bonnie Jean) were living in a 
one-room cabin in Sunland, California outside Los Angeles, they and 40 of 
their closest friends in the Grateful Dead and the Merry Pranksters (Kesey 
was on the lam in Mexico at the time) posed for a photograph for a Life 
magazine cover. "The landlord went ballistic," Wavy recalls, "and we were 
bummed for about an hour and a half until a neighbor came by and said, 'Old 
Saul up on that mountain had a stroke and they need somebody to slop them 
hogs!â?T So we were given a mountain top rent-free for slopping 45 hogs." 
Thus was born the Hog Farm, soon to hit the road in buses purchased with 
money earned as extras in Otto Preminger's Skidoo, presenting the free "Hog 
Farm and Friends in Open Celebration" show all over the country.

And all that took place before Woodstock made Wavyâ?Ts raspy voice 
recognizable to millions; well before he wrote two books: The Hog Farm and 
Friends (1974) and Something Good For A Change: Random Notes On Peace Thru 
Living (1992); before he started campaigning on behalf of Nobody for 
President ("Nobody's Perfect, Nobody Keeps All Promises, Nobody Should Have 
That Much Power"); and before Gravy splashed all over the rock-and-roll 
milieu, becoming bosom buddies with everyone from veterans Jackson Browne 
and Crosby, Stills & Nash to neo-punksters Green Day (after acting as an 
emcee at Woodstock 2).

But celebrity, while crucial to his fund-raising efforts, seems tangential 
to the essence of Wavy's work. Back in Berkeley, on a hot September morning, 
he waddles up to his corner bedroom, a psychedelic cave in which every inch 
of wall space is festooned with posters, photographs, mandalas, banners, and 
bumper stickers. Every shelf, nook, and cranny is crowded with books, beads, 
videotapes, Buddha figures, crystals, tetrahedrons, incense, Mickey Mouse 
and Goofy figurines, antlers, wind-up teeth, and empty soda pop cans. A pair 
of oversized clown shoes appear to be crawling out of one of the canvas bags 
on the floor. Wavy's lair feels like a cross between a tree house and a New 
Age/kitsch shrine to the bard of Woodstock himself.

Wearing shorts and athletic shoes, Wavy settles back on his bed for a 
two-hour conversation. His short-sleeved shirt is unbuttoned and he dreamily 
strokes his ample belly as he talks. He looks like nothing less than a 
reclining Buddha disguised as a counterculture tourist as he waxes 
rhapsodically through stream-of-consciousness segues about his life's work. 
Topic number one, dearest to his heart and freshest in his memory because he 
has just returned from his annual summer sojourn at the Black Oak Ranch, is 
Camp Winnarainbow.

"We just finished our 24th year," he begins. "It originally started as day 
care for Sufi kids. I thought it unjust that parents should be penalized 
spiritually, not being able to meditate and stuff, because they had kids. So 
I said 'Give me all your kids,' and we concocted this little circus arts day 
care. We discovered that perhaps the kids would be better off without the 
parents and the parents would be better off without the kids, so we rented 
the next camp down the road, which was maybe two miles away, and turned it 
into an overnight camp." A decade or so ago, the Hog Farm acquired its 
permanent country land outside Laytonville. "I knew instantly it was ideal 
for our camp," Wavy says. In addition to the oak grove for camping, the Farm 
boasts its own lake (Lake Veronica with a raft named George) and a 350-foot 
water slide from Marine World.

Each summer, Camp Winnarainbow conducts four two-week sessions for kids, a 
one-week introductory session for seven-year-old novices, and a one-week 
session for grownups. Volunteer teachers share such skills as juggling, 
unicycling, tightrope walking, and trapeze, as well as music and art. 
"Grownup camp is just like kids' camp," Wavy explains, "except you get to 
stay up late and you don't have to brush your teeth. We're not trying to 
turn out little professional actors or circus stars, although it does 
happen. What we're really into is producing universal human beings who can 
deal with anything that comes down the pike with some style and grace. We've 
been pretty darn successful at that. A lot of the kids who are running the 
camp now started as campers when they were seven.They can usually do it on a 
unicycle while juggling three balls. We curry both hemispheres of the E 
brain. In school, kids learn numbers and letters; we teach timing and 
balance, which I think is equally important â?" without competition, except 
with yourself."

Camp Winnarainbow's concept of practice embraces so much more than physical 
skills. Mornings begin with Wavy reading from something like the Tao Te 
Ching or Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, and then the 
kids choose between high-intensity aerobics or yoga for their warm-ups. 
"I've also in the last five years discovered that kids will do anything if 
they can stay up later than other kids, even sit with a straight back and 
watch their breath. So we instituted WISE Gaias. WISE is Winnarainbow Inner 
Space Exploration. Three or four years ago we created a labyrinth for Jose 
Arguellesâ?Ts Dreamspell ceremony. They leave their problems at the center 
of the labyrinth and come out pretty clean."

Thanks to royalties from the Ben & Jerry's Wavy Gravy ice cream flavor and 
grants from the Grateful Dead's Rex Foundation, Winnarainbow is able to 
provide camp scholarships for homeless children from the Bay Area and Native 
American kids from a reservation in South Dakota. That assures what Wavy 
calls "a little diverse miniworld."

Not long after the founding of Camp Winnarainbow, Wavy found another way of 
working with kids. Rather, it found him. Some doctors at Children's Hospital 
in Oakland had read about all this hippie do-gooder work in the Oakland 
Tribune, and they stopped by my house and asked if I would come entertain 
the kids." Still in deep pain from his third spinal surgery and "bouncing on 
the bottom," as he puts it, Wavy figured he had nothing to lose. "On my way 
out the door, somebody handed me a rubber nose. Without it I could have 
struck out completely. With it I was able to move outside my own bummer and 
make little kids laugh. I thought I had troubles 'til I eyeballed some of 
those kids!"

Wavy continued to visit kids at the hospital on almost a daily basis for 
seven years. "Then I went on a tour and came back and they wouldn't let me 
in anymore. It was quite a blow. I still don't know why, and nobody has been 
able to find out, but I guess somebody on the board didn't want this hippie 
freak coming in there." Wavy simply transferred his efforts to the 
Children's Cancer Research Institute in San Francisco. In his book Something 
Good for a Change, he tells the story of 11-year-old Billy, who had lost his 
hair to chemotherapy. Wavy had covered Billy's head with white clown makeup 
when Billy's little sister came up with the idea of showing a movie on 
Billy's smooth pate. "Could we, Wavy Gravy?" Billy asked. "Could we please 
show Godzilla on my head?"

"There was no way I could deny such a bizarre and heartfelt request," Wavy 
concludes. "So there we all were, sitting around eating popcorn and watching 
Godzilla on Billy's head."

Of course, Wavy learned many of his strategies, which combine fun and 
survival, at Woodstock.. The Hog Farm, the "mobile, hallucination-extended 
family," was on the road on the East Coast in '68 and '69, and was holed up 
in a big loft on New York's East Side, when Woodstock Ventures made a 
proposition. "One day this guy showed up looking like Allen Ginsberg on a 
Dick Gregory diet with an attaché case," Wavy recalls, "and he asked us 
'How would you like to do this music festival in New York state?â?T The Hog 
Farm had just rented land in Llano near Black Mesa, New Mexico, and the 
commune was just about to split the New York scene and settle in Llano. He 
said, 'We'll fly you in on an Astrojet.â?T We just figured he was one toke 
over the line, went back to New Mexico, and thought nothing of it. So we're 
celebrating the summer solstice in Llano, and this guy shows up with one of 
those aluminum rock-and-roll valises full of 'linear overlay,' and an 
Astrojet with room for 85 hippies and 15 Indians."

Recruited to build fire pits and fire trails around the festival grounds, 
the Hog Farm convinced the promoter! to let them set up a free kitchen, as 
well. When they stepped off the plane at Kennedy Airport, the Hog Farmers 
were met by the world press and told that they had been assigned the task of 
doing security at Woodstock, too. "I said, 'My god, they made us the cops,"' 
Wavy recalls. "And I said, 'Well, do you feel secure?â?T The guy said, 
â?~Yeah.â?T I said, 'See, it's working already.â?T That's when he said. What 
are you going to use for crowd control?' I said, 'Cream pies and seltzer 
bottles,' and they all wrote it down and I thought, 'The power of 
manipulating the media, ah ha!"'

The Hog Farmers' finest hour came with the rains that swamped Max Yasgur's 
farm and threatened to turn the hippie dream into a National Guard 
nightmare. "The weather turned Woodstock into a national disaster area," 
Wavy continues, "and we had a chance to show the world how it would be if we 
ran the show, so we pulled ourselves up by our collective bootstraps and 
were amazing â?" by surrendering ourselves to this interesting energy that 
enabled us to work days without sleep and intuitively pull off stuff that we 
couldn't have thought about in our wildest dreams. And the minute we thought 
that it was us doing it, we'd fall on our butt in the mud. So I think that 
the universe was acting out these archetypes. I've puzzled over it for 
decades, and that's the best I can come up with, that there was this amazing 
energy that you could surrender to, and it would move you."

Shortly after Woodstock, the Hog Farmers helped keep the peace between the 
cowboys and the hippies at the Texas Pop Festival, where blues giant B. B. 
King gave Wavy Gravy his name. "It's worked pretty well through my life," he 
says, "except with telephone operators â?" I have to say 'Gravy, first 
initial W."

Another great Hog Farm adventure set the stage for Wavy's participation in 
the founding of Seva. Recruited by San Francisco underground radio pioneer 
Tom Donahue and Warner Brothers Records to travel around the country and be 
filmed for a movie called Cruising for Burgers, later renamed Medicine Ball 
Caravan, the Farmers bused themselves across America, setting up stages for 
mainstream rock and rollers. After one last concert with Pink Floyd in 
Bishopsbourne, England, the Farmers pooled their movie pay and some funds 
raised for them from a benefit staged by a London commune and continued 
their trek across Europe. "It was around the time of the great Pakistani 
flood," Wavy remembers, "and relief was pouring in so very, very slow. There 
was a line of Gandhi's that hit me at that time, it was something like, 'If 
God should appear to starving people, God would not dare to appear in any 
form other than food.â?T We'd had so much attention from that free kitchen 
at Woodstock, we thought if we were in Pakistan with any kind of food, we 
could embarrass the large governments, and they would speed up the food 
relief. Then the Indo-Pakistani war broke out, and we hung a left into 
K-K-K-Kathmandu, distributing food and medical supplies to Tibetan refugee 
camps as we traveled. We fixed leaky roofs with rolls of plastic and built a 
playground in Kathmandu for impoverished kids. We also saw a tremendous 
number of blind people in Nepal."

With locally run sight programs in India, Nepal, and Tibet, Seva provides 
more than 80,000 eye surgeries a year. It also establishes partnership in 
Native American communities to tackle the rising epidemic of diabetes, 
supports work for sustainable agriculture in Chiapas, Mexico, and monitors 
violence against refugees of the Guatemalan civil war. "What we do is find 
someone who is a blazing, shining example of doing a particular piece of 
service, and we just back them hook, line, and sinker," Wavy says of 
Sevaâ?Ts strategy, "sometimes providing the flashlight to help them find the 
light switch.

According to Wavy, his commitment to the kind of work he does was indeed a 
product of the â?~60s. "Thatâ?Ts when I knew this thing was real," he says, 
"that it was the only game in town and I wanted to go to work for it, 
whatever it was. There is a wonderful chapter in The Wind In The Willows, 
where the mole and the rat rescue this little baby otter who was actually 
being protected at the moment by the god Pan. Of course the otterâ?Ts 
parents were beside themselves and all, and they saw Pan and they worshipped 
him, and he gave them the best gift of the gods, which was to sprinkle 
forgetfulness upon them so they wouldnâ?Tt be tortured with the memory of 
that amazement. I could have used a little of that, because Iâ?Tm always 
looking for that mega-, ultra-divine lick. Itâ?Ts like the cosmic carrot 
that keeps me in the movie. I began my study of comparative religion and 
service out of lust for that stuff. Itâ?Ts another kind of greed. Once you 
realize the interconnectedness of all stuff, thereâ?Ts no going back. I have 
an old Gravy line, â?~We are all the same person trying to shake hands with 
our self.â?T Remember that the next time you say, â?~pass the gravy.â?T"

---------------

Wavy Gravy (Hugh Romney) then . . .




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> . . . and now . . .
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>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Seeya round town, Moscow.
>
> Tom Hansen
> Moscow, Idaho
>
> "If not us, who?
> If not now, when?"
>
> - Unknown
>


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