Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft live in a little green house in Noe Valley that's spilling over with books, native plants, and other reminders of the anarchistic lifestyle they have been pursuing since the Summer of Love.
Back in that action-packed summer, when sit-ins and street theater were daily events, Berg and Goldhaft were part of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and helped form the Diggers, a Haight-Ashbury community collective that took its name from a group that tried to create small egalitarian communities in England in the 17th century. In San Francisco the 20th-century Diggers handed out free food, operated the Free Store, and helped people get housing, free medical care, and education.
"I used to pick up food twice a day from wholesale produce and fish markets, take food to the Black Panthers, teach tie-dyeing, study dance and mime, and attend community meetings," Goldhaft recalls.
She believes the psychedelic era spawned the Internet, Burning Man, the environmental movement, and even the women's movement.
"We were coming out of the 1950s, an extremely repressive time. Society was very puritanical, very black-and-white," she says. "And then, of course, birth control pills became available, so we could get involved in sexual activity and not be afraid of getting pregnant. Women got involved in setting their own limits."
Recalling how she choreographed Jack Off: A Girlie Show, based on the manipulation of women in advertising, Goldhaft says, "The show explored what is a turn-on and what men would do in a darkened theater when they saw us on stage. We appeared in this fashion show in see-through plastic clothing, but it started off with a series of naked photos of us jumping around, and when the lights went up, we had flesh-colored clothes, so we were like Barbie dolls, with no nipples or pubic hair, even though we had had those in the photos."
In 1973, Goldhaft and Berg founded Planet Drum to educate people about bioregionalism, the concept that each region is a distinct area with coherent and interconnected plant and animal communities and natural systems.
"If you plant native plants in all possible places, like our sidewalk, then native insects, butterflies, and birds move in, then coyotes and foxes, maybe bobcats," Goldhaft says.
"Or a turtle like the one someone put in our garden," Berg adds as he scans the sky for birds.
Berg says he'd love to see native deer roaming and families of quail and wildlife corridors from Golden Gate Park to Potrero Hill to San Bruno Mountain.
"There is a mistaken idea of urban identity in which nature is excluded, where nature rusts things, rots things, gives you sunburn, mosquito bites, and is the enemy.... Nature is our salvation. People should have interactions with natural processes, grow food, see where water comes from and where it goes," Berg says.
Berg and Goldhaft are optimistic that people are getting closer to understanding their place in the planetary biosphere.
"Planet Drum is not protest oriented," Berg explains. "We restore natural systems and find sustainable ways to live in the bioregion where we reside. Modern technology doesn't have to be ruinous. Computers and sensors can help open and close the blinds. Instead of having humungous power plants and overbuilt sewer systems, we should make things smaller.
"It's not what we are doing but the way we are doing it. We don't use roofs to grow food or rain gutters to collect water, but we should."
To those who lived through it, the Summer of Love is a beautiful (if hazy) memory of a simpler, more idealistic time, when the future seemed theirs for the molding. For some, it marked the end of their hippie days; for others, it was the beginning.
But to Wavy Gravy, the Summer of Love was simply a way station on a long journey that has always been devoted to the power of peace and love.
Gravy, a.k.a. Hugh Romney, was a central figure in the hippie movement even before anyone knew the term, and he remains the clown prince of countercultural values, more vigorous and active in the struggle now, at age 71, than its most dedicated heads were back then.
"It's our 30th year at Camp Winnarainbow, and we're still instilling those values in children, so the beat goes on," Gravy tells the Guardian by telephone from the 700-acre compound he runs near Laytonville, which is home to his Hog Farm collective and transforms into a circus and performing arts school for underprivileged children during the summer.
What values are those? "You can't go wrong with peace and love," Gravy answers without missing a beat. He is eternally hopeful, particularly when inspired by the enthusiasm of youth. "With these kids, I get a nostalgia for the future."
Nostalgia for the future: Gravy peppers his commentary with such colorful koans, usually giving proper due to the originator (which, in this case, I failed to note). He credits his friend, the late Ken Kesey, with another mantra for his life: "I put my good where it'll do the most."
And that's something Gravy has definitely done. He's put a lot of his good into the Berkeley-based Seva Foundation ( www.seva.org ), which has parlayed Gravy's fundraising, leadership, and activism into combating poverty and disease (particularly preventable blindness) among indigenous populations around the world.
When he's not at Camp Winnarainbow or in Berkeley at the Hog Farm's urban commune, Gravy is on the road supporting benefit concerts and events of all kinds, often wearing his trademark clown suit and wielding his stuffed fish, always working to, as he says, "dissolve the line between the stage and the audience."
Gravy recognizes the self-imposed crisis now facing our imperialistic country, but he doesn't despair and focuses instead on still-vibrant expressions of people power. Yes, we're mired in another unpopular and ill-advised war, "but we did put however many millions of people in the streets against this war," he says.
The Summer of Love is a distant memory, but its spirit is more alive today than ever. "We see it in the fashions, in the diet, in the people being concerned about the environment, big-time. Al Gore even patted me on my fish," Gravy says of an event he did with the Paul Revere of climate change.
"More and more people are getting to the bottom of that second BMW and finding it wanting, and they are getting ready to reengage to help people and the planet," Gravy says. "I think there is a change going on, that we're starting to feel that shift."
In the San Francisco Mime Troupe's 1988 play Ripped van Winkle , a perplexed hippie fell asleep in 1967 and woke up 20 years later, unable to fathom how much the town had changed.
The Joan Holden who became the chief playwright for the mime troupe in 1967 could never have imagined the 2000s. She couldn't have fathomed that so many of the strides made by the New Left toward environmental and social justice would be reversed in our century.
Recalling her heady early days with the troupe, the Berkeley native who worked on more than 30 of its plays says, "It wasn't the Summer of Love for me. It was the summer of the antiwar movement." Though she did show up for the Human Be-in, you wouldn't have found Holden spacily weaving a daisy chain on Golden Gate Park's polo field on a regular basis.
Rather than joining the flower children in their quest for a chemically higher consciousness, she firmly rooted herself in the Mao text - toting politico contingent associated with the Students for a Democratic Society.
"Some of us were into peace and love. Some of us wanted to start a revolution," says the mellowed yet still revolutionary-minded dramaturge who currently lives in Bernal Heights, her home base for the past few decades. "But I never thought that we were going to change the world at the end of a barrel," she adds.
Holden got her start with the mime troupe shortly after returning from a sojourn in Paris, where the then-aspiring writer enjoyed the freewheeling expat life with troupe actor and then-husband Arthur Holden. San Francisco was where everything was happening: The underground press - with publications like the Berkeley Barb , the SF Express Times, and the Realist - was in full swing. Demonstrations against the war and protests of Napalm maker Dow Jones were pulling in thousands of newly radicalized youths. There was a great feeling of possibility. Holden took joy in being a part of this mass.
Her first gig with the troupe came when her husband recommended her to founder R.G. Davis for the job of adapting Carlo Goldoni's commedia dell'arte play L'Amante Militare (The lover turned soldier) into a Vietnam story. Holden grabbed lines straight from President Lyndon Johnson and put them into the mouth of the farce's stock character the General, much to the amusement of audiences.
Holden left the troupe in 2000 and shifted her political action to local battles. She joined the movement for the passage of Proposition L, which would have prohibited the rezoning of light-industrial areas to permit the construction of live-work condos. It lost, but the campaign helped usher in a new era of district-elected supervisors.
She returned to her first passion and took a commission from Seattle's Intiman Theatre to adapt Barbara Ehrenreich's 2001 exposé Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America into a musical, which enjoyed a successful run at the Brava Theater Center in 2004. She also adapted The Marriage of Figaro and The Pope and the Witch for the American Conservatory Theater. She's currently working on a play about migrants, with support from the Z Space Studio, and to build her story is interviewing the day workers who line 26th Street in the Mission.
Look back at the past 40 years of the San Francisco Mime Troupe's feisty and satirical plays and you'll see the progressive history of the Bay Area reflected within. For the main scribe of those plays, the best part, she says, "was seeing people perform my scenes and watching the audience laugh."
How is it possible that the chief public defender of Yolo County, located about 80 miles north of here, never actually went to college, at least not in the traditional sense?
Well, the guy was busy back in the '60s; he was a rock star.
Barry Melton walked a college campus for all of 10 weeks before dropping out in 1965. Today he presides over an office that defends 10,000 criminal cases a year.
California's state bar happened to offer a college equivalency test, which the brainy Melton passed before doing legal correspondence courses while touring with a slate of musical acts, most notably Country Joe and the Fish, of which Melton is the water-bound half.
The folk rock anti-Vietnam protesters performed with everyone from Jefferson Airplane to Iron Butterfly to Led Zeppelin. Where did the "Fish" moniker come from? Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the fiery leader of China's 20th-century Communist revolution, who once compared revolutionaries moving among the masses to fish swimming through the water. Back then the Fish and friends "were Berkeley guys ... everyone was going to think we were Communists anyway, so we figured, why not?"
Born in Brooklyn in 1947, Melton helped cofound Country Joe and the Fish around the same time he dropped out of college. The band performed regularly at both Fillmore clubs, in San Francisco and New York City's East Village.
We caught up with Melton by phone in London, where he was performing a small string of shows with more recent bandmates. But Melton's been working full-time as a public defender, handling the cases of indigent criminal suspects, for about 25 years.
He began his career in San Francisco, working in the juvenile division of the Public Defender's Office (the Youth Guidance Center was known among inmates as "You Got Caught," Melton says) before moving on to Mendocino and eventually Sacramento, where he helped with postconviction capital cases.
"Most folks can't go and wage an ordinary defense unless [they're] rich," he says. "In a typical capital case where you're accused of murder, you need a couple of million dollars to defend yourself."
Melton sees his service to the court system as merely an extension of Country Joe and the Fish's prevailing antiwar sentiments. It's another form of resistance. He's also the immediate past president of the California Association of Public Defenders, and during his tenure he lobbied Sacramento on corrections-reform issues.
"I'm very proud," he says, "of the fact that I work in an area of government hired to fight itself."
It's another Thursday night at the corner of 16th Street and Mission, and a crowd of poets, performers, homeless, and hipsters is clustered around the brightly tiled egress of the BART station. One jumps into the center of the circle to play a howling tune on his acoustic guitar. As soon as he's finished, another is instantly up, reciting an original ode, her voice straining over the sirens on the street.
It's the weekly open mic, the beating heart of street performing for many poets in the city. While the attention of some fades down the sidewalk or lowers to a clandestine beer, there's one pair of eyes behind thick, plain-framed glasses that is unabashedly locked on the performer. They belong to "Diamond" Dave Whitaker.
No matter who's onstage, Whitaker's tuned in, his lips quietly mouthing a private counterpoint, his short frame buoyed by the beat, his hands jabbing the air during dramatic moments. Whitaker is one of those rare people who are always listening, always watching, always believing that great insights could come at any moment, from the mind of any person, around the most unexpected corner.
"Cast a wide net" is the first line of his treasured credo, which he's quick to share in the scratchy jazz of his stream-of-consciousness speech. "Find a common thread. Let life flourish. Don't panic, just keep it organic."
Between performances the stocky soon-to-be septuagenarian shuffles through the crowd, greeting friends and strangers with equal ease. If San Francisco's long list of storied iconoclasts were to nominate one person to represent it on a welcoming committee, to stand in for all that is unique, amusing, and ideal about this city, 69-year-old Whitaker would be an excellent choice.
Born and raised in Minneapolis, Whitaker arrived here at age 19 in 1957 after reading Kenneth Rexroth's seminal Feb. 22, 1957, piece in the Nation that suggested something unique was going on in North Beach.
"Radical politics and poetry were coming together for the first time," Whitaker says of his arrival on the scene and his immediate friendship with the great beats. "I worked as a bike messenger by day. I was a beatnik by day and night." Back then those poets' version of an open mic was Blabbermouth Night at the Place on Grant Avenue.
Whitaker's initial involvement entailed witnessing the scene and spreading it; one of his claims to fame was passing along a copy of Woody Guthrie's Bound for Glory to a young Bob Dylan during a brief return to Minneapolis in 1961. He soon became an integral part of the Diggers and the Black Man's Free Store in the Fillmore. "I cooked and served food every day during the Summer of Love," Whitaker says. He continues to feed people through Soupstock and Food Not Bombs, and his Rock 'n' Roll Spaghetti is still a feature at the annual Rainbow Gathering.
His politics don't just involve nourishing the people with potlucks and poetry. He lobbied for district elections in the 1970s, and his sparkly nickname came from his hosting a KPOO-FM radio show, One Struggle, Many Fronts .
While many of his fellow '60s cohorts have cashed out, Whitaker is far from retiring. He attends classes at City College, where he's studying "whatever is interesting, fulfilling," and serves as vice president of cultural affairs for the Associated Students. He's the keeper of the flame of a lively local poetry scene, dreaming up new community events like "Poem Dome," an annual open mic at City Hall to celebrate National Poetry Month, and the first annual City College Spoken Word Festival, honoring 31 years of Leslie Simon's Poetry for the People. He attends the event at 16th Street and Mission each week and hosts his own open mic on the second Tuesday of every month at the Park Branch library.
"I'm surprised I'd still be on the planet in 2007, to be almost 70 and still doing it," Whitaker says of his active poetry life. "My role is kind of as an elder of the community, to help provide some of that context, lineage, history, herstory, and hipstory."
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