My encounters with Wavy Gravy, Counter-Culture Clown and Psychedelic Relic.

For any counter-culture relics out there, I can quickly contextualize my experience at Desiderata Community School by pointing out that Wavy Gravy was our first commencement speaker.  If you are an old hippie like me, you will remember him as the guy in the Woodstock movie who was helping people on bad acid trips to get grounded in some good karma. His was the voice announcing over the loud speaker, "Don't take the Brown Acid. The Brown Acid is bad acid."

Hugh Romney, alias Wavy Gravy, was a friend of the school. He came to Sacramento from the Hog Farm commune in Berkeley to give a commencement address at our first big graduation ceremony. Yes, he brought green plastic garbage cans, and one of them contained freshly made electric Kool-Aid. Yes, I said electric, but Wavy never said it. Everyone thought it had LSD in it, but the trips people had might have been a party-wide placebo effect, since everyone knew that Wavy had provided the LSD-laced Kool-Aid for the infamous Acid Tests of the Merry Pranksters. Another green plastic garbage pail contained small toys, make-up, wigs, hats, noisemakers, bubble juice and bubble wands. Soon the air was filled with large shining globes of soapy surface tension, refracting light, making brief rainbows that floated on the spring breeze and popped into other dimensions. In other words, the atmosphere was very conducive to psychosomatic psychedelic visuals.

    The graduation ceremony took place at the home of the richest kid who had ever attended Desiderata. He dressed like a cowboy and hadn’t been a student there long, so I was not expecting his parents to be quite so wealthy. Since our tuition was on a sliding scale according to income, this family was a major contributor to the cause. At first, the group of about 25 hippies who descended on the mansion’s back yard felt restrained in such an upscale environment. Enter Wavy Gravy in his clown persona with the big green plastic garbage cans. I am really not sure if the older, more conservative adults from the student host’s family knew what was in the Kool-Aid, but I saw the well-dressed matriarch drinking some. About two hours later, after the ceremony, this same woman was getting her face painted and carrying a bubble wand.

Wavy’s speech included a song we all sang together to the accompaniment of his one-stringed “moon-lute.” He wrote it of course, but said it was an old hippie folk tune called “Basic Human Needs” …something about doing deeds to meet basic human needs from down in the garden of your heart.

     Wavy was not like any clown I had ever met. He was clever with words; for example, his “Nobody for President!” campaign, which was an easy formula: "Nobody can balance the budget! Nobody can end the war!” He liked sleight of hand and used it together with visual puns and sight gags with props.

He stayed with the school for a few days after graduation and I had the chance to I tell him I was interested in clowns, especially historical ones, like Grock and Grimaldi and the Commedia dell’ Arte.

            He asked me with some disbelief, “How do you know about Grock?”

            “I read about him in a book on clowns at the library. Not enough pictures.”

 Remember: There was no Internet in the 70s. If you wanted to do research there was the card catalog at the library…. and that was it. After discussing Grock and his musical clowning, Wavy loaned me his copy of a book called “The Fool and His Scepter” by William Willeford. It was by today’s academic standards an old-fashioned history and Jungian analysis of the Fool archetype. I am not sure when the “Killer Clown” motif appeared in popular culture, but this was before images of the circus "joey" or "Auguste" clown had been used in horror films as a symbol of unexpected evil, evolving by repetition into the clown as an expected evil, a subject of phobias and nightmares. In the 1970s I was lucky to be able to see a parade of great performing clowns like Geoff Hoyle, Mary Winegarden, Melinda Marsh, Larry Pisoni, Bill Irwin, Peggy Snider, Cecil MacKinnon, Gypsy Snider, and others, all passing through the west coast’s Pickle Family Circus. Nobody was making jokes about wasting mimes yet. Clowns and mimes had a more numinous, archetypal quality in the late 60s/early 70s, and the book Wavy loaned me was evidence of it.

A few months later, I visited Wavy, who was in the hospital. I tried to return his book. He said, “Keep it.”  I thought it might be because he was dying. He has cheated death several times since then and is still going. 

Many years later I noticed that Wavy was doing a “book signing” at the Broadway Tower Books in Sacramento. His book was about his free circus camps for kids. The program taught basic clowning and tumbling skills to disadvantaged inner-city boys and girls. I wanted to return his long lost clown book to him, hoping that that would jog his memory of me. I pulled out the book and said,

“I think this is yours.”

“You’re the kid who has my Fool and His Scepter!”

“I tried to return it to you when you were sick, but you said to keep it.”

“That’s probably because I thought I was going to die before I could read it again. But hey, I didn’t. I didn't die the last few times I almost died, either."

“Glad to hear that. I bought a copy of your book for you to sign.”

Wavy pulled out  his new book and said, “No, YOU sign MY book. This is my book signing.”

I laughed. This was Clown logic. Mullah Naz Rudin logic. Wise Men of Chelm logic. Marx Brothers logic. I felt this was an opening to tell Wavy something rather sentimental and fragile. I tried to get it out as economically as possible.

“I need to tell you something Wavy. My earliest memory of the circus is coming out of the show into the lobby area when I was less than 5. Kids were crowding around clowns who were stationed at each exit. I wanted to see a clown up close too, and said, “Why don’t I get to see a clown?” or something to that effect. What I remember my parents saying to me makes no sense, and they have no memory of giving me this apparently original bit of mythology. 

In my four-year-old mind, my parents told me, "There is a clown for every kid in the world, but your clown isn't here. You may not ever meet him, but he’s your clown."

 They were probably telling me something like “There aren’t enough clowns here to go around. All the clowns aren’t here." So, as a four-year-old I figured my clown was just somewhere else. But because of you, I got to meet mine after all.” 

As I said this I felt embarrassed. Not only was this a sentimental story, but I wasn’t sure whether it made me look imaginative or obsessive.

Wavy didn’t even acknowledge what I said. He thanked me for returning his copy of the Fool and His Scepter.  Disappointed, I turned to go. I had only taken a few steps when Wavy called out as if he were a carnival barker trying to drum up business.

“As I said to the mirror this morning, it’s all done with people!”  I turned back when he said this, just in time to see him pull up on his hat. His wig, “bald pate” and clown nose came with it, revealing his Hugh Romney face. He then lowered this “mask,” resuming his Waviness and Graviness and winked at me. I knew that it meant he knew what I meant. He just couldn’t be obvious about it. It had to be funny and off-the-wall, but it grew from deep in the garden of the heart.