Weaving the Threads Together to Make Something Beautiful

The table looms in the weaving room came in different sizes. If in doubt of what to do, you could always whip one of those out in a day or two. My mom has a framed small weaving I made in 3rd grade. It's about two inches wide and three inches tall. I thought I'd "go fancy" and include a PLASTIC BEAD in one of the threads. I have no idea what happened to any of the countless weavings I made on all those afternoons.

I have so many memories in that weaving room. I was lucky that I went to a school that had a weaving room, along with a clay room, wood shop, art room, and science room that we were REQUIRED to go to in the afternoons. I went to all of them. I made lots of clay figures with spaghetti hair made of clay pressed through a garlic press. I also made what I called "a stuffed animal carrier" in wood shop, which was probably one of the most useless things ever made. It was a giant box made out of plywood, with a handle, and a small door. It weighed about FORTY POUNDS empty and was so cumbersome, I never touched it after I brought it home.

In the science room, there were pickled creatures in jars, and metal dust you could collect with magnets. Once I came upon a box that said, "Open Me" and I opened it to find another, smaller box with the same message. So I opened that one and it had a message of "Almost there..." and so I opened it and there was a small box with a last message on it. When I opened the last box it had a dead, ruby breasted hummingbird. The dead bird scared me so much, that I dropped the box and ran out of the classroom and DIDN'T STOP until I got back to the classroom. I never told anyone why I was back early. It haunted me for years.

I am still drawing these fliers. I am still amazed by what comes up. They are such a good practice for memory, writing, and for drawing. I never in a million years thought about drawing those small table looms, but when I did, something in me WOKE UP.

Summer Pierre, you have survived two nights of no heat, a cat's illness, and countless moments of existential crisis, now what are you going to do?

I am going to Disneyland!

It's hard to believe that next week at this time I will be in the (hopefully) warm climate of Anaheim, California, running around with my little brother and sister and their mom, Janae, at the HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH. That's right people, I am going to Disneyland.

This is something that Janae mentioned doing when Luke was just a few evolutionary steps away from being a grub, and Lily wasn't even a twinkle in the eye yet. My dad had said something in response like NO WAY IN HECK WILL YOU CATCH ME THERE, and I had said, TAKE ME! TAKE ME! Here we are six years and an additional child later, and we have our airplane tickets booked, our motel reservations in place, and our three day passes in hand.

The "cool person" in me would roll my eyes at the thought of partaking in a place synonymous with blatant commercialism, but I learned long ago that it is impossible to maintain that cool persona around my little brother and sister. Nothing says, TAKE ME TAKE ME like the thought of doing something so FREE and SPAZZY like a weekend with them at the ultimate playground. Plus, I get to be reunited with such rides like the Jungle Boat and Pirate of the Caribbean.

The last time I was there was 17 years ago, and I was milking the last strands of whatever "childhood" remained, with my grandmother. At 17, I knew I was already too old, but I wanted to go anyway--kind of like when you are 13 and you go trick-or-treating (not like I know what that's like or anything). You know it's your last possible chance to say, "Hey grandma, will you take me to Disneyland?" and still get away with it. I wanted to go and experience a ride that nobody seems to have any memory of, but I loved, called The Incredible Shrinking Machine. It was one of the original rides, so it still had the 60's feel to it. You sat in a blue car and a voice narrated the process of you being shot by a ray that would cause you to "shrink". Suddenly, snowflakes got larger, and molecules started appearing. My favorite part was when you saw a GIANT BLUE EYE looking down at you from what was supposed to be the lens of a microscope. It was COOL and FREAKY. Unfortunately, like my own innocence, it had been RIPPED OUT and replaced with a much more UPDATED invention.

I remember I waited an hour and a half for the submarine, just so I could pretend for a moment that mermaids were real (something I often fantasized about). I also waited an hour to go on the then-new Star Tours ride. While I waited in line, a blond kid from Missouri struck up a conversation with me, and took my picture with his Kodak Disc Camera. Somewhere in Missouri, a grainy picture of me in a captain's hat and a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt exists.

As of right now Luke and Lily have NO IDEA that not only will they be going to Disneyland, but I will be joining them. Janae is going to wait until the last minute to tell them so she only hears "When are we going?" for at least 24-48 hours. Sometimes I feel like crank calling her and saying those exact words over and over again.

I can't wait.

Reunions

30 years ago, my stepfather, Gary, my mother, Bee, and my father, Jake, and I all lived (in various combinations) on a commune called (with some subtlety) THE LAND. It has been a bookmark in all of our personal histories--more so of my parents, of course, who have memories that are steeped with such misty-eyed nostalgia, that the moment you heard the words, "When we were living on THE LAND..." you could swear there was the smell of reefer and incense in the air, and a dim soundtrack of Joni Mitchell singing: "And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden..."

On Sunday, during my weekly conversation with my parental units, Pam and Gary, Gary said rather excitedly, "I just filled your e-mail box." With what, I wanted to know. It turns out that through the easy access of the internet and e-mail, a reunion chain has been spawned for the far flung members of The Land. Gary included me on the correspondence. I thought, "Oh how cool." Some people I have only made up memories of through the various purple haze stories I have heard through the years, and others, who I remember very clearly from my childhood. It seemed to me a very interesting cultural example--where are all these people now?

I go off line 4 days a week--partly because I don't have easy internet access outside the office, but I also FEEL better when I am not constantly logging on, checking on things, and scanning the interactive TV that is the internet. I am used to a small collection of e-mails awaiting my response, but was not prepared for the NINETY-SIX forwarded e-mails from this little reunion chain that could! GEEZ LOUISE! Retired hippies can e-mail, people!

I haven't had time to read through everything, but from what I have read, it's been interesting to see where people have scattered to since 1977. Some are documentary filmmakers, some are editors, some went to prison, some are dead, some are in Canada, some are grandparents. I am very curious to see what happened to the other kids that were affiliated. I guess I'll have to wade through the FIFTY or SO remaining e-mails. One thing that seems evident just from the limited reading I did, is that no matter how diverse the paths of these people are, all of them have been through it, all of them are still making their lives by hand--something that drew them all to The Land in the first place.

Reunions are weird things--they can either be welcomed events filled with connection and recognition or they can be prickly, inasive, painful things. Either way, they are filled with stories. I can't wait to hear them all.

Sunday Scribblings: Instructions

How to Be a Product of Hippies: The first 21 years.

1. If you aren’t born at home, be brought home to a shack, preferably one remodeled from a chicken coop or a barn. If possible, neither parents should be gainfully employed. They should be “living on love” otherwise known as “living by their wits” or more accurately, through odd jobs and state assistance. Make sure your father either has hair the same length as your mother, and/or give her a run for her money, with overflowing facial hair. Have him listen to Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” on the way home from the hospital. It will make him think of you.

2. Be named after the following: seasons, weather, Biblical characters, Greek mythology, misheard names from movies, moods, or deities.

3. Spend early parts of your childhood either completely naked, or slightly adorned by beads, a pair of sandals or moccasins.

4. If your parents don’t stay together, plan to spend weekends at your dad’s makeshift home, surrounded by metal sculptures, Southwestern rugs, and tie-dye t-shirts, listening to the Doobie Brothers, and watching dad roll his “cigarettes” and drinking beer. Mom will start sporting tinted sunglasses, and wear scarves in her hair, while finding out the price of a goat, you will keep in the back yard, along with the Chinese ducks and apricot trees.

5. Be warned: when someone offers you carob, it is not the same thing as chocolate. Not even close. Be baffled at adults’ insistance that it is better for you. Also, when you are served spaghetti, it will be thick, green, flat noodles, tough as rope. This will be better for you, as it is made from spinach. Get used to the vitamin scent of healthfood stores and goat’s milk instead of regular old milk. Learn that tofu, that incredibly thick and bland thing that shows up in your spaghetti comes from a bathtub, in someone’s house.

6. Learn that President Reagan is the anti-christ. Curse his wrinkled, rosy cheeked face, like your stepdad, when he comes on the TV. Write letters against nuclear war to him. Be upset that nothing happens. Be outraged when the Republicans continue to win. Feel that the government is not to be trusted. You are twelve.

7. Be totally embarrassed that your parents love to party. Lay in bed, listening to them howl and cackle with their friends in the living room. Listen to a story being told by your stepmom’s friend, about when she wasn’t with your dad, and how they threw hash in some omelettes one morning, only to have her parents show up unannounced. Laugh to yourself when you imagine your stepmom’s stuffy mother declaring that the coffee was making her “dizzy.”

8. Go to high school and get ridiculed for your name. Think it makes you deep. Believe in things strongly. Continue the thought that all Republicans and people with money are morally corrupt. Everywhere you look, people are MORALLY CORRUPT. Believe that you will find yourself once you go to college, which won’t be just any college, but a small liberal arts school that no one has heard of. Think it makes you deep.

9. When you are away at college, discover feminism, discover outrage. Believe that the commune you lived on as a half naked babe was a toxic environment and that your parents were selfish to bring you there. Date another biblically named hippie child. Love his sensitive, but politically minded soul. Together, you discover all the meanings behind what it was to be brought up this way, this way being a hippie child.

10. Over Christmas break get in fights with your parents over your “upbringing.” Tell them how wrong they were. They in turn will tell you how corrupt your “generation” is. How your generation doesn’t “get” what it really means to be radical and on the front lines and filled with wisdom.

11. Vote in your first election. Feel excited. Call your parents. They voted for him too. Celebrate. For he first time ever, you feel that the "good guys have won."

12. Graduate from college with a BA in the arts. Your thesis will be a documentary of your soul, or 25 views of the Male Psyche, or an entire semester of self-portraits. Believe your work is important even revolutionary. Then get a job as a waitress.

My Name is Summer, and Yes My Parents Were Hippies

People like to make fun of my name. As a temp, you meet people more than you normally would, and so I’ve been getting it more than usual in the last six months. "Summer?” One out of three will say, “Oh, well I'm Winter, nice to meet you!" Then they follow it with, "I bet you get that a lot." I humor them and smile and shrug it off, but after the third time in one day, I am thinking: Nah. YOU'RE THE GENIUS. Since it’s wintertime and very cold in New York, I’m often asked, “Why didn’t you bring summer with you?!” I am looking forward to the summertime, when a heat wave hits, and somebody says, “It feels like YOU out there.” How would you know, buddy?

Up until high school, I lived a relatively free from “winter” existence. Then again, I grew up in what I have learned since then, is considered an ALTERNATIVE environment. I went to a hippie school, and my classmates had names that included Andromeda, Boreas, Vitali, Oak, and Rolly (pronounced Role-e)(hi guys!). Considering the roll call, I was kind of the "Jane Smith" of the group. However, regardless of the pillows on the floor, and meetings where we had to discuss our feelings, I still got teased on the playground and called names. None of them were season-based. They were things that rhymed with my name--names that STILL make me cringe and feel bad. Names like "Bummer" and "Dumber." "Hey, Winter." Didn't come until I entered public school as a freshman. Then it was open season, so to speak.

If you opened my yearbooks, you would see (in all 4 years) that 90% of the entries end with "Have a good summer Summer (ha ha)." Sometimes the more creative types would write "Have the summer of summers, Summer (ha ha)."

My freshman year, the showcase model for the game show Sale of the Century was named Summer Bartholomew. If I had a dime for every guy in a Corona t-shirt that asked me, “Hey, are you related to Summer Bartholomew?” I wouldn’t have any college loans to pay off.

When I applied to colleges, I usually got two responses: one addressed to Pierre and the other addressed to Summer. I used to joke that Pierre got into college, but Summer did not. As it happens, in ALMOST all cases, neither did. (ha ha)

Then, I moved to the East Coast. East coast people find it a very funny name. This morning, as it would happen, two co-workers discussed my name in front of me, and one said, “I didn’t think it was your real name.” I get that a lot. Maybe it’s because there aren’t any hippies left here. I know the cultural consciousness happened on the east coast, because I’ve met people that had hippies for parents, but it seems that east coast hippies have moved on to academic postings or documentary filmmakers, and they seem to name their kids Amos or Noah, and not after seasons or other natural occurrences.

The good news about having a name like Summer is that people remember you. Or when they don't, they come up with the most interesting alternatives. I had a guy ask me once, "What is your name again--Sunshine?" SUNSHINE? Oh, it SO is now...

All said and done, I have to admit that I like my name. I know it fits me, as someone who is arty and who had hippies for parents. Incidentally, I knew a woman named Winter--she was my classmate Oak's mother. They lived on a commune with a kid who's real name was Cisco. In an act of wanting normalcy, Cisco declared in 3rd grade that his name was now DAVID. I hear he is on Wall street.

The point of this little tirade is that my friend Erica wrote to me yesterday and asked if I knew that the name 'Summer' was becoming popular. She had gone into a kid's store and saw all this merchandise with the name 'Summer' on it. Maybe it's the kid in me who watched with envy as every Rebecca, Jennifer, and Kathy got barrettes, mugs, lunchboxes, stickers with their lovely names on it, who wants to say to all the new Summers out there--LUCKEEE. The other part of me wants to say, GOOD LUCK. Then again, with an army of Summers out there, maybe they won't need it.

Rainbows in My Book

After reading Felicia's amazing and brutal post about her childhood yesterday, I went to page and began writing ferociously about a time in my childhood that was bleak and lonely. Suddenly what came was a song, more formed than any song has been in awhile--which isn't saying much, but when the hat fits, you friggn' wear it (and say thank you). The chorus came to me whole. It's very simple, but as soon as I sang the words, I began to well up. It reads this way:

Still I drew rainbows in my books,
I don't know where I learned it;
Don't know how I found them,
or how they found me.

What little girl didn't go though a drawing rainbows phase or horses for that matter? Where does that come from?

When I was 9 years old my mother moved us an hour and a half north from where I had been living all my life. I'd already had a pretty rocky childhood having lived in several different houses, with different parties. I think the thing that saved me was the school I went to. I'd been with the same group of people since I was three years old. Peninsula School was the only real constant in my life. When my mother decided to relocate and take me with her to Fairfax, it was nothing short of traumatic. For the first time I was in public school with a HORRID teacher (I still HATE her) that couldn't handle an emotionally whacked out kid, who cried easily and had a hard time concentrating. It was the first time I had ever dealt with bullies--boys would wait for me after school and try to push me off my bike. Every ride home after school was a mixture of relief and terror. I was relieved to be out of school, but I had to face another battle, before I could get home. My mother worked an hour away, across the Bay, and often wasn't home until 8 at night. We had very little money and sometimes as a result, very little food. More than a few times the power or the phone was shut off. I sometimes skipped school or made up illnesses. Like usual, I drew pictures, but drawing became increasingly more important to me. I think that's when I began to live mostly in my imagination, because I was alone and didn't have any choices.

When I wrote the words "Still I drew rainbows in my books," it hit that deep truth in me that art has literally saved my life. Like for so many people, it was a way out, it was a way to hope, or to literally CREATE something different for myself. There are people in my family who didn't have something like that and are struggling deeply with life, in ways that I don't. So when people find out the whole of my experience, they always ask me, "So how'd you make it?" Truly, I think of two things--Peninsula School (which I returned to for the last 3 months of that school year and remained until I graduated fom 8th grade) and art. As it happens, I am still very close with many of my friends from Peninsula School, and art continues to be the red thread through my days, tugging me forward, keeping me going.

And I still draw rainbows--the ultimate metephor for something magical and beautiful. It's how nature makes lemonade out of lemons. It takes the downpour and mixes it with sun to create something beautiful. No one taught me that and I don't know where it came from, but it got me through a lot and everyday I am grateful.

This Day in History: A Psychedelic Warrior Was Born Today

Gary and Summer in Palo Alto in 1976!
Last night was all about the quality of the audience and not the quantity--it was the HIGHEST quality. I had such a good time last night at Micky's Blue Room. It was a long walk through the wonder that is the East Village. Why do I feel like a somebody when I am walking down the street with my guitar? It's true--a good reminder for me. I felt more myself as I made my way down the cold streets, lugging my heavy case and taking in the beautiful nightlife of this city.

Today is the birthday of my friend and record label colleague Coppelia--she turns 30! Welcome to the fold, I say! I think the 30's kick ass personally. The 20's THINK they have it going on, but the real secret is that the thirties is when you GET IT going on.

It is ALSO the birthday of my stepdad Gary. Gary has been in my life since we were both half naked babes on a commune in 1974. Difference was, I was a toddler and he was a young man who had already lived a lifetime of experiences, including (but not exclusive to) dodging the draft, actively protesting the war while on the lamb, and then doing time for not going to Vietnam.

I could tell you some very catchy things about him like how he went to high school in Connecticut and as a result got to hear Robert Kennedy speak, and visit the Andy Warhol factory as a field trip. Or, during his protest days and being on the lamb, he called himself a psychedelic warrior! Such descriptions lit up my imagination like a firework display on the fourth of July!

Gary is one of the most passionate people I'll ever meet. When he has an opinion IT WILL NOT BEND. He's not afraid to cry during movies, and I got to say, I like that in a guy. I love it that he calls me up to say, "Have you heard the new Madonna album? It's supposedly great--she's back to her pop roots."

His amazing life experiences could fill a book, and hearing about them as I grew up is one of the reasons I wanted to become a writer. I think all of us think on some level or at one point that unless we are "successful" or "famous" our lives don't mean nearly as much to the world. I can say with all honesty that Gary's life has made an impression on me--and he is ALREADY a living legend.

Happy BIRTHDAY Gary, our very own Psychedelic Warrior.