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Old Hippies - John Gage @ Wavy Gravy's 70th Birthday

Those of you who have actually met me know that at heart I'm a hippy. Canonical's Matt Zimmerman couldn't stop pointing this out last week at DebConf once he'd figured it out :-) (Hi! Matt). I'm really too young to have been a hippy...I was 10 in 1969. I was already a hippy in my head, though, when my hapless parents took a wrong turn while traversing San Francisco (no easy task while towing a boat) and ended up on Fell Street along side the Panhandle on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in August. I have no idea what was going on...some sort of concert or festival. We saw people blowing bubbles and people playing music and people dressed in diaphanous clothes and huge butterfly wings and I *really* wanted to take one of them with us (there were plenty of hitchhikers). But my Dad said, "Lock the car doors...They steal children!" and sped on down the street. My little brother and I looked at each other and we both knew we were going to move to San Francisco just as soon as we were old enough!

Lisa Law.

Wavy G in all his glory. He wore this suit towards the end of last weekend's 70th Birthday Bash.

Wavy Gravy is one of my hippy heros. He and his Hogfarm Commune tribe members were the caterers at Woodstock. But Wavy was inestimably cool even before Woodstock. He grew up in a house next door to Albert Einstein's in Princetown, New Jersey. As a young man he was Bob Dylan's friend in Manhattan and Lenny Bruce's manager for awhile. He was "on the bus" with Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady. And he put his body on the line countless times in protests to end the Vietnam war. I wish I were half as brave as Wavy.

Last weekend was Wavy's 70th Birthday Party which he celebrated in typical fashion with a benefit concert for the Seva Foundation with Bob Weir and Ratdog, Mickey Hart and Friends, Steve Earle, my favorite...Gillian Welch and a bunch of the "regulars" at these events (Yoo-Hoo the Clown, Linda Tillery, etc.). Every person paying for a ticket at this event pays for one person's cataract operation through Seva, so you get to hear great music and feel good about it.

Because 70 is a big milestone birthday, there was a multimedia show on the topic of Wavy's life and times, arranged by Google and Sun's own John Gage! It was totally touching to see Wavy and his wife Jahanara (and John) on their sentimental journey around Google Earth and the adventure they had back in the day that led to so much downstream goodness (over $60,000,000 raised and dispersed to restore sight and help people in India, Nepal, Tibet, Cambodia, Tanzania as well as Chiapas, Guatemala and even in the USA (Native American Diabetes outreach).

Now, I'd like to say that I already knew about John Gage having traveled with Wavy and Larry Brilliant from Seva "on a bus trip around Asia" that led to the creation of the Seva Foundation...but I'd be lying. I wasn't surprised, though. Gage has always struck me as a fine human-being first and Sun executive second. Many a government in the Developing World has decided to look into FOSS as a result of a conversation with Gage. He and I spent some quality time a few years ago at a WSIS related event in Lyons, France. It was a double treat to see him onstage next to Jah, reminiscing.

I've been sending my child (and anyone else's children I could find) to Wavy's Camp Winnarainbow for years now...If you want to meet Wavy and catch his vibe firsthand I'd suggest you consider enrolling in Adult Camp...Or go to the Seva Foundation website and spend some time envisioning what a gift of money or time from you might mean to someone in a Developing Country.

Its never too late to become an old hippy.

Google and Remembering Easters Past

I'm a holiday nut...well really a holidy party nut. From the age of about 10 I've been organizing parties around holidays (any excuse to get everyone together in the backyard). I can throw a party in no time. Once when I actually forgot that I'd agreed to host a party until the first guest arrived...and still it was a great party.

I really love a good Easter party. Its so nice to be outside in the spring participating in vernal equinox fertility rites....like the hiding and hunting of the eggs. When my kids were small we used to pool families together and throw a really big Easter bash at Rancho San Antonio park in Los Altos. Some years we hid more than 300 eggs. Usually not hard-boiled and dyed eggs (nobody really wants to eat those, as it turns out) but colorful plastic or paper-mache eggs filled with candy and small trinkets and coins. Some years we did have some beautiful Ukrainian Eggs to hide, but they weren't for eating. In later years we filled the hollow eggs with colorful slips of paper that described what trinkets or candy the finder had won (insures that the chocolate doesn't melt before the eggs are found). We always hid several "special" eggs...really big ones with plush toys inside and "crystal" eggs with higher denomination money...and then there was the grand-prize "golden bunny". Finding him was worth $20 and gave you first pick of a partner for the raw egg toss!

If you were a grownup coming to our Easter bash you could choose to be a kid for the purpose of hunting eggs. We'd send all the "kids" off on a long walk together while we did the hiding. The ground where eggs were hidden was marked off with big pinwheels stuck into the grass. The little kids got to start hunting 10 minutes before the middling ones got to join for 10 more minutes, and then the big kids (some as old as in their 50s) could start.

The golden bunny was often the last to be found, and for some reason even though everyone looked hard for it, my son was most often the lucky finder. We were speaking today about how he went about finding it...he said he'd take a moment to "think like Mom" and he could usually figure out which hiding place I'd selected for the grand prize.

Many of the hidden eggs were cascarones (intact eggshells with the raw contents blown out through a hole in the bottom and then dyed bright colors and filled with confetti). So throughout all the egg hunting there would be periodic shreaks as somebody got a cascarone smashed on their head.

Then the hunt would be done and we'd all tuck in to a big potluck picnic lunch sitting on quilts laid out on the grass and soak up the sun. By early afternoon a wind would come up and we'd scurry to get everything back in the cars for the drive home.

By now you're asking what this could possibly have to do with Google, right?

Well, I have a lot of friends working on getting hired by Google just now, and I heard a story which convinced me that I might want to work there myself someday. It seems there was a Vice President-type position open and an acquaintance was interviewing for it. He'd gotten pretty far in the interviewing when he got tripped up by the following hypothetical: "Say its your first day on the job at Google, and you have 100 employees reporting to you. So, how would you spend your first day?"....

Of course any seasoned executive would spend it profitably, right? Interviewing the liutenants, getting to understand the current structure of the organization...WRONG!!! The correct answer (at Google anyway) was "Throw a Party!". No wonder everybody wants to work at Google! Wonder what they did at Google for Easter?