 So, to provide a little bit of context for our audience, I wanted to start with a general question having to do with what was it about America of the 1950s and early 60s that set you on the path of creating an alternative or a counterculture? Everything? Oh, it was a very stultifying time. It was repressive. It was gray. It was dull. It was confining. Another word? It was bad. It was. It was too it was too too repressive to withstand itself for too long. And the reason it was so repressive was for the wrong reason. They were the people, the parents of the 50s had come through hard times and their grandparents had come through hard times. And they wanted good times for their children and they gave them everything. And you know when you do that for your children it has a bad effect. It does. Well, you know it was Father Knows Best and a lot of women aren't going to take that for too long. But really it was the stultifying as you said that part that and I had counter-cultural parents actually from a different kind of culture but nevertheless and I didn't want conformism. I wanted to get free and freedom that was what much of the counter-culture was looking toward and that was what I wanted out of it. When I think of the 50s I think that everything I wanted to do I was told I couldn't do. Not so much by my parents who were actually quite supportive but just the society itself I think as a girl who was kind of active and exploratory you know the sports I wanted to play no, the instruments I wanted to play I mean just sort of everything felt like the boys were the ones who could have the fun and not the girls and so that was I think as you said it couldn't go on for too long and we just had to break out of that. I found that as I was growing up I knew that I would leave the place where I grew up I knew I would leave the small town where I grew up because it was too constrictive there were too many expectations that you had to do the right thing and I wasn't sure that I wanted to but the lines were drawn there were black and white and if you stepped over the line you were gone I got gone you know doing the right thing seemed to be somebody else's idea we wanted to do the right thing for us and so that self-expression and individuality became really important I want to share early on that I had an epiphany on the way down and that was I was really the black sheep of the family and almost had a nervous breakdown actually living where I lived but my parents actually were wonderful people and they laid the groundwork for me to be able to come out here from Ohio and to have the courage for that and to have the strength that my mother gave me she stood up to everybody that was ever treated me wrong in a way that would really damage me and I appreciate it now but I don't think I appreciated it to her and I wish I would have and my father was equally wonderful he showed me how to garden he showed me how to have compassion for others a million things and my rebellion was not against the way they raised me it was the dominant culture and mom and dad you did a good job this is probably a good segue into another question and that is what values you had that were counter to the mainstream that you wanted to express within this alternative that you were creating so what values did you hold dear I'll just say a few words openness sharing living simply transparency loving one another not being negative not being exclusive not telling secrets you know all of anyway there were a lot of values that were so meaningful that I didn't even know that I had them it wasn't an intellectual thing it was just slowly evolving it wasn't like a list was made of this is what I want you know but I think there is threads that hold us together and connections and massaging those connections and appreciating those connections and being positive you know is what motivated me and a lot of other things as well but love the summer of love is a beautiful way of putting it the love part that wonderful that wonderful happening in the park where the musicians the great musicians who could have made billions of dollars and actually did you know when they played at the big venues but they played for free at the park and that blew my mind I thought that was just that really tied into my values in a big way I worked with a group of people in the Haydash Burry who were called the diggers and we had our values were based on everything is free do your own thing you know self-expression and the ability to create what moved you to I wanted to live in a place that felt right in a way that felt right and I had been in an environment that had looked down on me for religious reasons and I just didn't feel at home there my parents had always thought that being an artist was the very best thing you could do and I didn't know what my art might be but it gave me an opportunity to explore all kinds of different things and discover myself and that self-expression and I'm really fortunate that the work I did has then inspired many many other people to feel that they could be artistic and be self-expressive and pretty soon we were all wearing all those things on our sleeves all the things that we cared about the symbols of freedom and conviviality and liberation I would say that early on I had a sense of injustice in the society and a little bit later for me when I started taking psychedelics just a deep knowing that we're all one and that we're all connected and that that's the most important thing is that we take care of each other and that these notions of separation and trying to accumulate a lot for yourself is kind of a bankrupt notion really and that we whatever evolution humanity will unfold will be because we're moving together and it's like what you said Sally about massaging the connection I'm glad you mentioned psychedelics they actually didn't find their way on to the list of questions but I wondered if any of the rest of you wanted to speak to the role of psychedelics in shaping your values in shaping your vision of the kind of society that you wanted to create well I'm interested in speaking to that you know I think it was that when we were smoking pot in those very early days was in a very small group and it was very dangerous and we were scared anybody else might know and that what it did was it began to drop the veils of between our inner experience and what we had been downloaded by the major culture the mainstream so those began to dissolve and we could see that and then LSD did way beyond that you could really take any kind of question into an LSD experience and find your own answer to it you could find all of those answers inside yourself and that was fabulous but another thing that it did was that it showed us that the mainstream who had been telling us that marijuana was a habit forming drug that would lead to narcotics and that it was untrue and that we began to say oh these other gen this older generation the mainstream has been lying to us therefore what else have they been lying about and that was part of what we discovered with that being able to listen to our own inner voice rather than that of the mainstream my parents were of a liberal persuasion and we're really very understanding of anything that I did by way of counterculture and we're themselves secretly counterculture people they were very much against LSD and they were horrified that I would even consider taking it and one day when I was visiting them I had sent them a picture of myself and they said we treasure this picture this picture shows you at your most essential perfect beautiful but you know where this is going right absolutely great I think that LSD opened everyone up to multiple realities that the possibilities were really much more than 3D we went on LSD how many D's dimensions were there there were multiple dimensions and multiple possibilities and on the other hand the legal system made it such so that if you smoked as Alexandra mentioned if you smoked any marijuana at all you were immediately a criminal and that separated you from the larger culture that had been lying to you and had been telling you some things were not good that were good and I think that created an incredible community of people who were looked at as bad or criminal or something and that solidified relationships with each other because we shared these possibilities of other realities we were in a sense liberated it also opened up the creativity gene for me all the colors the greens there were like 100,000 billion greens not green and it solidified our feelings of nature I think and brought us close not just with the human beings here but with the natural world which was very important for the work that we did in the future and it was an amazing amount of fun but it was so far beyond fun and people that never got to do it the pure acid I really do I feel sad for them I do and I hope that the all that we got they didn't that we somehow managed to share with everybody this wonderful, wonderful LSD and peyote and other mushrooms other psychedelics I got to take LSD every third day a small amount for quite a long time I think it's being recommended these days ahead of my time they're doing research about LSD as medicine for PTSD soldiers who return with PTSD and it's working I was going to ask a follow up question related to what you were saying Sally about the connection between the use of psychedelics and spirituality more generally the extent to which their use brought you into alternate realities like you mentioned more of an earth-referent spirituality was that the case for everything was alive everything was pulsing and it was for me I was lucky or whatever good karma or something it was always beautiful and when there were people involved it was like you just got deeper and deeper into those people and like I say trees and all beings and yourself as well do you remember how it was hard to talk to anyone who hadn't had some kind of experience and you got so you could just tell by looking at one another you could tell just from the light in their eyes that this was somebody you could talk to and not be afraid to be real the next question is very broad and maybe an opportunity to tell stories what were your specific contributions to this process of social cultural transformation so what were you engaged in doing what took most of your energy what were your creative outlets during this period in time what did you contribute well I can start before I guess 64 or 65 there were a group of friends who were gathering messing around with all kinds of things and we started something that we called the Thursday evening tape club I think but it was really sharing kinds of trips things that we had discovered and I had gotten hold of a Scott paper company film on administration and we had no idea what we would do with this thing but we were showing in the living room trying to say in what way can we twist this and there was an image of these dots coming down a woman's body and this is the blood and how it all worked and it was about my body size I stripped off my clothes and stood underneath the image that was being projected and then I moved around and it was wrapped around my body and the skin became such an incredible screen that we went from there to our Thursday evenings being in the attic with six or eight sources of light being projected light show kind of thing or a little eight millimeter movie camera or several projectors with slides and so all of these were projected toward this one particular spot and then one person would strip off their clothes and pick up some of these real sheer granny curtains and kind of wave them around and everything that the light touched the images would show up and it was incredibly beautiful it was just extraordinary and I had the ulterior motive of wanting to free people's bodies and free them so they could be in one another's company without having it to be about sex it could or it might not be but not in that environment it was dancing and we were dancing and we were having this incredible time people's minds were blown and they stopped they dropped their shame about their bodies and I felt like I was being a very successful nude activist so that went on and that became one of the things that we went into a theatrical situation and found we couldn't get away with it in public well this is probably going to sound weird but that didn't sound weird but I think that the best thing that I did was to purchase a piece of land and allow people to live there form a community and not interfere with the growth of people in this community and actually still exists it's working on 50 years now and I think the best thing I did for this community besides not taking any money myself was to move away I came back but yes to move away so that when you give people something they feel indebted no matter how much you don't want them to they will feel this way and so when you're not there it helps very much for them to coalesce around owning ownership and stewardship and possession of the land itself and to have it be about that Delia in your community did people work outside of it or did you have a community based what did you do on the land farming raising sheep creating a garden learning to live together that was the big thing so I was in this community for about two years and then I moved to a neighboring community which was more of an art community and the first community was quite serious and this other community was just not serious at all and quite we were not allowed to park our cars next to our houses we were not allowed to have telephones we decided there was no rule going down but we just decided we didn't want these things we had kerosene lamps and ate together and played music afterwards that was lovely and then took our sleepy children home through the dark seeing with our feet definition of hippie doesn't wear shoes did I live on the serious community or the fun one the fun one wherever you are it's fun probably I think there are some of the people in this room or the best thing that I did was to meet them Ramon and you here and Michael Phillips and Michael Eschenbach other my niece lots of people that was really really important and of course writing my book raspberry exercises that with Robert Greenway that was really important and it's not only for the school part which is a whole other subject of which I'm very proud but also because it started me on my writing career and working a lot with Michael Phillips which really opened up a lot of possibilities in my mind and he in my mind was a little bit in the straight world but much more in the other world but both and he could operate in both and thus I could operate in both too because here before I just operated in the string beads and so and make people happy and but I never thought of contributing in a different way and I'm so glad that I have that experience and I could help other people edit their books and publish books and we wrote about Michael and I living in community and operating a business that was based on honesty and marketing your products without advertising but because people loved what you did and you provided good service and all the good things that came from drugs and life experiences and the 60s and early 70s and so I really do feel like I made a contribution that will live on way after I'm an angel and lying around. Some people in the audience know that alternative education, alternative schools were an integral part of counterculture. What did your school do differently that regular schools weren't offering kids? It's such a long, you know who the expert is sitting right there. Don't hide your face Greg. He has written a lot. He actually looked at the Raspberry book and that school is not the same school as the one deal you was talking about. Correct? The school at the Dega. No, no. That's a different. This was based on my work in the city with like, I don't know if your kids went there or not but yeah, Diana Prima's kids and Marty Bowlin's kids and all the wonderful artists and people who couldn't bear to send their kids to a school, a radio or school let's say. On the back there's a dedication. I gave you the book. Would you read it? Just on that back cover. How long has it been since you taught in a culture which you fully believed? Yes. And then inside there's another one in the very beginning. I think she said that. Oh, to the millions of children still in prison? Yeah. Well, we I had the passion of working in the city school, two schools. Little school because my daughter was little and had to have a school and then an older group of children that some kids didn't even read yet and they were 12 years old and I would go and sit outside and they would sit in a closet because they were so shamed and teach them to read and so that lots of experiences in those schools and I do have to tell you about one of the parents was she and her husband are quite well known and they had these two children and they came to our school and they had their lunchboxes and salt plums you probably never heard of them it's a food and all the other kids would hold their nose and put down their school lunches and they were very not so happy anymore either because all the other kids got to go across with their little money and buy candy at the corner store but they couldn't so finally they figured out a way to get some money and go to the store and I let them because it was a free school and about two weeks later after I thought well this will run the gamut they'll get sick of it no no no one day at school the little girl took her lunchbox and hit her brother over the head with it and heretofore she had been the sweetest lovinest girl without her candy in the world so I believed ever more in the free school and what it teaches and I loved the experience but the parents did not love me anymore but when I came up to northern California to get away from all the hard drugs and stuff I brought my school experiences with me and my passion and Robert Greenway is a well known eco psychologist and professor and free speech man he looked at it from the professorial humanistic psychology point of view together we made a pretty good team and then we linked up with Sim Van Derijn who was the state architect and his wife and their kids and we had their kids and our kids went to school together and they'd spend half the time with us and half the time with them so they learned all about the engineering aspect and the building from the Van Derijn part and farming and dream sharing and sweat lodges and art and all the good softer skills from us and we had a great great old time all of us and then our students from Sinoma State would act as teachers as well teacher learners so that's part of the story of the book there's a lot more of course I was just going to say it's interesting I was also part of a group of seven women who started a school so it's interesting just as mothers as parents but we all had the inclination to really be looking at the next generation how are we going to raise our children offering them some things that we're missing in the world that we saw when I left Marin County which was in 1972 I moved to Kauai with my little two-year-old daughter and by the time she was three I realized if I wanted to stay on the island there needed to be a different school my friend Rochelle is sitting over there and she and I and five other women started a school like from nothing like total shoestring nothing like having garage sales to put $75 in the bank to get started and that school today is a 40-acre campus and 400 students and it's a great school and it's a wonderful school there's Hawaiian studies and there's all kinds of amazing things there was also something really special when we had 20 or 30 or 40 kids in the school and they were doing Shakespeare around the island so magic was yeah anything you wanted to add on schools before we get back to the original question which was I think it's obvious that all the what was alternative education at that time has made its way into all levels of schooling now kids are encouraged to be creative which was something I don't think I ever saw in school and the multiple kinds of studies you can do even at the college level you can choose your major your major can be various things I think the education system has really changed they call it homeschooling now they call it other kinds of schooling now but it all started with when you have a child and you you change your outlook on how you want this child to grow up and what you want how you want them to be educated and I think that's where it started people recognize this and they made real activities and actions that influenced other people and allowed them to expand that's what it might mean so back to the original question about what you did within the counterculture a story that maybe you'd like to share after the after I was on the bus with Keezy and we were doing these events called the acid tests all around the country with the Grateful Dead and light shows and then Keezy got busted and I came I didn't want to leave the country I didn't follow the rest of the pranksters and ended up over the next period of time starting the first all women's band in the area here and I was thinking about it when we were just talking about education one of the so first of all there weren't women playing all of the instruments there were some women singing and bands Grace was singing in the airplane at the time or Cygni and then Grace and certainly Janice a little bit later but playing our instruments and singing that was something we didn't have there was nowhere to look to see that so the first time we played on a big stage in Marin where we were elevated we were thinking so what do we do we were like our manager was saying what are you going to wear what can you drum in just even thinking about what we would practically be able to wear to play our instruments we didn't have anybody to look at so we were making it up our songs our lyrics were a lot about family and relationship and I've been thinking lately that many of the guy bands that were our contemporaries even though some of them were say fathers they weren't singing about being fathers they weren't singing about childbirth and they were at childbirth and it's just lately I've been thinking why weren't they singing about those things you know they were catching the baby sometimes but most of them weren't like they had this image of having to be single and sexy and maybe singing about family wasn't so sexy I don't know what that is I'm just thinking about it but I think that with Ace of Cups we had five women we all sang we didn't have one lead singer and a lot of when the record labels looked at us they were like well who's your lead singer well we all are we all are and that focus changed around person to person to person and we loved singing together and we were up in different musical styles we didn't have just one style so it's there was something that we kind of embodied and resonated I met Beth here just before we started and she was saying how she came to see us at at Winterland and some other things and how seeing us shifted things for her and made it possible for her to go on with her musical work which she's done all her life we didn't set out to do that but just embodying it ourselves it had the ripple effect of opening up that possibility so that's something I'm really happy about and we're still going that's amazing I guess I would like to say one more thing I think the age question for me now it's like when I tell people that we're recording now some people are like yeah, other people look at me like I'm completely nuts like you are making a record your band that was together 50 years ago was now making a record they can't compute because the music industry is so oriented for youth and I think in those days we were kind of up against ideas about women that we kind of had to break through or whatever we did but I think the age issue now so women and women that are our age that's a whole other like a sea of opinion that we're going to have to surf through in some kind of good way another glass ceiling it needs to be broken down however we're doing it that makes me think about how important music was in that time and I'm just going from my other story about the projected images we various people, Ramon Sander who's right down here was one of them Stewart Brand the pranksters Open Theater which was what my husband Roland and I were connected to and I'm sure there were others we created the Trips Festival and the Trips Festival was the big coming out party for the counterculture it had all these little things that each of our groups was presenting as our Trips, our trippy thing and we were going to do revelations but as it turned out it didn't seem like it was going to be a good idea but and Bill Graham we had gotten there to take care of the money he had been the the Mime Troops manager and we were all kind of surprised well, Bill went outside to see whether there was anybody coming because his theater and our theater had had very small audiences and we weren't so sure this was all going to work we were at the Union Hall the Long Sherman's Hall and he came he went out to look on the Friday night and his eyes were like this he said, oh they're out the side around the block and it turned out that there were thousands of people who came through and we had no idea because all of us had been in our own little living rooms carefully smoking pot and all of a sudden we saw how many of us there were and it was amazing but the the warlocks were there before they were the Grateful Dead and I forget who all else and what we learned from that was it was really the music that brought us together and able to get on the same beat and that all those other little trips that we were taking we're not going to do a large crowd like that what the music could do so because of the acid in the ice cream there were some people who didn't know what they had gotten into and during some of the music I think one woman's clothes had gotten ripped off we looked at each other and said we are not going to do revelations and have nude event here in the middle of this crowd I do not think so we would all have been busted before that night was over but it was the beginning of knowing what the strength there was and especially it was that weekend that Bill went out and rented the Fillmore so it was his beginning as he saw here is the way to make some bucks and the rest of us Roland and I said I think we better go to Morningstar Ranch and do some meditation so we went a different direction but it was there we discovered that music was the thing Judy did you want to share contributions? I don't know where to begin I think things really began during 66 and there was an incredible media blitz to tell people to come to San Francisco and the people that I was working with thought we would be overwhelmed and we had several meetings including meetings with the city the city thought it would be very helpful if they provided the tax squad to control things that wasn't what we had in mind so one of the things that we decided to do or the way we approached the summer of love was to make a university of the streets our idea was the diggers were really performers they came from the meme troupe they were improvisational they had a very creative had a good sense of humor and they wanted to do things that would people could go to events and we knew that all these people would come to San Francisco but then they would go back to their home and we wanted to give them an outline for a new society that they could take with them so we put free in front of everything we had the first thing we did was to provide free food in the park but we didn't just provide free food in the park we had 12 by 12 frame that was painted orangey yellow and we put the frame up we fed them in the panhandle we fed people in the panhandle and you know John Cage said if you put a frame around anything it's art and we thought the people driving down Oak Street going downtown to see this and want to join us which in fact a lot of them did so we also had a free store we had several free and we called the frame we called it a free frame of reference there was a lot of metaphorical language at that time we provided free news the communications company and the diggers used gestettner machines gestettners were kind of high end Mimeo machines like Xerox machines but a little different and we let people write things and distributed them free on the street so there was free news there was free food we had a free store now what is a free store you go to a store to buy things don't you or you go to a store to get commodities well if it's a free store then the situation is up for grabs you can improvise how you exchange goods in a free store as a matter of fact during that summer we had someone from Time magazine and the Saturday evening post came to the free store and said we'd like to interview the manager of the free store well the diggers were anonymous so actually Peter Berg told one of them this is the manager of the store but he doesn't like to be recognized that way so don't tell him that you know the other one from the other magazine the same thing about the other one they interviewed each other for about a half an hour so if you take a society and you wonder what is real what is reality really well we acted out things we called it life acting we we wanted to include all these people that had come we included the audience in our productions so that you you were part of the production you were not the audience for the production and we did life acts on hate street quite a lot there's in the exhibits at the Berkeley museum the de Young and the historical society all have photographs of the first really big event we did which was called the death of money and we had a parade down the street I won't describe the whole thing but it was pretty impressive and we did a lot of other things we did Lenore Candel wrote the love book and it was prosecuted as pornography but she wrote some poems and we had big butcher sheets butcher paper sheets and they were marbleized someone had taken them and marbleized them like the end papers of books and then someone had taken calligraphy and written her poem on the sheets there were about six sheets so another woman and I said oh I know what we should do with these and we climbed up to the top of a building on hate street and we held up the sheets of paper they were so big it took two people and then spontaneously some of the other diggers who were down in the street began chanting reading the poem so they read the poem we shifted the sheets as was necessary and then of course there was always an element in our events I don't know how it happened but the police decided that we should be busted for doing this because even though they didn't know what was wrong about it definitely something was wrong about it so we knew the people on the street said the cops are coming so we grabbed our papers went down before the police could come up we were on a building across the street so it's kind of a cat mouse game it was a theatrical piece the police knew their role and they played it out that's a couple of the things that we did but we actually I was at a press conference I don't know when it was maybe in January and there was a man there who said that he grew up in South Carolina and in his small town there was a head shop and that's where he first got turned on and he said that the reason the man had opened the head shop was that he had come to San Francisco and was participating in an anti-Vietnam war march that was at Civic Center but it went down the street and when it got to the street he said everything exploded with color and joy and so if you I lost I lost my punchline but what I did want to say is that the diggers really felt that if you could provide basic human necessities clothing food, place, shelter and celebrations we did free shows in the park all the time then you were free to live the most creative most fulfilling life that you might like to live you wouldn't have to go downtown and wear a white button down shirt as a matter of fact the free store got so many white shirts that we just someone brought Luna Moth came down and she looked at them all and said I know what you need to do with those just tie-dye them and we taught people how to tie-dye and we tie-died them all because then they were individual they were not mass produced and they were your shirt that you made and this white shirt had been recycled and transformed into something beautiful something that's come up a couple of times that I wanted to ask about that again is off-script is positive sexuality and the extent to which the counter-culture was sexually liberating for you and other women I can't wait to get a tongue into this subject I'm noticing that I just have the feeling everybody should stretch just stretch yeah and now I'd like to sing you a little song it has many verses but I'll just sing one it's called that old devil jealousy oh you said that I could love your man and it would not hurt you and you said that I could take him and not take him away from you now you will not even speak to me you do not know my name oh leave me leave me you're driving me insane it's that old devil jealousy in my back door and that old devil jealousy leave me alone no more and that old devil jealousy leave my heart in pain oh leave me you're driving me insane I'd like to say something about that that shift that was happening at that time in North Beach when we first started playing that was when all the topless clubs were up and down Broadway Carol Dodo was pretty famous then so right and so there was this whole thing about come into San Francisco and see those topless dancers right so when Asa Cups was first playing it was kind of hard for us to get gigs and our manager who's Ron Polthee his wife's here right now Sally calling and he called a couple of clubs particularly one on Broadway and said you know I have this band Asa Cups and they're all women and would you like to hire them to play a couple nights a week and they said yes the guy says yes and so Ron says well yes do you want them to come in and audition and the guy says no no no they don't need to audition do you want to hear their music no no they're all women right so as long as they'll play topless we'll hire them and Ron called me up and told me that and I said call them back and tell them we'll play nude but we won't play topless they didn't want us they didn't want us nude and we probably wouldn't have done it but you know that whole thing was just so disgusting that we had to do kind of what more what Alexandra was doing like let's just take off our clothes and be together right but they were not all about that at all yeah I know that was one of the problems that our feeling was so free and actually pure naked homeless harmless you know but they more and more the people who were looking at us were looking at us with very different eyes and although I love taking my clothes off in public after a while I just couldn't do it anymore sexuality Gretchen it's fine what about relationally anybody else having something to say about I wonder why everybody thinks that people of the counter cause your worth ripping off their clothes and having orgies and all sorts of oddities you know I mean it wasn't deep throat or behind the green door or stuff I just don't know where that came from that was one small group of people and then there were mothers and families that probably didn't do that and there are people who had all sorts of arrangements and transgender relationships started to blossom and so much you know different than the Carol Dodo and Mitchell Brothers stuff and I noticed in your book you had a sort of the Madonna you know and or whatever and I didn't really experience that personally I wonder how you experienced it I think the society of the 50s was very puritanical and so the fact that in the 60s people were glorifying voluptuousness and sexuality and not being it behind the door is why so many people are drawn to that aspect of what was going on and I think women being able to claim their own sexuality and I think we're still working on that today I mean I heard some news broadcast that talked about some bimbo going someplace you know it was just like why are we still using those pejoratives I don't know it was important to the evolution of that though that 1960s when the birth control pill became available and that liberated women so much that their own senses their sexuality and their ability to express it in whatever way they chose to became from that 50s point of view kind of sullied and we did I remember free love and women's lives were often spoken of in the same context and there was a lot of confusion in the general population about that and other things that we're still working on vis-a-vis sex is coyote began in the 60s Margot St. James and unionization of sexual workers giving them some power I think one of the most wonderful things about sex and the counter culture was that it wasn't about sex it was about sensuality and allowing yourself to relate to other people in a sensual open way without it meaning you were going to go to bed together and that gets us back to the closing part remember the velvet and how important that was for our sensuality and how we kind of it was an easy way of sending out a message like a peacock being able to show your body but that was the first step I didn't just go from there to there I had the silk I don't know what guys did but we're colors oh yeah took their shirt off colors right long hair embroidered and patched things yeah being willing to kiss, funnel and hug a woman without either of them thinking it was going to lead to intercourse of sexual nature it was intercourse of another kind of sensual nature you know they still carry briefcases and all that men do I mean I was like thinking about our version of the straight person was always the suit and the briefcase and everything well if you happen to have a tv it's still there I don't understand what happened the pendulum has to stop I wanted to ask about the challenges or obstacles that you faced I was thinking in terms of sexism, homophobia hostility from the mainstream parental disapproval or in some cases people taking advantage of the relative lack of structure or rules within your communities it's open you can talk about any challenge or obstacle challenges in the communities yeah challenges or obstacles that you faced as part of the counterculture it could be I think it was challenging I've always been community minded not commune minded so much the service you give to the community around you is really key to happy neighbors and not having enemies shutting down because they don't believe as you do and fostering that sense of community is really key to me when you go in as a group of people and you embrace bigger and bigger and bigger it's wonderful I personally never or very seldom encountered any resistance except the door slammed in my face when I lived in the city a few times because people landlords had gotten ripped off it was toward the end you know and they were sick of having hippies come and they could tell I was one you know but otherwise in the country people were wary of us because they grew up for generations and here we were there was a lot of us but we joined the fire department some of us were nurses builders so we embraced them and asked for their advice that really made a big difference at least in my experience it was good Denise you faced a lot of sexism the one that came to mind was a little bit later then when I moved to Kauai one of the things that I when we started the school and we were taking the kids to the beach all the time and I decided I should become an emergency medical technician because I just wanted those skills so that if things happen with the kids I have more knowledge and after I became the hospital in Kauai was shorthanded and they asked me to work part-time with the ambulance I was the only woman that had gone through that program on Kauai so I was in a class with 11 guys most of whom were firemen and I was working and I was actually really enjoying it learning a lot it's just a whole different thing to be around on a little island going to all the things that happened I really enjoyed the job it was challenging and interesting and then some of the fellow who owned the company managed the company called me in and he said you know I got a complaint from the wives couple of the wives of the firemen they don't want their husbands working with you not a personal thing like me personally they really didn't know me but because there was just one room where we waited for calls he just said well we can't have our husbands working with the woman so you lose your job and later that happened to the next woman who came up on the island and she fought it and won but at that time I was just kind of crushed I was really enjoying this work and okay I just like crawled away they sent me to a different island and that really didn't work for me but it was just a lot of water so you know those kinds of issues I'm sure that you all have versions of something like that where women just when kind of push came to shove the women had to move aside but in your music you didn't get record contracts right? yeah we didn't it wasn't just that we were women although that was probably some part but it was really more the way that we approached our music which was very feminine that fact that we didn't have a lead singer that we were much more of a cooperative venture and we still are our record that's gonna come out has everything from a single voice Mary Gannon singing an Irish ballad with Irish pipes to psychedelic rock to R&B you know we have a lot of different musical styles because we all have different musical influences and so you know I feel like it had to do with the fact that we weren't being bound because we all wanted each other to shine and have a chance to share our musical like Marla came from an R&B background Diane came from kind of a R&B in country, Marielle and came from blues and folk and these Mary Gannon came from Broadway or whatever so I think and we had a much more cooperative spirit and I think that's what they didn't know how to rally into or lasso into something that they could market you know the diggers were a cooperative like that but not only women but men and women and the way that we functioned was that if someone had an idea other people would help them manifest their idea and that it didn't really matter if it was a man or a woman who had the idea there were people you did what you were good at if you were good at having ideas you had ideas if you were good at helping make it happen you made it happen and I had a similar situation happen at a commune where I was where people had decided to be very, very politically correct and they organized themselves into work cadres to get things done and one of my sisters one of my extended family sisters one day said you know I don't think I want to clean the kitchen I think I want to go and build fences with the guys or with that Cadre and the women were just appalled just so upset they were so jealous it was amazing and I also want to tell you a funny story about another place where I was at a kind of communal situation where out in the country where the farmer next door had hurt his back and so we had volunteered to help him bring in the hay it was haying season and there were two 16 year old kids local kids who were doing the haying as well so in order to do haying you go out into the field and you fill up a cart with hay bales and then you drive it back and come to the barn and unload it so Nina and I were one of the unloading crews and the kids were another unloading crew the bales are very heavy so the boys would they wanted as much as possible they were sure that they could get them done faster than any of the the old guys you know the 30 year old guys who were our friends and so they were really fast but Nina said well they're all stacked in the cart why don't we just make them like a staircase and roll them down we don't have to pick them up and we unloaded the hay trucks faster than the kids did they were very disappointed and I just got a notice that we're getting short on time I can't believe it's gone by so quickly so I wanted to move to the legacy of the counter culture where do you see the lasting impact on local state, national international level I just want to say something quickly and I don't know if it fits in but I don't care I think of Janice Joflin fairly often and I think that she left us with something really good forget the accidental heroin overdose and all that she was a woman who believed in being your deepest self and being exactly who you are and I felt she was very empowering she was to me and I think two other women as well and I miss her in our world she lived not very long not long enough but hard out and I want to set the record straight she was not one of the guys and if I see that again I'm going to go to the ocean and scream she was a deep loving, caring very, very intelligent woman I'm going to add something to that so we were in the same office with Janice and I just had a little quick story one night because the band we all lived together one night from Janice and she was like hey Denise what are you guys doing tonight well I don't know we're home she was well I'm having a party and I just realized I didn't invite any women she thought she could get five with one hit but it was so cute they invited a bunch of people but there's no women so what did the counter what did the counter culture accomplish besides changing the way we eat changing the way we move changing the way we relate oh a few things perhaps let me think I don't know let's hear from the audience do you feel that the counter culture has influenced your life thank you alright anyone have any specifics they want to add I made several pages of specifics but they seem irrelevant everything it's an outlook it's a way of holding the world that has changed you can wear your skirts any length and you can have your hair any length I did write a few things down we really did want to change the world we really had we thought we were going to and we thought maybe we'd put acid in the water supply just so we could but some of the ways I wrote this and it's easier to do that than to try to remember what I wrote so it turns out we did change the world if not the way we thought we would through computers psychology and alternative technology through civil rights gay and other rights of gender and sexual orientation through recycling and reusing and looking at the costs of population out of control it was over consumption reducing, reusing, recycling looking, oh that's put in there twice, oops exploring our ecological needs and the inevitable crash with the future of a culture that was unwilling to change we had a lot of ideas that we thought would make it environmentally and about war and we were unable to get over the top with some of those but we worked at it and this brings us to where we find ourselves today now we can no longer ignore the danger signals ecologically or economically we saw the need to live more simply but sustainability as a concept was ignored along with the care that we have in our hearts for this wonderful planet that we call home alright I see quite a number of young people in the audience and I wanted to end by asking you if you have any advice for younger people particularly young women who want to be part of the process of change yes yes do it be proactive do what your passion is do what your what will make you happy follow your heart I think that young people are teaching me that's the way I feel too and I would say in a co-evolution quarterly I interviewed people about this a long time ago what I said was remember your friends and hang out with them like a quarter of the time at least don't pencil them in because you can erase them and travel all you can and don't be afraid take risks and jump off the cliff together but you are doing it I feel that there's a lot of young people out there making big changes and dedicating themselves to what needs to be done here but don't forget yourself don't forget to travel don't forget your friends take care of each other take care of each other create the world you want to live in and you said something to me once Alexandra about joy if joy isn't part of whatever you're involved with yeah there were some millennials in New York that were questioning what they could learn from the counterculture that came out of it was that you had to make it a lifestyle you had to live it and if you just resist you'll burn out you've got to have the fun you've got to make it fun or you're not going to enjoy your life and I think you have to have more color and more love thank you all for coming out and for your questions and thanks to the panel for your insights and contributions thank you Gretchen thank you Gretchen