All That California Female Energy (Another Turn on the Pony) [Hippie Squared]...

It was our first rehearsal for Salome, late spring 1991. I had managed to drag Mutahar Williams along. “Mutahah,” as it was pronounced, was his Subud name, but he was very English, his voice deep and resonant, like seasoned wood: an exquisitely-tuned instrument for poetry. We’d hit the coffeehouse poetry circuit trolling for players for Festival Dionysus, our anarchic take on the ancient Greek festival of wine and theater. I found Mutahar at Lizards on Santa Monica, or the Espresso Bar in the alley off S. Raymond in Pasadena. He was a professor at Occidental College and a considerable poet. The M in MTV still stood for music then, they actually showed videos still. Mutahar felt the time was ripe for poetry videos, so he made his own. Nature poetry, shot outdoors. I think I still have the VHS cassette somewhere. But I recruited him for the Ancients Chorus in Dionysus. He was one of those who remained skeptical of the show all the way through our run. Not as skeptical as the only professional actress in our patchwork company of poets, musicians, painters and general gung-ho creative types, who kept moaning, “This is going to ruin my career,” throughout every rehearsal. She never invited anyone she knew to the show. And she’d lose herself in back whenever the whole Gray Pony Chorus took the stage. Oscar Wilde’s Salome was our follow-up to Dionysus, and it would prove to be a fluke hit (as I wrote about last month, complete with cast and crew list, synopsis, etc.), but at that first rehearsal who could know? There were at least eight women there, and only three men: Mutahar, myself, and Blaine Steele, the director. (Peditto might have been there, too–our producer, and founder of the...