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Wavy Gravy
Wavy Gravy, Hugh Romney, who is fast approaching
official geezerhood, is more active and more effective in the world then
he was decades ago. Back then when still known as Hugh Romney he stood on
the stage of the original Woodstock concert and announced...." What we
have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000!" He was at Woodstock as a
member of an entertainment/activist commune known as the Hog Farm. Today, the
Hog Farm still exists, collectively owning and operating the 700-acre Black Oak
Ranch and hosting the annual Pig-Nic. And Wavy lives a third of the year in a
Berkeley Hog Farm urban outpost, a big communal house he refers to as
"hippie Hyannisport" But Mr. Gravy (as he's known to readers of the New
York Times) has expanded his activities over the past two-and-a-half
decades to include codirectorship (with his wife, Jahanara) of Camp
Winnarainbow, a performing arts program for children which takes over the Hog
Farm for 10 weeks every summer, and the organization of all-star rock concerts
to raise money for a variety of environmental, progressive, political, and charitable
causes, most notably Seva, a foundation he cofounded in 1978, initially to
combat preventable and curable blindness in the Third World.
He may be best known to millions as a cosmic cut-up and the
inspiration for a Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavor – "I am an activist
clown and former frozen dessert," he says – but it is because of his good
work on behalf of the planet and its least fortunate residents that Wavy Gravy
has achieved his own brand of sainthood. His friend and satirist Paul Krassner
has called him "the illegitimate son of Harpo Marx and Mother
Teresa." Wavy says, "Some people tell me I'm a saint, I tell them I'm
Saint Misbehavin'."
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