After Work

There is more work to be done

Over 50 years ago, Steven Stills and Manassas laid it down in Winterland. The cost of freedom is to lose one’s life in the body. I’m pretty well convinced that what Bob Weir said about death being the last and best reward for a life well-lived. I was there on Pier Six in Baltimore when he last played with Wolf Brothers there. It was a huge celebration and I was so happy to be a part of it.

So, I’ve gotten off work a short time ago clocking out after about an five and a half hours of continuous standing, walking, bending, and taking so many orders for food and beverages from so many people! Such fun - but quite physically demanding. I believe in the vision of the founders though and am having such a good time just being “another bozo on the bus” - onward, I say!

This takes me to an essay by Elizabeth Lesser:

We’re all bozos on the bus,
so we might as well sit back
and enjoy the ride.
-Wavy Gravy

One of my heroes is the clown-activist, Wavy Gravy. He is best known for a role that he played in 1969, when he was the master of ceremonies at the Woodstock festival. Since then, he’s been a social activist, a major “fun-d” raiser for good causes, a Ben and Jerry’s ice cream flavor, an unofficial hospital chaplain, and the founder of a children’s camp for inner city kids. Every four years he campaigns as a candidate for president of the United States, under the pseudonym of Nobody, making speeches all over the country, with slogans like “Nobody for President,” “Nobody’s Perfect,” and “Nobody Should Have That Much Power.” He’s a seriously funny person, and a person who is serious about helping others. “Like the best of clowns,” wrote a reporter in The Village Voice, “Wavy Gravy makes a big fool of himself as is necessary to make a wiser man of you. He is one of the better people on earth.”

Wavy (I’m on a first-name basis with him from clown workshops he’s offered at Omega) is a master of one-liners, like the famous one he delivered on the Woodstock stage: “What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000;” and this one, on why he became a clown: “You don’t hear a bunch of bullies get together and say ‘Hey, let’s go kill a few clowns.’”

But my all-time favorite Wavy-ism is the line above about Bozos on the bus, one he repeats whenever he speaks to groups, whether at a clown workshop or in a children’s hospital. I have co-opted the phrase and I use it to begin my workshops, because I believe that we are all bozos on the bus, contrary to the self-assured image we work so hard to present to each other on a daily basis. We are all half-baked experiments-mistake-prone beings, born without an instruction book into a complex world. None of us are models of perfect behavior: We have all betrayed and been betrayed; we’ve been known to be egotistical, unreliable, lethargic, and stingy; and each one of us has, at times, awakened in the middle of the night worrying about everything from money to kids to terrorism to wrinkled skin and receding hairlines. In other words, we’re all bozos on the bus.

This, in my opinion, is cause for celebration.

From: https://www.feminist.com/ourinnerlives/inspiration_lesser3.html

I find this incredibly freeing. We have only to let go. That’s about as hard as we make it.

Onward, indeed!

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