Good Life Project - Denise Kaufman | A Technicolor Life
Episode Date: February 18, 2021At 73, Denise Kaufman is the ultimate renaissance woman, an active member of the ‘60s Bay Area psychedelic rock scene who’s seen and done it all - and continues to do it all. The longtime singer a...nd bassist is a member of Ace of Cups, the pioneering all-female psychedelic rock band that opened for Jimi Hendrix, The Band, Janis Joplin, and more, and that shared the stage with the likes of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. She continues to play and record new music with the recently reunited group, which has been praised by Rolling Stone, Billboard, CBS This Morning, NPR All Things Considered, The Guardian, and has recorded new songs with Bob Weir, Jackson Browne, David Freiberg, and more. A deeply spiritual person who has been exploring energy flow and community connectedness for over half a century, Denise also is a trained yoga teacher who has taught Madonna, Quincy Jones, and more. She splits her time between Venice Beach where she practices and records with the Ace of Cups (https://amzn.to/2OOUqUj) and teaches Yin Yoga - and Kaua, Hawaii, where she founded the Island School in 1977, and lives on an organic farm, and surfs in her free time.You can find Denise Kaufman at:Website : https://www.denisekaufman.com/ace-of-cupsInstagram : https://www.instagram.com/marymicrogram/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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At 73, my guest today, Denise Kaufman, is kind of the ultimate Renaissance woman, an
active member of the 60s Bay Area psychedelic rock scene who's seen and done it all and
continues to do it all.
The longtime singer and bassist is a member of Ace of Cups, which is this pioneering all-female
psychedelic rock band
that opened for Jimi Hendrix, the band, Janis Joplin, and so many others, and that she shared
the stage with people like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane. She continues to play and
record new music with the recently reunited group, which has been praised by Rolling Stone,
Billboard, CBS, This Morning, NPR, All Things Considered, The Guardian, and has
recorded new songs with Bob Weir, Jackson Brown, David Freberg, and more. A deeply spiritual person
who's been exploring energy flowing, community connectedness for over half a century, Denise also
is a trained yoga teacher who's taught everyone from Madonna to Quincy Jones and so many others.
She splits her time between Venice
Beach, where she practices and records with the Ace of Cups and teaches yin yoga, and Kauai,
Hawaii, where she founded the Island School in 1977 and lives on an organic farm and surfs in
her free time. She's just an awesome human being, and I am so excited to share this conversation
with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.
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charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew
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what's the difference between me and you? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all flight risk.
Your mom, Golda, was actually a London Jew who was on her way to the U.S. when the London bombing broke out.
My mother was a widow. And so my brother was a little boy with her. And she was coming to
the World's Fair in New York. And they were en route on the Atlantic when Britain entered the war and London started to get bombed.
They were coming as a vacation, essentially.
She married quite young. She was like 20 or 21. And her husband had gotten cancer, brain cancer. And so she nursed him for some years. And after he passed, the family said, you know, you should take Julian and have a little time off. And they had some
cousins in New York. And so she came to go to the World's Fair and then basically never left.
Yeah. So the US became the home. And it sounds like music obviously touched on your life really
early, but it was also, it sounds like a big part of her life as well.
Yes, it was. She had a beautiful soprano voice and did sort of light opera and theater.
Although, you know, in her family, girls weren't allowed to really be on the stage.
So they could play for charitable events, which they did.
And there was, I think it was called, it was like a settlement house kind of place in London.
That was sort of a Jewish, like kind of a center for people of all different in the community that particularly
needed support. And so my mom volunteered there. So they did musical events there. So she had
opportunities. But, you know, when she came to America, she was not in quite a strict background.
Yeah. But I mean, at the same time, she finds herself in a country she never intended in staying
out with a young child in New York. Yeah. Had you talked to her about sort of like
what that season of her life was like?
Well, she's passed, but I had talked to her and she did actually did an oral history. It was a
rough time for her. The family that she came to, the cousin she came to stay with who from
what she said that her parents, my grandparents had hosted them a number
of times in England. But as soon as the war broke out, I think they felt that she might be a burden,
she and my brother, and she felt that. So she picked herself up and went to a boarding house.
And she couldn't legally work because she had come on a tourist visa, but she found
a little work in a doctor's office as a receptionist
underground, you know, under the table.
And then, you know, she was smart and charming and adorable.
And pretty soon she was able to go to Canada at some point and reenter the country on and
get a different visa with some help.
And she moved to Boston and that's where she met my dad.
Got it.
Right.
Because your dad was Harvard, right? So yeah, he grew up in Brookline. Oh, got it. So then how does the family end up on
the West Coast? My dad had enlisted and went to officer's candidate school in Louisiana.
And they married while he was in the army before he got sent to, he wanted to fight Hitler. So he
enlisted and he got sent to the Pacific. He got sent to, he wanted to fight Hitler. So he enlisted and he got sent to
the Pacific. He got sent to the Presidio in San Francisco and he was an army supply officer,
a lieutenant in charge of army supplies on naval ships. So he crossed the Pacific nine times during
the war. So that was his job. So my mom and brother moved out to San Francisco to be near him
when he got off and leave
and they all fell in love with San Francisco. Yeah. And what's not to fall in love with in
San Francisco? You know, it's funny though, because I think a lot of people think about
San Francisco and the Bay Area, the way it is now or the way, you know, the last really 10,
20 years have become, but when they were there, it was a very different place. And then also when
you were a young kid, you know, and your early teens, it was a very different place. And then also when you were a young kid,
you know, and your early teens, it was a profoundly different place.
Yeah. I had so much freedom in the city to go everywhere because it's a small city, right?
Seven square miles. And you could take a bus anywhere. And so, you know, I would take my
fishing rod and go down to aquatic park and just go fish with the old Italian men who were fishing there.
Or I'd take my bow and arrow and go to Golden Gate Park out by, you know, 32nd Street and go to the archery range.
And, you know, somebody would come and pick me up from the family.
But, you know, there just wasn't a sense that it wasn't safe for kids to just wander around.
And I did.
Yeah. And it sounds like you got involved in music really early on,
also on the same time in the children's opera there.
Yes.
Well, it was a really interesting little company.
It was started, it was only Norbert and Hedy Gingold
who were Viennese escapees from the Nazis.
They had numbers on their arms.
So they didn't exactly really escape,
but they ended up in San Francisco. He was the pianist for Bertolt Brecht for some of his work,
Mr. Gingold. And he wrote a number of light operas that were based on the children's fairy tales.
And so he had a thing called San Francisco Children's Opera, and they had a little house
in the avenues in the Richmond district.
And they had three companies.
So you could be there on the Monday and Thursday company or the Tuesday and Friday or the Wednesday and Saturday.
And you worked on a play for your company for three months.
But in that time, you were in the chorus of the other two companies when they had their plays.
It was amazing.
And Mr. Gingold would sit at the upright piano. And he was was the director and Mrs. Gingold did all the costumes and sets.
The plays happened every month at the Marines Memorial Theater in downtown San Francisco.
It was a great experience. That's amazing. Did you have any sense? I mean, I know this is
when you were sort of like single digits even. Yeah. I started when I was like seven or eight. Yeah, seven maybe.
Right.
Besides just feeling drawn to it
and having something about it was amazing,
did you have any sense early on
that this would be something that would follow you for life
and maybe even take up some of your professional interests?
I never thought that I would do anything.
I mean, music was central to my life.
I mean, that was, you know,
children's opera was, I was already playing piano from the time I was three, figuring things out on
the piano. And I started taking piano lessons at three or four and the conservatory of music in
San Francisco. So, you know, music was just central. And even my family, when we'd go to,
I kind of adopted aunties and uncles uh lived up on mount tamil
pious in marin county my mom's friends from boston and um we'd go have dinner together and then sit
around a little campfire outside at the house and sing folk songs from the and uncle max would pull
out an accordion and was very much central in my family.
My dad could not carry a tune, but he had a great memory for lyrics.
He was an English literature major, so he was the lyric guy.
And then my mom had a beautiful voice.
And so I got somewhere in the middle.
Not a great voice like my mom, but a good lyric sense from my dad.
And I kind of fell in love with him.
Right.
It's like you have the words and the melody from the from my dad. And I kind of felt that way.
Right. It's like you have the words and the melody from the two different sides. That's amazing.
It's incredible. I think when you can have an experience like that really young, I remember when I was pretty young, one of my mom's oldest friends played cello, I think it was in the Boston
Pops. And they lived in this renovated church out in the middle of nowhere,
like a couple hours outside. But every New Year's Eve, literally what used to be the front of the
church was their living room, which is this massive space. And they would have all of the
players from the symphony come on New Year's Eve. They'd all start drinking and stay up all night
long. And at some point, all the instruments would get
broken out and they would just jam for hours and hours and hours. And to this day, this is 45,
50 years ago. It's still so vivid in my mind. I think that you get imprinted like that and it
never leaves you. That's amazing.
But yeah, I think there's something about it that especially when it touches down that early in life,
I feel like it changes the way that you look at the world to a certain extent also.
There's a musicality to the way that you see patterns and interpret interactions.
I wonder if you feel that too.
I feel like there it becomes a part of you through exposure to or playing over the creative side of music, even if it's composing and songwriting, it becomes almost like a lens through which you process your experience of everything else.
Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, sort of both orally, you know, like the way you listen to, you know, the sounds of the birds or just sounds and rhythms that you hear in life i think
i mean for me also phrases and and words that i hear that trigger something or you know sometimes
i'll just hear something i'll write it down like it is your it triggers a lyric idea or a theme idea
you know yeah you um i mean, from this early beginning,
I know at some point you end up in all girls boarding school, I guess in Palo Alto,
which again is one of these places where when people hear Palo Alto now they're like, oh,
it's the heart of Silicon Valley and this very different place when we're talking about.
Yes, it was. Yeah.
Tell me what the scene was like there then.
Well, you know, the first, I went there for my last two years of high school. So the first year I was a boarding student and the second year we had a little apartment down there.
And so I got to not have to board.
But, you know, Palo Alto, of course, the school I went to was sort of established as sort of a feeder school to Stanford.
So the Stanford campus is right there. So there's that, you know, the intellectual and educational, you know, radiant status Stanford.
But also what was there was the nascent folk, the folk scene.
When I was a junior, I got to join the Stanford Folk Music Club.
So my last two years of high school, I was the only high school student in that.
And those people that were in that were all Stanford students, graduate students.
And a number of them had gone to the Freedom Summer in the South to register voters.
And so, you know, Stanford wasn't as politically active at school by a long shot as Berkeley was.
But there were those folks who were.
And there was also Iris Samperl, who had a bookstore in Palo Alto that he was sort of a mentor to Joan Baez.
And there was that little scene there. And then, of course, we lived when I got we had a little apartment my last year year and it was on University Avenue and the very top of University Avenue
was a place called the Tangent
and that's where Jerry
and Mother McCree's Uptown Jug
Band and the Bluegrass and
the Foggy River Mountain Boys, whatever
band was called. I used to go
hear those guys all the time. Right.
And when you say Jerry, we're talking about Jerry. Jerry Garcia.
Yeah. This was pre-dead. He was
he would, Zodiacs.
It would have been Zodiacs.
Well, the Zodiacs were, that was, that was more pig pens, but Jerry was in it.
Sometimes that was more an R&B band.
That's the band I hired for my graduation party.
Oh, no kidding.
No kidding.
I had heard the Zodiacs play and it was like that.
I love them.
So they played, we had an after party from after the regular party for graduation.
And there was OVX was my name.
So you've got like Jerry Garcia and Pigpen
playing your high school graduation.
Right.
That is pretty incredible.
Yeah.
Back then, were you playing with them at all also?
No, I wasn't.
And I used to go to the music store where Jerry taught,
but I don't ever remember meeting him there
or meeting Bobby there.
There was a fellow named Dick Jaqua, who also was a folk player in Palo Alto.
And he was school. I wanted to take guitar lessons.
So the school would arrange for him to come once a week.
And so I because I couldn't leave. That was when I was boarding.
And so I was I would study with Richard with Dick.
And he was a bright light, you know, because I had moved from San Francisco. And one of the reasons my parents sent me there was because I'd been like sneaking out to all the folk clubs in San Francisco for the last year and a half before that. They were just, they wanted me to be, you know, a little bit away from what was that scene in San Francisco. I wasn't doing anything really that bad, but it scared them.
Yeah. Do they realize what scene you were dropping into though?
No. In Palo Alto, they had no idea. No.
Right.
Yeah.
So, I mean, at the same time, you're getting really deep into music. You're getting exposed
to these incredible musicians. Like you said, Stanford was one energy. Berkeley was a whole
different energy, but the whole Bay Area at that time also really becomes a center of a huge amount of political
activism, which it sounds like you were really strongly drawn to.
I was into political activism from the time I was, I can remember. I mean, I started a
youth for Kennedy at my junior high school in San Francisco. I think I was on my first picket line at 14 in San Francisco, picketing a theater that
in the South, that was like the United Artists Theater, I think it was called.
And in the South there, that chain was segregated.
So I actually went with my little neighbor to go to a movie there.
And we got there and there was a picket line and we found out what it was.
We're like, we're joining.
We didn't go to the movie.
We joined the picket line.
And I still have this letter that I typed
out to the head of the theater chain, asking him to desegregate the theater in the South, you know,
and, and, you know, especially I think being exposed to the people that had come back from
voter registration for Freedom Summer. I wrote a song, you know, when I was 16 about Schwerner, Cheney,
and Goodman after they were murdered. So that was really deep for me, everything that was going on,
because, you know, it was too young to go down there, but I took it deeply. And of course,
folk music, you know, it was so, I mean, our drummer asked me recently, I don't remember,
you know, why didn't you go into politics?
You know, Denise, you know, and I was like, you know, you know, you know, and I was like, well, politics and music were together.
It was the same thing for me at that time, you know, it wasn't just one or the other.
I feel like sometimes we forget that.
I recently actually had a conversation with Ellen Harper, who was sort of, you know, along with her family down in Claremont, California, like growing the Folk Music Center there, which was sort of like the Southern California hotbed.
Yes.
And we were talking about this same idea that when a lot of people think about folk music now, it feels very kumbaya and peace and love and super chill, not realizing that the roots of it are deeply embedded in protest.
Yes. And, you know, before that, I mean, the chain gang music, I mean, you know, and the music coming out of the horror of enslavement, all of that, we can't separate.
Yeah, it's a continuum, really.
You end up not at Stanford, but at Berkeley.
Yeah, I went to Stanford for the summer, but I was already going to Berkeley in the fall. And again, you land on campus there in the middle of the free
speech movement. Well, that hadn't started. I landed on campus, I was 17 with September,
fall of 64. And I mean, I went there in front of Sproul Hall in the plaza that was the big
administration building. There was this plaza with, you know, card tables everywhere with somebody there representing every organization on the full spectrum of political thought, giving you their pamphlets and standing basically on their whatever their soapbox was and telling you why, you know, why, you know, SDS was the organization or why the anarchists were or why the John Birch Society was or whatever it was like, you know, and I was in heaven. I mean, that's what I went there for. And so I would be taking everybody's brochures and talking to listening.
And then within a few weeks of my arrival, you know, the campus police came and they took all
the tables away and they said, you know, we can't have any people from off campus, on campus,
sharing, spreading any ideas. These tables are illegal.
And so from the very first day that happened, I was basically right there. So I went to the very
first meet gathering on the steps of Sproul Hall at night. And so I was there from day one in the
free speech movement. I was still 17. So when we sat in around Jack Weinberg in the police car,
it really seemed that there would be arrests.
You know, by then there was sort of a core group of people that became the steering committee.
And some of them were my friends already.
And they said, you can't get arrested, Denise, you're 17.
You can't, you'll go to, you know, you'll be in juvie.
So you can't get arrested if they start arresting.
And, but that didn't happen.
You know, an agreement was reached.
So we dispersed in the thousands of us that were there. But then, you know, a month or so later when we entered Sproul Hall, by then
I had turned 18. So I was arrested along with, you know, 700 something other people.
Yeah. I mean, what is that like for you? Because you go into a moment like that,
knowing like you're deeply convicted. Yes.
This matters. And any number of outcomes may happen, including knowing you're deeply convicted. Yes. This matters.
And any number of outcomes may happen, including you ending up in jail.
Yeah.
And when that happens to you, are you shocked?
Are you horrified?
Are you resolved?
All of the above?
None of the above?
I think definitely resolved.
Some of my mentors, they were the Hallinan family. The father of that family was one of the best lawyers
in San Francisco you know it was sort of they they were veterans of protests and all of this
kind of thing so I felt like empowered by being with them and um but we had a Hanukkah service
in Sproul Hall it was in December um and by the time the arrest started, you know, they went on for hours because there were
700 something people arrested. I was I had like an armband because I was like an official, like
an FSM official, free speech movement official. And so I was one of the last people taken out.
And by the end, the reporters had left and the police got pretty violent. So I got my
shoulder torn up and I had to go to the hospital when I got out of jail.
I first went to jail at Santa Rita.
I mean, not at Santa Rita, which is where everybody else went.
I end up with the last, I don't know, maybe 20 or 30 people that they took out to Oakland
City Jail, which was a lot rougher.
I'd never encountered the police except for the nice cop who used to cross me on the way to Sunday school in the crosswalk,
Harry, you know? So I didn't have any experience of being beaten up and kicked and being thrown
into the elevator with my head, you know, launched into the elevator head first. That was shocking,
but I had read about it. I knew that happened to people.
Yeah. And I mean, that thread has remained, you know, not with the same level of violence,
but your level of conviction and resolve, it seems like has always been incredibly central
to everything you do.
There's another thread that sounds like starts to touch down in your life.
And in that, you know, the entire area and the culture around then, which is psychedelics.
Right.
Which plays into everything from the activism to the music,
to the whole scene. And that's, that's something that you step into as well.
So the kind of the whole fall semester was the priest movement semester at Berkeley.
By the time we got in the spring semester, I met some really interesting people who were doing
meditation, who were into meditation
and Aikido and some other interesting explorations that I'd always been into because my mom had done
yoga. So I had my first yoga teacher at 15 in San Francisco, who was not teaching me asana,
but teaching me meditation and bhakti and devotion you know so i was also always drawn
to that so in the spring semester those people kind of turned me on to they were they were taking
lsc i didn't actually start taking it from them but i knew about it because i'd be around them
and be like well this is kind of interesting the space they're in and uh eventually a friend
you know offered to have me try it actually Actually, what I tried first was DMT.
And it's like LSD, but it's very compacted.
And that was incredible.
And he was a chemist.
He made it.
And then after that, I tried LSD.
So that was probably, I don't know, I want to say January, February of that spring, spring of 65.
And it opened up what I had always felt, which was there was a connectivity of everything, a oneness to everything.
And I just melted into that in that trip. And I started taking it fairly regularly and trying to understand what that realm was and
how to access it more. Where's the integration points? I mean, how is it to be one and then be
an individual? What's that? Yeah. I mean, it must've been so interesting to have that experience
in the context of, on the one hand, the music scene is all about uniting, but
also protest.
The other hand, like fierce activism, which is all about clearly defined lines and advocacy
and fighting.
And then to enter the world of psychedelics, where on an involuntary basis for an unknown
amount of time, you're dropped into a place where there's a merging of everything.
I'm curious just how you process sort of like these different worlds and inputs and experiences
and lenses all at once. It was not easy. I mean, I, first of all, to find people to really try and
talk with and to be in a realm that was, I didn't have language for, you know,
and that was kind of when I met Kesey,
that was kind of a big shift for that because he was the first person that I
could really, when I said what I was trying to express,
he totally got it. And he, he understood.
This Ken Kesey and what's become known as the Merry Pranksters.
I don't know if you called yourselves that back then, but I know sort of like,
and the famous bus.
Yes. Yeah. So I had been playing with a band.
I wasn't in that band, but sometimes I played with them and,
and they were good friends. They were still in high school.
I was still in Berkeley, but they were a couple of years younger,
great players. And they had a band called The still in Berkeley, but they were a couple of years younger, great players. And they
had a band called The Answer in Berkeley. And the guitar player, Chip Wright, his father had been in
that Stanford writing program with Ken Kesey and Ken Babs and Larry McMurtry. Dr. Wright was the
head of the Unitarian School of the Ministry, which is a national school for Unitarian ministers in Berkeley. And they were having their annual conclave for all the Unitarian ministers
and wives down in,
I assume we're in Monterey on the coast as a conference ground there.
And we,
and Dr. Wright had asked us to bring instruments down and play this event,
you know, just bring the band down.
So the week before that we had had a very, the band and I,
the guys and I had had a very transformative psychedelic trip and we climbed
over the fence at the Greek theater and at UC campus.
And we were very high.
And I had an experience of basically walking off the stage in Greek theater on
air.
And at some point realizing that I was like, I was an eye walking on air, which when I fell face down onto the concrete below.
And I ended up, Chip and I, in the hospital with my face, two black eyes in my face, you know, a couple of hours later. And the's taking all these x-rays and finally saying, we don't know what's going on. We can see by the bruising on your face
that you've broken some bones, but we don't see any evidence of it on the x-rays. And I had this
experience of like kind of re-entering my body when I took that fall slowly. Like I felt like
if I re-entered it quickly, I would really be broken up. And if I,
if I could slow the vibrations down slowly,
I could kind of meld things and merge things so they wouldn't be so broken.
So after that happened,
I basically wandered around Berkeley for a couple of days with, you know,
two black eyes and a really beaten up face. I couldn't talk about it.
I didn't know. I was just beyond words with what had happened
and it was that week that we went down to uh down to a sea lamar and Keezy walked up to me
just like what happened to you and I said oh you wouldn't believe me if I told you he said well try
me you know so after that we ended up being on the beach all night. That was a big relief for my heart to be able to just talk to someone who totally got it.
Who got it, yeah.
And then next week, he came up to Berkeley.
I was back at school.
He came up and he said, I've come to get you.
You're coming on the bus.
So I quit school and got on the bus with him.
And he said, by the way, your name is Mary Microgram.
You already have a prankster name.
How was that? Thus then the Tom Wolfe, Mary Microgram reference and electric Kool-Aid acid test.
Yeah.
You know, I didn't meet him because by the time he came to do all the research and meet
everybody, I was already, you know, just about starting the ASIC cups.
So I didn't, I never hung out with him, but yeah, he did mention that there was this person. Yeah.
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Mayday, mayday.
We've been compromised.
The pilot's a hitman.
I knew you were gonna be fun.
January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th.
Tell me how to fly this thing.
Mark Wahlberg.
You know what the difference between me and you is?
You're going to die.
Don't shoot him, we need him!
Y'all need a pilot?
Flight Risk.
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charge time and actual results will vary. So Kesey, for those who didn't know,
was not the most beloved person by government officials and law enforcement. And he was
not welcome, ended up, if I recall correctly, faking his death and then splitting to Mexico.
When we were about ready to do the TriRIPS Festival in San Francisco, which was this
first big psychedelic event in the city, we'd been doing the acid tests all over, you know,
in Oregon and in Palo Alto. And, you know, we'd done a lot of acid, a number of acid tests by
that Muir Beach. But this was an event with a bunch of different artists and created people together to do this thing called the trips festival.
So it had the mind troop. It had some of the bands that had,
I think the pranksters did a lot of the visual cause we'd been really working
with making the film and, and light shows and things like that.
And I think Don Bukla brought, it's like,
it's like a synthesizer like that he could make sound travel all around the room.
And there were a lot of artists and musicians that were part of creating the
Trips Festival.
And out of that really came the music scene because Bill Graham really got
what was possible and ended up going to the Fillmore and renting the Fillmore
and everything kind of
went from there but just before the Trips Festival Kesey and Mountain Girl were on the roof of
Stuart Brand's apartment in San Francisco and the police the police had been totally
following him for I mean they wanted him and he and Mountain Girl had already gotten busted once
and they they went up on the roof and they
you know surrounded them and I think they threw some pot down or something but the police got it
anyway they got busted and that would be Kesey facing and probably Mountain Girl too a long
prison sentence in those days so Kesey faked his death and went to Mexico and eventually there were
a lot of the pranksters and the bus went to Mexico. But before that, we went to LA and did the Watts acid test and had some other adventures.
And then the bus went to Mexico.
I didn't, I love Mexico.
I'd already spent a summer there when I was 14.
So I loved it.
But I really wanted to play music in San Francisco.
So when the bus went south, I came back north.
Yeah.
So you come back to San Francisco area, but I mean, it also sounds like you're in a place
where, you know, it's been a chunk of time where you've been riding the psychedelic wave.
Your parents see you, they freak out a little bit, it sounds like.
A lot.
Right.
And basically give you a choice.
Like you're either getting committed to this place.
It wasn't actually that they tricked me.
Oh.
Yeah, it was a trick.
I didn't know.
No, I did not know. They, you know, they, they basically, by then I had done a lot of acid and I was really exploring.
How do you get to those states of consciousness? How could I get to those places without taking anything? How could I get there and stay there so that I would never have to come down? That's what I was kind of interested in.
And my friend Merlin and I, she was called Martha in those days, Martha Wenner.
And I had decided we were going to try and rent a house in Muir Beach.
And we were developing these trust games to try and give people a sense of what a psychedelic experience might open for you, but without psychedelics.
So we had this whole outline of what we were going to do.
And my folks said, you know, well, we'll help you do that.
We'll, you know, pay your first month's rent for your little house that you want to rent
and get you started.
But we need you to, we want you to go to the hospital and take a physical because you haven't
done that in a long time.
So it was a trick.
And I ended up in the psych ward at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco. And I took some hours before I figured out why I wasn't getting the physical.
But I ended up staying there for three months.
And I stayed there because the doctor said, your parents are really frightened.
We should do some family therapy.
You need to kind of not have them in this state they
could actually commit you to a much worse place than this and so you know and then the other piece
was it was only while I was in the hospital but I met the man who was recovering on the few floors
up who became the first manager for the Ace of Cups who was a mystic and we started writing music together. So there was always something for me
often about an apparent limiting situation that was a stepping or a portal into something really
good for me. Yeah. It's amazing. So this, you're talking about Ambrose Hollywood.
Yes. Yeah. Right. And it seems like a lot of gears start to shift for you then where music really becomes
the dominant force.
So Ace of Cups comes together and it's you.
I guess you didn't start it, but you're in fairly.
I'm the last one to join.
Right.
Yeah.
And it becomes, I guess, would it be either the or one of the first women rock bands in
the whole San Francisco area?
We were the first ones in the Bay Area music scene, for sure.
And probably one of the first in the country at that time.
Yeah, there weren't that many.
I mean, it's so through the years now we've connected with other people.
I mean, I'd played in other bands before,
including a band that turned into Moby Grape was the band that I was playing in
just before I joined the Ace of Cups.
And I've always been the only woman in the band and so when I met Mary Ellen
at Blue Cheers House on New Year's Eve 1966 the last night of 1966 and she was playing the blues
you know just on her acoustic guitar and just rocking I was like I'd never seen a woman
do that you know and I pulled out a harmonica and started playing with her. And she told me
they was, she was getting together with some other women and they were starting an all one band. And
it was like a, my mind, I was like, all women band, that sounds so weird. You know, I can't
even imagine it. Right. But I went over to check them out and yeah, we had a good time together
and I kept going back, you know, because it was fun.
Yeah. And the rest is history. I mean, you end up playing around a whole bunch, eventually
playing on stage with Hendrix and Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, The Dead. But I guess it was an
interesting time also, like you said, there were a lot of women singing groups, not a lot of women
in bands, especially hard rocking, blues back, you know,
like bands where everyone's playing the instruments, writing their own stuff. And it seemed like that was this window where music was exploding. The scene was exploding. A lot of people were getting
signed, but you, you were, and the Ace of Cups were really an anomaly. And it sounds like the
industry didn't really know what to do with you.
I think that's totally true. And we had five members, five lead singers,
everybody sang, everybody wrote, and we all had different musical influences. So we never felt
that we had to put ourselves in a particular bag. And, and,annon wanted to sing kind of a humorous song
that kind of harkened back to her Broadway mothers
or in her theater background, that was cool.
And if Diane wanted to sing something that was a little more country
or Mary Ellen more bluesy, I mean, we just felt like we could do it all.
And we were really influenced by the psychedelic music going on.
So we, you know, Quicksilver was kind of our big brother band.
And we were influenced a lot by the long jams.
And Marla was more of an R&B singer for sure.
You know, so I think our sets and also included acapella singing.
We'd sing No More War.
We'd just come up and put our arms around each other and sing No More War with our, whoever was there, the audience.
So we didn't, I think we just didn't fit.
Plus we were these, you know, hippie chicks and, you know, often barefoot.
I don't know what they thought of us, you know, the record labels.
Yeah.
So we didn't get offered the kind of deals that the other bands did.
This was also a time where the industry was, I mean,
the industry has changed and it's gone through a lot of evolutions,
but it was essentially bought, you know, Airplay was bought.
This was the time of Paola.
Yes.
And you had sort of like king and queen makers.
Yes.
And if they just didn't, like if one person didn't vibe with you, it was game over.
Right.
Right.
You know, I think a lot of those people that were with the record labels that were looking for something that was like something that was already a hit, you know, who was going to be the next Beatles or the next birds or the next,
you know, and I have to say for a number of people for whom success did come at that point,
it didn't serve them well in terms of their lives. And I always wonder what would have happened if
they had just been kind of working musicians for longer, and maybe they wouldn't have kind of taken the paths that they did.
And, you know, there's so many people that, you know, I just wish I could hear what their music
would have evolved into and their spirits and their souls. And it's a sad loss for a lot of
those luminous people, you know, Janice,
Michael Bloomfield, Jimmy, of course.
Yeah. I mean, the, the world took a lot of people way too early.
Yeah.
You guys are still playing from what I understand coming into 69.
I know you were at, you were at Altamont.
Were you playing there or were you?
No, we just, we were, I was five months pregnant at that point.
And I had gone with my husband, Noel Jukes, who's a jazz player in the city, in the Bay Area.
And we had gone there and we were sitting way up in the back, not near the stage.
And, you know, but there were 250,000 people sitting shoulder to shoulder on this kind of amphitheater, like dusty raceway.
And someone threw a quart beer bottle in the air. I never saw it, but they lobbed it from way behind us and went quart beer bottle in the air.
I never saw it,
but they lobbed it from way behind us and went way up high in the air and it
hit me in the skull. And after some adventures,
I ended up in San Francisco back at Mount Zion hospital where I was in having
neurosurgery being five months pregnant. And so I was,
I was out of Altamont before the violence,
before Meredith Hunter was killed that night
and before everything else happened, yeah.
For those who don't know the history, I mean, this is,
I think it's still probably viewed as sort of
one of the most notorious nights in rock history.
Yeah.
Bill Graham said it was the end, you know,
the end of the darkest night.
Yeah.
Stones are in concert.
Hell's Angels are sort of like running.
Yeah.
Yes.
Something security, something resembling that.
And it just, it's not a good day.
At that point, were you already on the way out of playing?
Were you sort of moving into the next season of life?
Not really.
I mean, I thought I would, you know,
because we already have had two
babies in the band already. So we'd been still playing, but I think my daughter was born that
April and my husband was in Michigan. We were, we were still playing, but it definitely was
less for the next year. So there were a lot of things going on that. So we were sort of drifting
in different directions at that
point yeah and it sounds like you um you drift in a very different direction also um a couple
years later you end up um in kawaii right but it sounds like interesting parallel i mean totally
different circumstances when your mom came here she wasn't intending necessarily to make a home
right similarly it sounds like you you go to Kauai originally
for some sort of Aikido conference or gathering
or something like that and basically never go back.
Well, yeah, I had come to Kauai for a summer when I was 15.
The summers when I was 14 and 15,
summer of 14, I found a program in Puerto Vallarta
and went and spent the summer there.
And the summer I was 15, I was really desperate to learn to surf.
So I got in this program that was here on Kauai and spent the summer here.
So I knew I had totally,
literally my mom had to come over and drag me home crying.
I was never going to leave. And I was like, you know,
I had felt I had found my place and my family and my culture, really.
The Hawaiian culture. I just fell in love and my family and my culture, really, the Hawaiian culture.
I just fell in love with the music and the people.
So when everything with Ace of Cups dissolved and my actually my marriage, too.
So Noel and I had split up and my friend Merlin and I came to Kauai and again thought that we'd spend a little, you know, a weeks or here or something like that. But we ended up camping for the summer.
We met someone who had some land and we had tents with us.
And I got my baby and my dulcimer in my tent.
And we fell in love again with this island for me.
And then by the fall, rented a house.
And by Thanksgiving Day, Mary Gannon from the Ace of Cups.
Because I had left all my my amp my electric
guitar my sitar all of my instruments were still in rent and Mary Gannon said she would bring
everything over and this will give you an idea of the times she brought 11 pieces of luggage
including you know a twin reverb amp a sitar a tempura wrapped in blankets, 11 pieces of luggage, my big Gibson hollow body guitar,
11 pieces of luggage, no charge for luggage. And she was able to bring the sitar and the
tampura on the plane. And that was those days. So she came thinking she would stay for a little
while. She came with her daughter, Talena, and then she never left. And she met her husband, Andy here, and they're still together. They have five more kids
and she's still here. Yeah. And that's amazing. That really, it becomes home for you,
becomes home for her. And it sounds like it also really, you're, I mean, music is always a part of
you, but you're settling into just a different season of life. Is that where you also start to become really involved in organic farming?
Well, we were farming in Marin County too.
I mean, we had big gardens and things like that.
And I always felt like it was really important to have land and grow your own food.
It's like I felt like I had this focus to do that from pretty early on. I mean, I stopped eating meat when I was
18, you know, and I was just interested in how you grow food. So, and I always felt that things
could break down in society and that it was really good to be able to grow your own food.
Be self-sufficient.
Yes. You know, and I didn't take it as far as some people did, but I took it to some degree. I mean, we don't live here off the grid.
But yeah, that was always a call for me to have land and to grow food.
Music was always a part of everything.
I never stopped playing.
When I got here, I got really into Hawaiian music and slack key and singing.
And then I got together with someone I lived with for nine years who was
from Oahu and was a slack key player and songwriter.
So we worked playing Hawaiian music for years.
So it just evolves.
Yeah.
It just kept evolving.
Yeah.
Taking a different shape, basically.
Yeah.
And I mean, we lived in a little valley and we just were playing more acoustic music.
I had a beautiful acoustic guitar at the time.
And I played dulcimer, which really worked well with slack key music.
So I just got into the culture in that way.
And surfing, which is still like one of my magic places is the ocean.
And just to paddle out anywhere, you know, is just some of my best ideas and lyrics and everything have come just bobbing
around in the ocean. Yeah. I think I haven't done a lot of surfing. I've done a little bit of it,
but what I think that the common perception for those who've never been on surfboard is probably
just like, yeah, you paddle out and you just catch a wave, catch a wave, catch a wave where the
reality is most of your time, you're just kind of sitting and waiting and looking at the horizon. And that can be really magical time if you don't
beat yourself up about the fact that a great set isn't coming really quickly.
Yeah. And here in Kauai, the waves are different than some other places in the world. And so
you might be paddling for your life the whole time you're out there,
but on a more mellow day, it'll be what you described, you know,
where there'd be time between sets and there may be other people out.
You can't take as many waves as you might,
if you were just the only person out there. And so you're sharing,
and you're appreciating other people's waves. And, you know, for me,
I just like paddle way out and just bob
around and just kind of let everything flow through. Yeah, it's a magical place. Yeah.
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Don't shoot him. We need him.
Y'all need a pilot.
Flight Risk.
In the next decade or so, you become one of the co-founders of the Island School.
It sounds like it was really built a lot around Howard Gardner's ideas of multiple intelligence, sort of an alternative approach to recognizing the intelligence in every kid and maybe how they need to learn and participate
and experience things differently to really fully flourish.
Yeah, totally. What happened was by the time my daughter was two and a half or three,
going on three, I, and I knew I wanted to stay here, but I had started going,
volunteering at some schools and visiting some schools. And I knew there wasn't a school here
that I would feel good about sending her to. And so I started reaching out to other people and
turned out over time, a group of seven women, we got together and started the school.
And I think for me coming out of the Ace of Cups, I was like, well, yeah, a bunch of women get together.
There's just nothing we can't do.
And the fact that we didn't have any money or didn't have, you know, whatever we didn't have, it was just that's OK.
And we, you know, of those seven women, one had a master's degree in education.
Two others had teaching credentials.
Others of us had other skills. My friend Merlin is just brilliant.
And she ended up writing the first grants for us so that we got the money to have a kitchen at our school.
Once we got rented a building, we found a building, we developed our curriculum. So it took a couple of years of work to get the school
from an idea to our opening day, which was 44 years ago last week. Wow. Yeah, but the school,
you know, we opened with 12 students. We'd spent till midnight the night before doing final
painting in some of the rooms. And the school ran there for some years. And then we were given a beautiful piece of land in another part of the
island, right adjacent to next door to the college,
to the community college.
So the school now has a 40 acre campus next to the college and I think 420
students pre-K through 12. And it's a preeminent school, you know,
on the island and one of the, in Hawaii, in one of the great schools.
That's amazing. Such a powerful thing to create. And I just love the idea of sort of like,
it seems like there were all these moments of, you're kind of like, well, we're getting the
band back together, you know, like whether it's to start a school, whether it's to do a show.
And then this notion that, you know, like there's nothing we can't figure out.
Okay. So we've never done this before. It's never been done before. So we can make it happen. It's all good. You end up coming back. It sounds like,
tell me if I have this right, back to the mainland, down around LA, Santa Monica, Venice area,
where it seems like, I know you had been exposed to yoga really early in life as you shared through
your mom and then through teachers.
But then that really takes a much more central role, too, both in your own practice and also you stepping out as a teacher.
Right. You know, I always had my own practice. as the guests of the electric flag in my Bloomfield was because I was starting to study sitar that Monday
with Nikhil Banerjee, who was this amazing teacher from India
who was teaching for the summer in the Bay Area.
And I stayed home to do yoga and meditate for the weekend
so that I would be ready to start to practice sitar on Monday.
So it had always been a very real part of my life.
But when I came to L.A., I came to I came to LA in 83 to go to music school.
So I moved to LA and some friends of mine there said,
what are you going to do if you can't surf every day? You know,
cause you're living in Hollywood and you're in school all day.
And I was like, I don't know. And they said, well,
you should come and meet this teacher.
So it took me to a yoga class that really worked for me.
It turned out to, it was Bikram.
And I ended up, it was not too far from the school
and where I was living.
And, you know, it was in Beverly Hills.
I was in Hollywood.
And so I just started going to yoga as my workout
and as my, you know, my practice
and balance out being in music school all day.
And, you know, pretty soon Bikram asked me
to start teaching there you
know he would have the more advanced students teach classes when he wasn't available or when
he was in India and out of that this whole thing evolved for me to be able to be teaching yoga
and then I started Ashtanga a couple years later and so I ended up teaching Vikram's for a while
and Ashtanga and it just came to me I never really intended it for that to be anything other than my personal practice. But, you know, yoga all of a sudden
started to gather momentum in the culture. And I never like advertised or anything like that.
I just kind of people would hear me or find me and ended up teaching people. I mostly did private
classes for those next years. Yeah.
Yeah. I'm curious how you experienced the culture of the yoga community. Because you come out of a music scene where, and also just a place where you are regularly coming together with women
and just doing amazing things. And to a certain extent, working with erotic culture where maybe
there are a lot more men, but also you're carving out a place of your own in the context of the island school, making something entirely new and defining the culture.
And then you step into the culture of yoga in the US in the 80s.
And it's different now, I think, but it was very patriarchal culture. You said, you know, like Vikram, Patabi Joyce, when, you know, like we're talking about Ashtanga,
it was all, it was the, the quote gurus were almost entirely.
Yeah.
Indra Devi was an exception.
It's the only one, right?
What was that like for you?
Because you're very strong and, and, you know, like you have strong opinions, strongly held
and you're capable and
you've done so much right did you struggle with that at all well you know the funny thing is that
Bikram my relationship with Bikram and I know that things got a lot weirder later but
when Bikram married Rajeshree um you know first of all Bikram
says it also kind of mentored my daughter
my daughter used to come to classes
and you know he was
she was 13 he was always good to us
you know he was Bikram he was a total character
but he never there was never
anything untoward that happened
to me or in my realm of
experience with him other than him
you know being dictator
you know kind of going than him, you know, being dictator, you know, kind of
going off on people, you know, but when he married Rajashree, he was in, it was in India and we were
in Kauai. And my daughter by that time was like 15, 16. And he came straight to Kauai from India
with her. And she had never been away from her. She'd never been alone with a man till she married him.
She had been with her father. You know,
that was the only man she'd ever been alone with her whole life.
And she'd never been on an airplane. She'd never been out of India.
And they married and they came straight to Kauai and stayed somewhere near us
in Princeville. And Bikram was just like, you know,
she needs to be with you and needs to be
with Tora, you know, because Rajashree was, I think maybe 19 or 20 at the time and Tora was 50.
So we met her, we were the first people to hang with her when she came. So, you know,
we had kind of a different relationship. We played the music for his wedding party in LA.
You know, I didn't have kind of bad experiences that people had later with Bikram.
Yeah. And I was even just curious about the, just the broader culture around yoga.
It was not just the patriarchy and it was all the people that were like taking on the,
the strictures of all of those practices.
And, you know, I mean, for me, I mean, if I went,
my daughter and I and her friend Britta went to India and studied with Patabi in 1992.
And, you know,
and I've been practicing a lot around yoga work since that time.
And just to me,
kind of what I really started to see was that the,
I don't know, the pedagogy of some of these practices were not even necessarily from the
teacher, not so much from Patabi, more from, I think, Iyengar and some of the Iyengar people.
It just got more and more, you have to have your hand like this, your foot must be there. This,
you know, it was like all these things that, because I, you know, I've been had the same kind of body, you know,
rather than something that was something that was a more inner expression that
flowed from you in your unique way, because with your unique body,
your unique spirit.
So that's the thing that really started to get to me in the yoga world was just
this, this dogmatism. And to me,
denial of, you know, these things that you were supposed to say that, you know, like, okay,
everybody's step three feet apart.
I was practicing the Kareem Jabbar was one of my students.
And we went to when Patabi was in LA one time,
I took him to a few days of workshop with Patabi and what, you know,
I'm standing next to Kareem and then,
and the instruction is step your feet three feet apart. that's not possible where did that gospel come from you
know he's like you know his feet are like and that's really was sort of the beginning for me
of the when i got into yin yoga and started really working with paul and suzy grilley and
were sort of part of the test group that was developing a much more functional approach to yoga. So that's when I eventually kind of stopped teaching
Ashtanga and started teaching yin. And that's been my passion ever since. I go to other places
in my life for my workout. I don't go to yoga for a workout. I go to yoga for fluidity and flow and depth and calm and staying mobile.
I was curious about the easing into yin.
For those who don't know, ashtanga is a very, very intense physical and aggressive,
depending on how it's practiced, approach to the physical practice of asana.
And yin is this really, it's much more gentle, accommodating, static,
allowing your body to release itself at its own pace.
On the floor.
You know, you're using gravity.
You're relaxing.
But it's also, my approach to yin, it's not just,
it's not like what people call restorative i mean it is
restorative in nature if you're really really stretching those places of in your core your
hips and spine that tend to get get more and more contracted especially in a chair-sitting culture
so i love the the energy of yin yeah and it can be very intense i mean you can be breathing deeply
as your body starts to let go you know probably, probably just, you know, being me that if everybody in the world did yin yoga and nobody
was doing anything yang, I'd be teaching a yang practice because I, you know, because I love yin,
but partly it was just because nobody was doing it. Everything was vinyasa or vikram or ashtanga.
And yin is to me the foundation. If you read in Patanjali how he describes asana,
the physical practices,
it's a complete description of yin.
Yeah, I agree with you.
I taught vinyasa for about seven years
and my body really gravitated away from it
and much more towards my own sort of adapted version of yin
because that's what I need.
And like you said, you look at this Patanjali,
fundamentally in you know, in the U S we look at, you know, the physical practices as the end, whereas the original intention was, this is just what opens and
prepares our body to sit towards the, you know, more with more ease into the more esoteric and,
and very likely deeper parts of the practice, you know? So it is interesting to see how
it's landed in the U S how it's evolved. And. So it is interesting to see how it's landed in the US,
how it's evolved. And I'm actually really curious to see where it goes over the next decade or so.
I don't know if you follow the conspirituality or some of the guys that are doing. There's some
really great guys, Derek Perez, Julian Walker, and Matthew Remsky, who have really been taking on abuse in the yoga,
spiritual world. And then most recently QAnon and what they call conspirituality and the rabbit hole
that so many people that are in the quote wellness community have gone down in terms of QAnon and
anti-vaxxing and all of those things. And I've been part of a group that's taken on to try and
counter that. I feel that turning oneself over and losing critical thinking, whether it's in
cults or, you know, yoga cults or QAnon cults, you know, that we need to nourish that clarity of thought or that
that discriminating wisdom that, you know, is in Patanjali and isn't any
worthwhile spiritual teaching and not go down these rabbit holes.
And so I always appreciate people that are calling abuse and cultism yeah you um in the last handful of years end up
getting the band back together right so some 50 years or so after you're originally with these
incredible women yeah ace of cups ends up back in the studio right Right. So what happened was there's a fellow named George Bayer Wallace,
lives in New York, has a little boutique record label,
beautiful label that mostly is focused on reissuing or issuing for the first
time music of our era, the 60s era,
either that was released and went out of print or was never even released but he is a connoisseur of finding music that and giving it great packaging great liner notes
great everything and up until us pretty much everything was already recorded so he had reached
out to me because we didn't we had never gotten a chance to go into the studio with our own music
and make a record and so he reached out to me wondering if we had music that was unreleased.
And we had one record that came out in 2003 made from old tapes that, you know,
Mary Gannon and Diane and Marla had carried around for some years that were like rehearsal tapes
and live gig tapes from the 60s.
But we didn't have anything of great quality we
just had this but our our first uh hero alec palau from a record label in england went through all
of those tapes and extracted the best of it and we may release a record of live music from the 60s
so fast forward a few years later we get a a call from George Wallace saying, do you have any music, any more that I could release?
And we didn't.
But we became close with George.
We got an invitation to play at Wavy Gravy's 75th birthday party.
And we put the band back together with George's help, rented a house, got a rehearsal space, played a gig.
And then after that, Mary Ellen, our guitarist
and Diana and I just wanted to keep playing together. And we all lived in California in
different places. And George made it possible he would rent us a space or help with airfare
or something like that so we could all get together. And we just started playing and writing.
And pretty soon he just said, you're like writing great stuff. And I love what you're doing.
You need to go in the studio.
So we found our producer, Dan Shea.
And we started recording in 2015.
And we went from recording 12 songs to 16 to 21 to 36.
So we released our first album in 2018.
It was a double album, 26 songs and a 17-page book.
And then we released the next album about eight, 10 weeks ago.
It's called Sing Your Dreams.
And we have another album that we'll finish when COVID lets us get back together.
It's about a half done.
It's amazing.
And I mean, you've also, you've brought in all these collaborators to jam with you guys.
When you get together, you know, granted you played little things here and there, or like
one or two of you have gotten together and played, but when all of you, when you're back
together in a studio, number one, in the studio that in a weird way, you were almost denied
50 years.
Yeah.
It was like really the first time the Ace of Cups got to, it was the first time we got to work on our music in the studio.
Right.
We had to learn a lot of things. Things changed in the 50s. You know, we used to sing backups. We sang it like to be back in a studio? Like when the first time, you know, you all come together and you start to hit those harmonies together, you know, like some 50 years it just feels like the most natural thing, like when especially, you know, these songs, if I ever played my song music by myself, which I did, you know, people say, hey, sing a song you wrote and play music.
But in my head, I was hearing all my sisters who weren't there singing their parts, you know.
And so it's just like that coming together feels so good and feels so like we never stopped.
It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well.
So hanging out here in this container of the Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?
Offer. offer i think it's all about offering into the oneness or offering into the
the collective that we are in whatever form is available you know and um for me it's been like
offer some things that i've explored in terms of movement and flow and offer that and offer music and offer.
Right now, I'm offering food that I'm harvesting to our local food banks.
That's like I'm the front line.
You know, my main job right now is farming and just being part of the food supply. It's all just another expression of how to offer
into what we are together. Thank you. Okay. So while I know you play a number of different
instruments, your harmonica is pretty much always on you and I see you happen to have it there.
Yes. Would you mind playing a little something for us?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay. Thank you so much for listening.
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