Shawyer dissertation May 2008 final version - The University of ...

through iterated actions and clothing, but they knew that the tourists were also,performing their mainstream identity, for example, with their neatly trimmed hair. TheSan Francisco Diggers, a group of theatrical West Coast hippies, even tried to radicalizethe tourists by holding up a large “frame of reference” to the world (Doyle 80). TheDiggers encouraged them to walk through this tall yellow picture frame as a symbolicgesture of radicalization. With this symbolic performance, tourists who had passedthrough the “frame of reference” began their process of adopting the hippie identity. TheDiggers’ “frame of reference” and the mirrors held up to the tour-bus windows attemptedto disrupt and challenge the Establishment’s fascination with the hippies and theirperformative lifestyle, and also made the point that everyone’s life is performative.Like the hippies of San Francisco, the Yippies of New York were very consciousof how their daily costume created a performance of countercultural lifestyle. In hismemoir Soon to be a Motion Picture, Hoffman explains that when the Yippies, hippies,anarchists, and street kids of the East Village left their New York neighborhood, theirappearance immediately signaled their difference from the mainstream culture of thetime. “We are already in costume,” he writes. “If we went above Fourteenth Street wewere suddenly semi-Indians in a semi-alien culture. Our whole experience was theater—playing the flute on the street corner, panhandling, walking, living protest signs” (Soon102). As living protest signs, they performed their political and cultural philosophywherever they went. Thus at the Grand Central Station Yip-In, the Yippies, hippies, andanarchists stood out against the usual crowd of soberly dressed commuters, young men inmilitary attire, and uniformed police. Just as the police wore uniforms and nightsticks to140