music | art | theatre & cinema listings for the hudson ... - Roll Magazine

he guitar face of folk singer-activist
Woody Guthrie bore a scribbled
message: This machine kills fascists.
The same slogan could be applied to
the extensive arsenal belonging to Wavy Gravy, which
includes a number of huge red noses, bowler hats,
rainbow suspenders and a floating goldfish on the end
of a leash. For more than a half-century, Wavy Gravy
has played the bumbling but knowing fool, at the 1969
Woodstock Music Festival concert, at anti-war protests,
in humanitarian missions to Nepal and Bangladesh. This
sly diversion has allowed him to win hearts and minds
while stealthily spreading potent messages about peace,
love and understanding.
For the better part of a decade,
Michelle Esrick has followed this
psychedelic Pied Piper with a camera.
The result is the documentary Saint
Misbehavin’: The Wavy Gravy Movie, not only a celebration of this
sacred clown and his good works, but also a mind-blowing civics
lesson on the American counterculture. Dizzying in its scope
and joyous in its execution, Saint offers a contact high for the
uninitiated. Like the man himself, the film provides a message of selfempowerment
that you’ll eventually discover tucked in between the
unbridled insanity. As Wavy says in one of the countless aphorisms
that tumble from his lips during the film: “Laughter is the safety valve
on the pressure cooker. If you don’t laugh, you’re gonna have beans on
the ceiling.”
“Wavy is the fool of our time, he’s the great court jester of modern-day,”
said director Esrick. “He’s just so brilliant. And a lot of people see him
walking a fish walking by, or whatever outfit he’s in, and say, who’s that
crazy guy? Or, who’s that fool? They don’t realize he’s a sacred fool.
He uses it to draw people in, and if you wait a minute, you do get
drawn in and he does transmit the most simple, beautiful messages of
basic human needs.”
On Saturday, December 11, Woodstock Film Festival presents the
Hudson Valley premiere of the documentary Saint Misbehavin’: The Wavy
Gravy Movie at Upstate Films on Tinker Street in Woodstock. The wise
fool himself will be in attendance with director Michelle Esrick. Seltzer
bottles and fright wigs are not mandatory but strongly suggested.
DDDDDDDDDDDDD ubu
Esrick was a New York actress and a leftie activist when she first met
Wavy in 1992; four years later, she launched an unlikely line of Grateful
Dead neckties. The band members, still in shock over Jerry Garcia’s
demise the year before, had no interest in promoting the merchandise.
So Esrick and her business partner tapped Wavy for the job, since he had
a long association with the band. “They love Wavy and he’s like Santa
Claus to the Deadheads.” The newly recruited spokesperson was also
motivated by the two percent of sales profits that would go to allowing
9 | rollmagazine.com
lower-income children to attend Camp Winnarainbow, Wavy’s finishing
school for clowns and free spirits in Northern California. In a tour that
hit New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, Wavy was in his element;
knocking off 101 press interviews in 25 days with the same combination
of loopy logic and Dadaist philosophy that had made him a fixture in the
counterculture movement in the 1960s.
“My mind was being blown every day,” Esrick said. “Like, I couldn’t
believe that he was here, he was there, he was everywhere,” she
said, referring to the many lives Wavy had led, appearing Zelig-like
at cultural milestones throughout the last generation. He began as
a Greenwich Village stand-up comedian and beatnik named Hugh
Romney in the late 1950s, was the leader of a commune called The
Hog Farm, became an icon for the ages as head of security and food
commissaries at Woodstock 1969—famously announcing the plan to serve
breakfast in bed for 400,000. (The origin of his career moniker, revealed
in the film, involves a man with a guitar named Lucille.) Along the way,
he crossed paths and mingled creative visions with the Beat poets, Tiny
Tim, the Yippies and Bob Dylan, sharing a mixture of Eastern religion,
bohemian freethinking and anarchic commedia dell’arte that Wavy calls
“intense elevated shenanigans.” (The meaningful madness has not always
been fun; Wavy was often tear-gassed and beaten at protests by cops,
resulting in serious spinal injuries that still plague him.)
Wavy, Esrick soon realized, was not some quaint tie-dyed
caricature, still living on the fumes from his role in three days
of peace, love and music. Building shrewdly on that watershed
moment, he had commandeered Merry Prankster-like bus trips
across Europe and Asia to help people in impoverished areas
in the 70s and 80s. Esrick was fascinated by the mystical way the clown
with calculated mania effortlessly buoyed people around him. “I just
saw that everybody that got to hang out with him wanted to go hug
somebody when they were done being with him.”
“It sounds so silly, but I was completely transported,” she said. “And
I said, I’ve got to make a movie about this guy. And it was more
like, I have to share him.”
Esrick began plans to do the film with her necktie business partner,
who had already won an Emmy for his John Cougar Mellencamp
documentary. But he had to fulfill a book contract and begged off,
leaving novice Esrick to approach Wavy with her cinematic proposal.
She had little previous experience, save for assisting Oscar-winning
documentarian Barbara Kopple on the 1994 film My Generation, about
the 25th anniversary Woodstock festival. While happy to play the fool,
Wavy is far from gullible and considered the offer sceptically.
“And I thought, Well, I’ll just see what happens,” Wavy said.
“I often have people say that they’re going to do things for me and they’re
promising me millions of dollars, and the next day I see them with their
face painted blue and a balloon tied to their ear.”
Esrick accepted Wavy’s wait-and-see stance and began lining up
investors. The process was arduous: she would raise a bit of cash, race
c o n t i n u e d o n p g 10...