T Minus 63 Days: Kiva Time!

Our second week of rehearsals is over and we are now just nine weeks from opening night. Tonight is a big event for the Muwekma tribe. We are meeting at my house for a tribal dinner and videos, which will be followed at midnight by a trek to Kiva Retreat in Santa Cruz for a private "after-hours" party.

Kiva is a fascinating place. It is the only day spa in the area that is communal in nature and provides a clothing-optional environment with hot tubs, a magnificent sauna and a beautiful lawn and garden. They also provide therapeutic massage therapists for hire during normal hours. After closing (midnight on weekends, 11 PM on weekdays), they offer private rental of the entire facility for after-hours parties.

Kiva is totally spiritual (they aggressively enforce the non-sexual nature of their facility) and is a perfect environment to immerse a HAIR tribe into the experience of group nudity. Since it is clothing-optional, it is perfectly acceptable for people to wear bathing suits, robes, or whatever makes them feel comfortable, but my experience is that most people will usually disrobe after spending even a short time around others who are nude. Most people seem to be more uncomfortable remaining clothed in the presence of people who are relaxing in the nude, than to get naked. Once the normal taboo of seeing others in the nude around you is broken, it becomes a much less threatening thing to experience yourself.

We have a delightful evening planned. During and after dinner, we will be watching several very interesting videos we have accumulated about HAIR and the 60’s including:

• Peter Jennings’ In Search Of America - the making of a HAIR production at a Boulder, Colorado high school in 2001 (right before and after September 11)


• Berkeley in the Sixties - a documentary on radicalism in Berkeley, California


• Flashing on the Sixties: A Tribal Document - a documentary on hippies

Barb has planned dinner for the grill along with vegetarian entrees to accommodate all of our tribes’ eating habits.

At Kiva, we will all get acquainted with each other (hopefully most in the nude) and at the end of the evening, we will perform our tribal naming ceremony. We are going to have an altar and each tribe member is responsible for making an offering (a small object, either serious, humorous, or otherwise) in honor of the tribe. The altar will travel with us for rehearsals and performances.

Rehearsals are coming along well. Our last rehearsal of the week on Wednesday started with an exercise that we have taken from Tom O’Horgan’s playbook, an exercise is sensory overload. I will not describe it in detail here, because we will still be using it on members of the tribe who haven’t experienced it yet, but it definitely caused a variety of reactions from different members of the tribe. We then proceeded to a complete music review and concluded by learning Sodomy and Donna. In four music rehearsals, we have now gone through the following songs in the show:

• Aquarius
• Donna
• Hashish
• Sodomy
• Ain't Got No Grass
• Initials
• Hair
• Walking in Space
• Our Eyes Are Open (Walking in Space Reprise)
• The Bed

There is lots more to do, but plenty of time to do it, so this makes me feel really good. Add to that the developments in marketing (see my previous post about performing at the San Francisco Pride Celebration) and we are definitely heading in the right direction!

Peace to all!

Jon