MB Hair

Point well taken, Leo!

Here’s something I blogged somewhere, early the Monday, following the gathering…

“Across Cathedral Avenue: Peacocks, HAIR, and Hats Off to Nina Dayton and ‘Tribe’…”

So, who knew?

You can live your whole life in New York, and still be surprised.

In the garden next to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine strolls this otherworldly WHITE peacock, with a fan-span that seems to be about four feet… A Google check says that there’s a whole bunch of peacock’s on the Chuch’s expansive grounds.

The small park is actually called something like The Childrens’ Garden. Surrounding the area are a series of pedestals, with small metal statues, all emerging from the pages of a book… Each features a figure from religion, or literature, and a passage of their work. A closer examination reveals that all the mini-statues were created by kids, probably modeled in clay, and then cast, or fired somehow…

Where else can one see Georgia O’Keefe standing up with Confucious, and along side of Mark Twain…?

😉

Saturday night, the Synod House, next door to the Park, and St. John the Divine, was the site for the latest–and they’re saying the last–HAIR alumni reunion. And, like the event a while back at La Mama, it was really once again quite extraordinary to see so many folks reunited by a show that they had once performed in, and hear their music…

(Two years ago, despite having done a bit of business with one or two of the HAIR folk, I did feel a bit like being at someone else’s high school reunion. But this year, I knew some old pals of mine were going to be there, and had my own very pleasantly surprising moments when two folks from my past were very unexpectedly there–one of whom, a gal I first knew, as a wee teen, thirty tears ago!)

Nina Dayton, and her family, and Michael Butler, Walter Michael Harris, and Natalie Mosco, and a whole bunch of other folks did another great job, bringing this all off.

Somewhere in the early ’70s, HAIR actually did a concert performance at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. (The Cathedral itself is one of the most remarkable, and, I dare say, awesome spaces, in New York.) The album, for a while, anyway, became one of the rarer HAIR recordings.

And, just a few minutes ago, I received an email from a new friend I met Saturday night, mentioning that the peacock, in some cultures, is a symbol of immortality.

It occurs to me, that long after HAIR may have been forgotten as a cultural landmark, well beyond many of its social issues will hopfully have been resolved–

It’s that remarkable music of Ragni, Rado and MacDermot that will persevere and still, in many cases, be so very beautiful.

Jim Burns (James H. Burns)
May 5, 2008