Sunday in the Park with The Old Hippie in the Red Shirt

Yesterday was the Fourth of July, which always means going to see The SF Mime Troupe in Dolores Park. Yesterday it also meant a visit with Mollie Maguire, who we last spent regular time with when she was three. Her parents and the Plotniks lived across the street from each other for a short time back at the beginning of the EPark days, and Mollie and The Great BZWZ were best buddies for a short bit of their toddlerhood.

The dear girl has fair skin, so Plotnik gave her a choice of caps to wear. Out of free will she chose the one she's wearing.



Mol is getting her Masters Degree in Public Policy and is in Saint Plotniko for the summer doing an internship. She hopped on the J-Church and sat in the park with the Plotniks, Ms. Mush and Ms. Ginger Snap. Mollie lives in Michigan now. Walking from the streetcar into the park you pass through the parade of g-string bare-butt boys on blankets.

"I'm not in Michigan anymore," she said.



The show this year ----ehhhhh. It was too long and too predictable but it always is a little of that. The problem is that this year there is no Dick Cheney to sneer at. For the past several years we've always had Ed Holmes to play Cheney and flip the bird at the entire audience of screaming hippies, hippies-for-a-day, ex-hippies and leaders of minor western religions, but this year: no Dick Cheney. Nobody to hate. You just can't despise capitalism nearly as much as Dick Cheney. So it was a relatively sedate show.

And it never changes: every year, after they sing their wonderfully warped Star Spangled Banner, modified so that the melody now only has a six note range, this guy rises up and gets the audience to sing along 'This Land Is Your Land.' A few do.



It's easy to jeer at capitalists and call for collectives instead of corporations. It's harder to make it into art. Often the Mime Troupe pulls it off. This year they had some good moments but mostly it was a sleeper. They must have gotten too far into the writing process before BP appeared on the scene.

It was fun to watch the kids playing ball down below the stage -- usually it's footballs, but this year we saw one football and half a million soccer balls. Then we hopped on the green Melbourne streetcar for the ten minute roll back to World Headquarter where Ducknik had the corn sticks ready to bake.




It was great to see Ms. Mush and Ginger S. and later on Silent Bill. And of course Mollie. She has grown up, like Plotnik and Ducknik's kids, to not be a copy of either parent but a combination of the best parts of both. And she'll be here another month so there's a lot more catching up to do.