Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. A portly, bearded, 74-year-old hippie clown, born Hugh Nanton Romney but better known as Wavy Gravy, he has been sending ripples of good will that have gently lapped around the fringes of American culture for more than 50 years. The subject of Michelle Esrick's doting documentary portrait, "Saint Misbehavin': The Wavy Gravy Movie," he is first seen practicing his morning prayers at his home in the Berkeley branch of the rural California commune known as the Hog Farm.
"May all beings have shelter; may all beings have food," he intones before an altar crowded with iconography, both holy and comical. "Bless this day as it transpires and help me be the best Wavy Gravy I can muster."
Given his nickname by B. B. King at the Texas International Pop Festival in 1969, Wavy Gravy, who physically resembles an older, shaggier Robin Williams, is the real thing: an authentic unreconstructed hippie idealist living the communal life, doing good works and advocating peace, love, and laughter, in the guise of a clown. The movie looks back to his roots as a Greenwich Village poet, traveling monologuist and, among numerous projects, organizer of the Phantom Cabaret with Tiny Tim and Moondog.
Along the way he forged connections with everyone who was anyone in the 1960s counterculture, including Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead. He is lauded by Odetta, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt.
In 1965 Romney married Bonnie Jean Beecher, who later became Jahanara Romney and has been his wife for 45 years. The film's most voluble commentator, Romney exudes an earthy warmth and steadiness. She calls her husband a hero, and "Saint Misbehavin'" offers nothing to dispute her words. Its only dark side is its mention of the painful spinal fusions he has undergone as a result of beatings by the police at antiwar demonstrations. He belatedly discovered that a clown costume served as protection, because the police didn't want to be photographed harassing a clown.
The person who emerges is a man who has long transcended rancorous political debate by embodying a holy fool. Since the mid-'70s he has run a Nobody for President campaign on the Birthday Party ticket. Traveling with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, he wore a jester's cap. The Hog Farm became a touring hippie caravan invited to provide security at the first Woodstock festival, where the group ran a free kitchen that provided breakfast for thousands.
We meet his cheerful son, Howdy Do-Good Gravy Tomahawk Truckstop Romney, later changed to Jordan, who was born on the seat of a Greyhound bus.
We also visit Camp Winnarainbow, a place teaching circus arts to children, which he founded with his wife. The movie follows him and his close friend Dr. Larry Brilliant on a trip to Asia, where, under the auspices of the Seva Foundation, a charitable organization supported partly by benefit rock concerts, the poor of Nepal receive medical treatment with an emphasis on sight-restorative cataract surgery.
As you watch Romney delight Asian children by playing a kazoo and blowing bubbles, you see exactly the person described by the satirist Paul Krassner as "the illegitimate son of Harpo Marx and Mother Teresa."
Make of it what you will: like its subject, "Saint Misbehavin' " is an unabashed love letter to the world that defies the cynicism of our age.
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