Sunny: The Hippie Chick

By Dawn Natelle

Reviewed and Edited by Eric

Chapter 18 --John and Mitchie were gettin' kind of itchy Just to leave the folk music behind

Tom took over navigating as we got near to Haight. He led us two blocks north and then west to about the same position as our house on Haight. It was on Oak Street and faced onto the Panhandle Park area. We pulled up in front of an Edwardian house, quite a bit bigger than our house. It had a bigger front lawn, which was covered in vehicles not grass.

“Pull up there on the right,” Tom said. “No one will pull in behind you there.”

There was a big, colorful sign over the porch to the house that read “Middle Earth” in a modern melting-look typeface. We all got out of the van and climbed the steps to the house, with Goldie holding her new treasure. “You have to come in,” Tom insisted. “There is something I want to show you.” We didn’t take much convincing. On the way home Tom and Goldie had explained that they lived in a cooperative commune, and Sunny and especially Melanie wanted to see how it all worked.

Inside Goldie headed up to their room to change the baby while Tom took us into the rest of the house. There was music playing in one of the side rooms, probably the parlor of the original house. A huge man with long hair and a longer beard came out.

“Gandalf,” Tom said. “Let me introduce you to some new friends: this is Mitch, Sunny and Melanie. Guys, this is Gandalf, the leader of the steering committee.”

“We don’t have vacancies right now, Tom,” Gandalf said. He didn’t look like the real Gandalf from the book. He was stout, not slender, and not all that tall. But he did sport a floppy peaked cap and a grey cloak.

“They aren’t looking to join,” Tom said. “They have a house on Haight, not too far away.”

Sunny had moved towards the music, and I could tell she wished she had her guitar, which was back in the van But when she got into the room she started singing. It was a cover of the Beatles’ Eight Days a Week and as she started to sing, the band members each stopped for a second, smiled and then caught up on the beat. They didn’t all pause at the same time though, so the song continued. When the song was over, a tall lanky fellow spoke.

“Hi. I’m Strider. That was amazing. Do you know any others?”

“Do you guys know Creeque Alley?” Sunny said. She had been singing the song for the past few weeks since it first came out.

“Yeah. Maybe. It’s new, so we haven’t played it much,” Strider said. Sunny looked at an acoustic guitar sitting against the wall. “Do you mind?” She asked, picking it up and starting to tune it. Strider nodded his approval. Sunny played the intro to the song, with the band joining in with her and she started singing the Mamas and Papas’ song.

When the song was finished Strider started to applaud, and soon the rest of the band was following suit. “It’s official,” Strider said. “You’re part of the band.”

“No, I’m not,” Sunny replied. “I said no to Big Brother and I’m saying no to you.”

Strider and the others in the band looked stricken. “But your voice is perfect for us, and with you we could go from being a two-bit bar band to getting a record deal.”

“Sorry guys, But I will sing a bit with you now if you want to jam,” Sunny said.

Melanie and I left at that point as Tom led us upstairs to their room. Or more correctly rooms. He went over and gave a kiss to his wife, who was nursing Summer on the bed. He then took them to the adjoining room, which was his studio. He fiddled with some equipment and a gas jet started burning a hot-looking flame. While he was doing this Melanie and I were marveling at the blown glass art that covered almost every square inch of space in the place.

“I do glass blowing sculpture,” Tom said, picking up an 18-inch long rod of translucent red glass. He held it in the flame.

“I was lucky enough to meet a guy about five years ago who taught me,” Tom said, slowly turning the rod. “I’ve been on my own for just over a year.”

He melted a large drop of the red onto a metal device that looked like a turntable. Then he drew out a bead of glass that they soon recognized as a capital M. He used a metal stick to shape the sides and serifs of the letter out. Then he took a yellow rod and once it was hot enough, he added a capital E to the slowly solidifying M and used the metal stick to push it over to one side, making it largely vertical. Next came a white rod to make an A from the middle of the M towards what they later realized was the front. A fully transparent rod made an L that came off the end of the A and was shaped into a horse’s head with a serif forming a horn. It was a unicorn.

The N from a green bar went at the other end and formed the rear of what was starting to look like a sled or wagon. Another transparent I formed the body of the animal, and Tom finished up with another E in yellow that mirrored the first E to form the second side of the wagon. He then used a knife thing to slice the cooling glass from the initial base.

“That’s going to be hot for about an hour,” Tom said. “But it is my gift to you for all you did for Goldie and me this week.”

Melanie was speechless with her eyes wide at the beautiful creation that had been made from the letters of her name. She could still see where the letters were and was pretty sure she could show someone how it had been made, but if you didn’t know it just looked like a beautiful creation. “Thank you, it’s beautiful,” she was finally able to say.

“I think Goldie and Summer are ready to go downstairs now,” Tom said. “The baby will have to meet all the other people in the house.”

When they walked into the parlor, Sunny saw the baby and stopped singing in mid-word. The band also stopped almost as soon as they noticed the tiny bundle in Goldie’s arms. They all crowded around to say hi, but then moved back to their positions on the stage. They were replaced by what must have been all the females in the house. The women’s attention span on the baby was much longer, and all demanded a chance to hold the little one. Finally, Summer had enough and started to cry. Goldie was at the far end of the crowd at this point, so Melanie took the bawling baby, intending to take her to her mother. Surprisingly Summer immediately stopped crying when she recognized the familiar-smelling girl and snuggled into her breast. It was only when the baby started rooting around for her nipple that a red-faced Melanie handed the tiny infant back to her mother, who did start to nurse her again, causing all the women to say ‘ahh.’

At this point Tom came over to Melanie and me (Sunny hovered with the others around the nursing baby.) “Goldie and I are not very religious,” he said, “so instead of godparents we would like to name you and Sunny as Earth-parents to our daughter. Would you accept?”

Sunny had apparently heard, because she turned to Tom and said: “I would love to be little Summer’s Earth-mother. Becoming any kind of mother is a dream to me. We accept.”

“Can I be Earth-auntie then?” Melanie begged, and Goldie nodded her agreement.

“A rite. A ritual,” Gandalf crowed eagerly. “We must have a ritual.”

So, after Summer was fed there was a small ritual held in the main room of the house. Gandalf started speaking in gibberish. I looked at Tom, and he leaned over and told me that the man was speaking in Elvish.

“But no one else in the house speaks it, so we don’t know how accurate it is, or if is it even close to the language in the books. We just kinda go along with the flow.”

So Gandalf droned on for another half hour, and finally finished, telling us in English that we were now the Earth-parents of the little babe, which brought a huge smile to the face of Sunny.

Goldie and Tom then took us back up to their rooms, where Sunny marveled at Tom’s glass creations. He showed Sunny the one he had made for Melanie, and she explained how he had used her name as the base of the creation.

Then Goldie came over with a larger, much more complex piece and handed it to Sunny. It contained dozens of colors, and it looked like the head of a lion with all the colors forming the mane.

Tom then handed me another larger shape. This one was all in black glass, and occasionally dark grey. It was a dragon and the only color to it was a spear of red-orange glass coming out the open mouth, representing fire. It was magnificent.

“These take a bit longer than the one I made for Melanie,” Tom explained. “As you saw, I can turn out a simple one like that in under an hour. These take nearly a month, although that it not steady. I work on these for a few hours a day, then do a few simpler things to let my imagination and creativity recover.”

“They are magnificent,” Sunny said as she stared at the colorful unicorn head.

“We want you to have them,” Goldie said. “For all you did for us.”

“It is too much,” I said, noting that there was a price of $150 on the shelf these two had been taken from.

“Nonsense,” Tom said as he wrapped the two pieces in old newspapers to protect them in a box he was putting them into. “Besides, it is not us that gets the money if they were to sell. The commune takes all the cash.”

“How does that work?” I asked. “I mean this is your creativity and artistry. You should gain by it.”

“That isn’t how the leaders think,” Tom said. “I am starting to agree with your ideas though. In theory everyone works and produces what they can, and we all benefit. But the four leaders consider sitting in their meetings each night to be their contribution. The money the band earns playing in the bar goes into the pot, and we four artisans are expected to put our earnings in too. There is a girl who makes gorgeous candles, a leatherworker who does belts, hats, boots and shoes, and a metal worker who makes stuff like this, but in metal not glass. Then there are the women, who do all the cooking, baking, cleaning and other menial chores.”

“You didn’t mention Dori and Meri,” Goldie added. “They sell weed and acid on Haight. They probably make more than the rest of us together. Plus getting drugs at cost for the commune.”

Melanie’s sculpture, now cool enough to handle, was laid on top of the box containing the other items. We apologized and said we needed to get home soon, so I took the precious box and carried it down to the van. We met Gandalf on the way, and he said: “Oh, did you buy something?”

“He’s just checking to make sure we didn’t get any cash to turn over,” Tom whispered to me. Then, in a louder voice he replied to the leader. “No, we just gave them some trinkets to pay back for all they did for us.”

Gandalf peeked in the box, seeing Melanie’s small treasure on the top of the wrapped items. “Just little bits,” he said approvingly. “Tell your friends where you got them.”

We were soon in the car, with Sunny holding the box of treasures on her lap as I drove. It was only a minute later that we pulled into the house. We went into the place, with Sunny cradling the box until she got upstairs. She looked around to find a suitable spot to display them.

I saw some letters on the table and rifled through them. “We got two, no three letters from Ben,” I said. “Mary must have brought our mail up. Could have done without all these bills though.”

“Oh, Ben,” Sunny squeaked. “I forgot all about him. I’ll have to write a letter tonight, and another tomorrow to catch up. I know he lives for mail from home over there. Luckily Mary will have been writing, and I know those are the letters he treasures most.”