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Welcome to Beachtown Bohemia. ‘Beachtown’ is a self-explanatory word. ‘Bohemian,’ however, can be ambiguous: it means different things to different people. Below, a vignette attempts to illustrate where I’m coming from in naming this newsletter and how a hippie may be a different thing entirely.
The summer before kindergarten, my parents bought a house sight-unseen on the then blue-collar west side of Santa Cruz, California. It was the Reagan Era and while most of America was watching Dallas, we of the coastal iconoclast milieu were still clinging to the remains of the Sixties. The house was in a mish-mash neighborhood both architecturally and demographically: bungalow, nineteen-fifties unremarkable box, Victorian, seventies diagonal-wood-paneled beach shack. The population was similarly jumbled. On one side of the block one might find parents who worked at the local Wrigley’s gum factory next door to a rental house full of UCSC grad students, next door to a carpenter’s wife in Daisy Dukes who parked her crème-colored camper truck out front. And at the end of the block, closest to the Pacific Ocean, lived the world’s foremost professor of marine biology. The house we had bought, a block in from the cliffs, was flimsily made and homely. It had only two things going for it in 1980: a decent price, and the salt air scent
Our move-in date had been delayed: the seller had rented out the three-bedroom beach house to twenty or so hippies who had been living for years in various states of nudity, unemployment and body odor with all their stray dogs and children. The tenants were protesting the home’s sale and dodging reality by refusing to vacate. My mother, a well-traveled, middle class, bookish New Yorker, loathed the hippies. While she may have shared similarly leftist political leanings, my mother believed in things such as hygiene, the proper laying of the silverware and the alphabetizing of the Miles Davis records. In other words, she was a bohemian. Yes, she had been arrested in Golden Gate Park, but for performing Commedia dell’arte with her acting troupe sans permit; none of the hippies causes moved or seduced her. For all her nonconformity, she had always held down a job, paid taxes, and expressed her rebellion via music, books, and cooking. Beatnik maybe, but never a hippie.
One morning, I felt a certain vigor in the air at the breakfast table. My mother slipped into her French blue linen caftan, tucked her hair into a sleek low chignon and tossed me into our Dodge van. “We’re going,” she announced, “to our new house to extract the hippies.”
We approached the stoop. She rang the doorbell. A dirty child just my age opened the door and called upstairs to her father. Then, atop the staircase, I witnessed my first nude male. He was hairy. His name was Aero. He snarled menacingly down at us from the top of the landing, “We’re gonna sue you, lady!” In my kid logic, I assumed guilt for whatever this hairy naked man was so angry about. My mother, however, stood her ground and provided me with a most memorable demonstration of female bohemian backbone. She stood there in her Pappagallo wedge espadrilles, holding my little hand and said through an ice-cold blonde stare, “Get the hell out of my house, AERO.” And he did
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Beachtown Bohemia arrives in your inbox every Tuesday.
On offer: an illustration, paired with a story, observation or short essay.
Themes such as: coastal California material culture, beach hair, our built environment, cultural norms, local flora, the taxonomy of taco sauces, etc.
Perfection.