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the weekly outdoor productions and studying mime with Ronnie
Davis. Billy and Emmett would get together and talk about the
evolving phenomenon in the Haight-Ashbury, until the wee hours of
nearly every morning. Other members of the troupe would sometimes
take part in these discussions, particularly Coyote and the Hun.
Coyote described himself in a book as having grown up with very
smart, wealthy parents in Englewood, New Jersey. He was a very
imaginative but fat child who only learned to like his body after
having graduated from Grinnell College and then dropping out of
graduate school and beginning to work at the Mime Troupe,
studying with Davis. At twenty-five, he was no longer fat, but
was tall and handsome. He had an affinity toward Zen discipline
and a scholarly, intelligent mind, due in part to the emphasis
his family put on education. He was performing the lead role of
Pantalone, an eighteenth-century Jewish-Italian shylock in the
current commedia dell'arte production. He played the part well.
The Hun got his name because some believed he was his own
horde, while others felt he looked like a Mongolian Iago. He also
profiled himself in that same book. Born in New York City in
~937, he spent his adolescence as a car-hiker in the potpourri
city of Miami which, he would point out, was only built in 927
and represented the Pow! Pow! naked power of the South. He was a
child genius with an I.Q. of 160 and a Quiz Kid, but in high
school he hung around with "fourteen-fifteen-year-old
hillbilly boys that used to stand in Levi's and boots, with
thunderbird belts and kind of like denim or, y'know, a shirt with
whaddaya-call-it, a Western shirt, pearl buttons on the things,
drunk, drunk, and going like this and looking like Montgomery
Clift in that flick he made with Arthur Miller's script and
lookin' like that, y'know, with brass knuckles." He picked
up a political orientation from his father, an H. G. Wells Outline
of History libertarian, who thought the Russians were good
people. He went to the University of Florida on a work
scholarship, got a degree, concentrating in literature, and after
getting over the New York blues-life mystique, drifted to San
Francisco to meet the older members of the beat generation. He
joined the Mime Troupe as a writer-director and was in the
process of directing a one-act play about police harassment and
brutality called Search and Seizure, which he wrote from
the actors' improvisations.
These discussions that Billy, Emmett, and the others had,
dealt with the freedom being assumed by young people in
Haight-Ashbury and throughout the world. They agreed that the
ultimate goal [end page 236]
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