The West Coast
Women's Music and
Comedy Festival
by Lee Lynch
I d id n 't recognize Robin Tyler with nothing
but a walkie-talkie on. Consequently. I never
go t to thank the com edienne-producer for
inviting me to read at her brainchild, the West
Coast W om en’s Music and Comedy Festival,
this Labor Day Weekend. My lack of fam iliar
ity with mass nudity aside (Girlfriend says I’m
the knd of person who doesn't even see naked
w om en), I found this festival to be carefully
organized, sm oothly administered, even —
an unexpected bonus — mellow.
N orm a Jean (see Amazon Trail, November
T
H
E
AMAZON
TRAIL
1985) had agreed to make the trip with me
several m onths ago, before she bought the
tw enty-four foot RV that Akia, a day-stage
perform er from ou r neck of the woods, called
a Hotel. And which another wom an enviously
referred to as bourgeois. Could this wheeled
culprit have contributed to the mellowness of
the festival for me? Katherine Forrest, author
o f Curious Wine, Daughters of a Coral
Dawn, etc., and her sweetie, seemed to think
so when they arrived h o t harried, hungry at
the multi-acred sum m er cam p turned lesbian
nation. Katherine organized her presentation
while we all exchanged notes on the state of
o u r literature and our com m on culture
shock. I’d at least been to the New England
W om en’s Music Retreat its first two years.
Katherine, an L A city woman, was even
newer to the scene.
Getting N orm a’s m obile oasis to the ou t
skirts o f Yosemite where the Festival was held
was another sort o f adventure. I'd never dri v-
en anyth i ng larger than a Ford Econo Van —
back in 1971.1 was less nervous about my
presentation than I was about learning to drive
a piece o f equipm ent whose dashboard re
sem bled a c o c k p it Norma took the gargan
tuan wheel first while I learned lesson number
one before we'd even topped Mt. Ashland:
stum bling around inside a m oving RV can
produce car sickness. I sat and felt the green
pallor drain from my dank face.
Lesson num ber two was simpler: RVs are
bigger than subcompacts. If you're going to
drive one, you’d better realize that some vin
dictive soul will have moved every dot from
every line on the freeway to someplace you're
not expecting them to be. And in case you
d o n ’t notice, the other cars on the Amazon
Trail will set up such a cacaphony of honking
you'll think you're a m igrating duck.
B ut it was lesson num ber three I learned
b e st D o n o t under any circumstances, hap
pen to be driving the first tim e you've ever
piloted such an enorm ous vehicle when you
begin the clim b toward Yosemite. And if
you’re d u m b enough to find yourself
squeezed into one of those too-small, sinu
ous steep avenues, with the Bekins moving
tru ck that just dropped the piano off at the
Main Stage plum etting downhill toward you
— do not look to the rig h t over the cliff, to be
Just Out, October 1986
certain you have enough room. You don't.
At Groveland I pulled into a parking lot and
let Norm a pry me, stiff, trembly-kneed,
breathless, out of the driver's seat She'd been
grand for someone about to lose her vaca
tion home. Every tim e I'd lost nerve she'd
growled out the com m and. "Give it hell!” Our
ascent to hell was all her achievement.
But the Festival, you ask, what about the
Festival? Please understand I was a writer
encouraged to make this pilgrimage by a
publisher who promised I'd meet lots of fans.
I did make it to the Day Stage twice. Once for
Pat Bond doing Gertrude Stein, as usual a
m oving and totally convincing appearance. I
always cry at the end and want to rush into
her arms sobbing, "Miss Stein, Miss Stein!"
and I went back for SDiane Bogus, Bay area
poet. I've been a fan of hers ever since I read
Lesbian Hands in Common Lives/Lesbian
Lives.
I also visited the Main Stage twice. Theresa
Trull's throbbing music lured me briefly to
the sidelines where I watched her small figure
mesmerize an audience of countless women.
The next night I walked over again, this time
with Bobbi Weinstock, a gay activist from
Virginia whose cruising-femme stories 1 could
have listened to all night. I caught some of
Kate Clinton with her and really liked her new
routines. Kate, that is, not Bobbi. Though if I
hadn’t been a married woman, out there un
der the glittery mountain sky, wrapped inside
the energy of those cheering w om an-m ulti
tudes, I suppose I m ight have found some of
B o b b i’s routines as appealing. . .
“ You’re a married woman now,” my
ex-cruising buddy Norm a would chastise
me. N orm a was Best Butch at m y wedding to
Girlfriend June 7 and donned a burgundy tux
to earn the title. For this trip I'd had a
sweatshirt made for Norma, black, sleeveless,
butchy as hell, with big red letters that read:
ROAD MANAGER. She proudly displayed it
to the packed tent at m y performance and did
a fine jo b of managing me, if not that unruly
precipitous road through the sky.
O ther than these forays to the stages 1 was
m ore likely to be found in the Festival
Sponsored Speakers’ te n t I heard Katherine
Forrest speak o f the current trends in lesbian
lit. Jud y Grahn of the proud gay history she
sets forth in Another Mother Tongue — did
you know there was once a whole tribe of
Fairy People, both women and men? O r that
the term gay, rather than being a male appe-
lation, goes back to the goddesses? Later
that day Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon spoke of
becom ing older lesbians and talked good
sense about rights and strategies in the
heterosexist world. I was resting in the RV
after m y talk when I heard gales of laughter
from the tent. I checked the schedule to see
which com edienne was on, but it was JoAnn
Loulan, author o f Lesbian Sex.
I also hung around the craft area a while,
signing books, getting to talk to the festival
goers, to Susan and fellow New Yorker Alice
Malloy of Mama Bears Bookstore in Oakland.
And to Jeffner Allen, author of Lesbian
[ fw
RealtvUroui
J> S
Philosophy.
Probably most im portant to me of all my
experiences at WCWM&CF was the time I
spent in my own backyard. RV parking has an
added attraction. The crowd seemed a little
older, a little quieter, a little less festival-
attuned, a little more like me. We, it turned
out, had parked in a military zone. Behind us
were two Korean vets, one from Chicago and
still em ployed by the army, the other also a
civilian, but still in charge of an enormous
num ber of military vehicles. The transporta
tion expert, a Captain when on active duty,
was full of Arm y stories. She had been on the
front lines in Korea and seemed both fasci
nated and repelled by her experiences there.
Over and over in her stories I heard a deep
warm caring for her sister soldiers and for the
Korean women. She lives in the Castro now,
surrounded by her Grandm a’s furniture in an
overpriced apartm ent
We had a sailor neighbor too, turned dental
technician, and she and Norma, also ex-Navy,
hung out together. All four servicewomen as
sured me th a t despite the isolation and fear
(described eloquently by Pat Bond in the film
Word Is Out) endured by lesbians in the
arm ed forces, there is no lack of us there.
O ur little encam pm ent in the decidedly
friendly territory o f Yosemite — tents, pickups,
cam pertops, field kitchen — got real homey,
with an everyone-pitch-in atmosphere that
made the W CWM&CF truly a festival for me.
A festival of dykes, a celebration of us in our
RVs and m ountain tents, in our clothes and
out, in our love o f music or o f literature — or
just o f women, women, women!
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