Everyone who resided at Williams College had a job to pay the rent, and were generally fairly active people when not at work. Darryl had a part time gig at a cheese store on Vine Street, close to the Shattuck Co-op, which had just expanded their imported cheese section and was now offering budget blocks of Finnish lappi, muenster, and gouda.

Leading up to a quieter side street away from from the busy parking lot of the Coop where Volvos and Volkswagens and other small imported cars vied for parking, the corner of Vine Street and Shattuck offered a popular laundromat on one corner where the tubs and driers constantly revolved, one Maytag always had a quarter stuck in the slot, allowing for a perpetual free wash. Across from the laundromat was a large restaurant called Pantry Shelf. The waitresses wore pastel uniforms and the hovered behind a real soda fountain in the rear that served a bit of NY, a deli menu including chocolate egg cremes and celery spritzers. That was a very friendly place which welcomed every customer, and the waitresses remained working there for years.

The cheese store, where better heeled patrons shopped, was just down the street from the original Peet's coffee. Because Darryl was well liked at the cheese store, he was able to take time off work when touring with the Mime Troupe. Darryl would work in the back and sometimes behind the counter in a white apron slicing off orders from huge wheels of imported cheese. Within a few years, the cheese store became a worker's collective.

His friend had a part time job as a temporary employee delivering mail for the post office, and would drive around Oakland with her dog in the truck and delivered mail. One time, her dog ran off while she was around the corner delivering mail. She knocked on every door enlisting neighborhood aid to locate the missing animal. She tapped at one door and saw a flutter of curtains like someone was peeking out. She tapped again, and a gruff voice barked loudly, "Whaddya want?" She explained the circumstances through the closed door and the door was opened by a large man sporting a huge Afro dashiki. She'd interrupted what she said looked to be a Black Panther meeting, with guys in large Afros sitting in large African basket chairs, the walls of the entry decorated with an animal skin with African shields and arrows on top. She did find her dog that day. When budget cut backs arrived she was temporarily laid off with a muttered promise she would likely be rehired down the road, so in between she snagged a job walking horses at dawn at Golden Gate Fields.

Ed Leddy toured more often than not with the Marine Band.

Gene Schoenfeld maintained a medical practice in addition to his publishing and busy social life with other famous icons of the sixties and he was not around the estate too often. The man residing in the peacock house, which was an immense single floor space with kitchen and bath below a rehearsal studio, though from a fairly well-heeled family who owned a music publishing company, relied on a student stipend and worked as a teaching assistant while finishing the dissertation for his PhD.

I worked part time nights as a waitress in what I regarded as the hippest blues and jazz club in the East Bay and was enrolled as a fulltime student of history and literature at UC Berkeley while I lived below what was being used as a dance studio in the old gymasium on the estate. My boyfriend worked at Leopold's, also known as Leopold Stokowski Memorial Pavilion, which was primarily a record and tape store which was owned by the students of Berkeley and which was founded with the idea of distributing profits to support community endeavors.

A couple who rented the big two story carriage house almost no one ever saw -- he was a professional muscle builder and competitor and worked in construction, while his girlfriend worked as an exotic dancer. They were likely in residence the longest of any renters, surely from 1966 and to late 1974 if not beyond.

Altogether, the total rents each month collected by Dr Hopkins in the mid- to late-sixties may have soared to close to $1500 a month, out of which Dr. Hopkins paid the PG&E bill, water, and trash pickup for the entire estate (except for the carriage house as I recall which I believe was on a separate meter), material costs for repairs or improvements and maybe property taxes. As we asked little of Dr Hopkins in the way of improving the property, perhaps he and his aged father pretty much lived off what was left of those meager rents. Charles, the handyman, was given free room and board by Dr. Hopkins in exchange for working about the estate.

While people can argue the residents were the lively ones and existed apart and were most interesting all on their own, it was Dr Hopkins afterall who met and approved or selected residents from the rental applications and so he determined who would live on the estate.

Ed Leddy was a jazz trumpeter best known for his work with Stan Kenton, but Leddy also was a player at the Lighthouse and all the famous places that helped birth and nurture the cool jazz of the late 50s and early 60s known as West Coast jazz. He appeared on many lp's which were testaments of the shift from big band to be-bop. (The image on the right is Ed's own scrapbook of newspaper clippings of his music tours primarily those with the military.)

As one of the more curious coincidences, he'd played on one of the first jazz lp's I ever bought, West Coast Jazz in Hifi. At that early point in history in Los Angeles, my sister knew some jazz musicians, and coincidentally again was introduced to Ed Leddy who had given her a small can of rum babas, a confection that his aunt in New Jersey had mailed him on his birthday. This had to have been 1960 or so that I opened and ate the rum babas.

In 1968 or 1969, I didn't put together that I might have even heard of Ed Leddy until I saw Ed Leddy himself walking down from the manor house one day with a package. His aunt had sent him a birthday present, his favorite, a can of rum babas. What's more, the confection was put out by the same company, so it was an exact duplicate of the delight I had ingested nearly a decade prior. I was truly surprised when I saw that.

Ed had attended West Point Academy and played in the US Army bands. He toured around the world with them and played everywhere towards the end of WWII. Apparently he'd reenlisted after that as he was rumored in the mid-60s to be playing in the US Marine Band. He often traveled with them which is why he was so seldom seen on the estate. I remember seeing his scrap book on the table in Darryl's cottage once. His scrapbook is pictured above, purchased from Ebay by a military collector.

In 1969, a person Ed used to play with had recently died, and there was a record jacket near the turntable in Darryl's cottage. I noticed the title "Burrito Borracho" and Darryl and I laughed a bit about that as Borracho was the name of the character who Darryl was playing on a Mime Troupe tour.

Mostly the conversation drifted to Latins who make music and art, as "Latin" and "Mexican" was on the air with the Mime Troupe and an offshoot El Teatro Camposino as they were performing together at that time. And Darryl even was onstage once with El Teatro, back when the names of the characters were identified by signs hung around the necks of the actors. And Johnny's record aside from the copy we'd just listened to was nearly destined for the scrap heap drowned as it was in the oceans of rock music being released, as was a recording called Cuban Fire which was similarly doused and one which would likely never again see re-release until some music historian took interest. So the conversation that afternoon was something about the transience of art.

The West Coast jazz scene of the early 60s had nearly disappeared with the bursting popularity of rock and roll recording, with Los Angeles nearly as the hub. Most jazz players who wanted to continue with jazz relied on European tours, some relocating permanently to Europe in order to play jazz regularly. Other jazz musicians took on jobs playing television and sessions and tours with rock and roll bands who needed musicians to actually play the music. Ed survived by touring and playing with the US Marine Band.

Because we shared an interest in a particular delicacy, I told Ed about a wonderful restaurant called the Balabosta down on University near Mandrake's, the blues and jazz club. I had the idea he might want to stop into Mandrake's sometime to catch some of the major jazz that was pumping out of the club. I ran into him at the Balabosta one time, each of us seated at different tables covered with red and white checked cloths. We each had set before us a small dish of their famous chocolate baba a rhum.


http://www.jazzwax.com/2007/10/somethng-else.html
Retrieved: 7.30.11

The Williams College Tennis Court

In early 1967, on one of my first trips to the estate to visit people I knew who'd moved in there, I heard stories of how those theatrical types had just entertained themselves by recreating a famous scene from the Antonioni film "Blow Up" on the estate's tennis court. Peter Cohon, Ronnie, Darryl, maybe Sandy ... I don't know for sure who was on the court that day.


I'd just seen "Blow Up" over in Albany, as had half of the East Bay. All I remembered thinking was those mimes sure were noisy, weren't they?

There was a small cornet hanging from a braided cord on the wall of the cottage that Sandy and Ronnie were handing over to Darryl and his friend. And Ed Leddy by all reports had given a trumpet lesson or two to one of the residents of the cottage recently.



(Photo of Ronnie Davis and trumpet
"Vietnam veteran R.G. Davis, one of the founders of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, rides his bicycle to an Iraq war protest in San Francisco while playing "Reveille" on his bugle. Chronicle photo by Deanne Fitzmaurice"
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2003/03/22/BA125137.DTL
Retrieved: 7.28.11

Ed Leddy: Jazz Trumpeter

Darryl's cottage was quite large, an unpainted wooden structure with steeply pitched roof covered in forest green tarpaper. The great room boasted an ancient gas furnace which was never that I recall used, as that would have been futile because the room was wrapped around with windows. The floor of was covered with an equally ancient huge single piece of linoleum of indeterminate well-worn design, nailed in place around the edges and peeling away from the walls. That was layered with large braided woolen rugs or rugs with floral borders acquired on various thrift store outings. Furnished with couches, upholstered side chairs, occasional tables, and bookshelves with books and papers falling into each other.

The outside door led directly to the great room. A hard right turn from the entry door carried visitors into the kitchen, which was large enough to hold an ample kitchen table and three wooden table chairs all set beneath the window which afforded a view of the shrubbery outside. And a 1930's gas stove with a sink next to it set into a short wooden counter with shelving underneath for pots and pans, an area that was covered with thin curtains held in place by small brass curtain rods. There was a small gas wall heater in the wall of the kitchen that adjoined the bedroom, which was farther to the right through a door. That was at a different level because of the natural geography of the estate, built as it was on a hill, so you had to step up a stair or two into a small hallway and two steps carried you past the shower and bathroom facilities and on into a bedroom expansive enough to hold a bed, looking glass in a standing frame, two dressers, large woven baskets with lids containing clothes. That room, too, was wrapped on two sides with windows, under which on one side had built-in large cupboards and shelving.

Another cottage, set almost directly across the estate on the southern edge of the grounds, was much, much smaller and more primitive. This structure truly was ramshackle in appearance, and despite framed windows and a small step up porch under a small covered porch roof looked to be a building that had originally been erected to hold gardening tools, but which over the course of time had been improved and expanded upon. This small unpainted wooden cottage, no bigger than ten foot square, with a door once painted blue was the rental residence of a mysterious resident who was seldom seen on the estate. Squeezed inside was a bed, an easy chair with reading lamp, a small dining table with one chair, a stove for cooking and heating. There was a kitchen sink and towards the back, though I never saw this area, was the bathroom and shower. The tenant who was seldom seen was Ed Leddy. Ed lived on the estate for some undetermined number of years, certainly from 1966 to 1971, who knows how many other years on either side of that span.

Darryl Henriques: Comedian in Residence 1966-1969

So Ronnie and Sandy relinquished use of the desirable cottage and the Mime Troupe went on tour. Darryl Henriques the next season portrayed Borracho in "Olive Pits", a play which opened the tour in Delano and eventually won the troupe an Obie that year.

Although history remembers and often mentions Peter Cohon's (he wasn't Peter Coyote just yet) role as writer and actor, as I recall, Darryl was the only performer whose image was pictured on the poster, his face beamed out from the middle of a large blue star. That poster is missing from the San Francisco Mime Troupe official site, and to my knowledge the only place on earth you can view it is the lobby of Dell Arte International, 615 H Street, in Blue Lake, California.

While in residence at Williams College, Darryl Henriques stayed busy with the Mime Troupe throughout the year and especially during performance seasons. As a Mime Trouper, Darryl handled the crankies and made paper movies of his own. He was also an actor in the early plays about the parking meters and the telephone credit cards which the Mime Troupe performed at Provo Park in Berkeley among a number of other locations.

Darryl founded the East Bay Sharks, a Musical Theater Group, which also performed in parks throughout the Bay Area, including the park in San Francisco's China Town. The East Bay Sharks also performed onstage at the Freight and Salvage Coffee House and Mandrake's, both popular Berkeley venues of the time.

Sometime during this period, Darryl traveled to Mono Lake to be in a movie called "Shoot the Whale", which is still offered for viewing at places like Pacific Film Archives.

The cinematographer for "Shoot the Whale" was Philip Makanna, who'd recently aired a short cinematic piece on local PBS television station KQED (see San Francisco Cinematheque below).

Darryl moved from the estate sometime before close of 1969. Before he did, one of his visitors was an old college friend, Barry Leichtling who had run a rock palace in San Diego called the Hippodrome briefly in 1968 and who'd gone on to co-write a script and appear in a film, which had been released briefly to popular acclaim before being withdrawn for decades, now regarded as a cult classic, called "Captain Milkshake."

Darryl moved from the estate in 1969, but many of the scripts and ideas he'd been working on there found realization within the next short period of time.

In early March of 1971, the East Bay Sharks shared a bill with Commander Cody at Mandrake's where Darryl likely ran into film student Bill Farley when Bill was tending bar at the club. Eventually Farley made a documentary (2006) about Darryl, called: "Darryl Henriques Is In Show Business" and Peter (Cohon) Coyote found his way into that film.

And to conclude, Darryl Henriques is in show business.



http://www.cfiwest.org/sos/archives/newsletter/about.htm
Retrieved: 7.18.11
From Darryl's resume:

About Darryl Henriques

Member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. 1967 Park Season and National Tour of Obie winning L'Amam Militaire.
Founder of East Bay Sharks Musical Theater Group in San Francisco Bay area. Appearing in parks, schools, and nightclubs. 1972-76.
Writer and performer on Scoop's Last News Show on KSAN FM in San Francisco Bay area '76-'86. Voice of The Swami from Miami, Joe Carcinogenni, Jacques Kissmatoe, Rev. Clyde Fingerdip.
As a stand-up comedian has performed at benefits for such groups as the Rainforest Action Network, the Sea Shepherd Society, the Alliance for Survival, the Abalone Alliance, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Various Waldorf Schools, Fair, Media Alliance, etc.
Author of 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Pave The Earth, Ulysses Press.
Darryl played Nanglus, the Romulan Ambassador to the Federation in Star Trek VI, the Undiscovered Country.



Darryl Henriques, partial filmography
http://www.blockbuster.com/browse/catalog/personDetails/28066
Retrieved: 7.28.11

Darryl Henriques, partial filmography
http://www.moviezen.com/celebrity/darryl-henriques/filmography
Retrieved: 7.28.11

Darryl Henriques, partial filmography
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Darryl_Henriques
Retrieved: 7.28.11

"Olive Pits is an adaptation of Lope de Ruede's sixteenth-century farce, El paso de las olivas. The original is a short skit about a husband and wife who begin counting the profits from their olives the day they plant the olive tree. Olive Pits was banned at California State College at Fullerton. The Jack London Society had invited the troupe to perform it on their campus in February 1968. However, after learning from administrators about the troupe's use of obscene language in A Minstrel Show, the Faculty Council voted to forbid the performance. Four hundred students and faculty attended an anti-censorship rally on campus, then walked off to an orange grove where the show was performed."

The San Francisco Mime Troupe Reader
by Susan Vaneta Mason
(University of Michigan Press, 2005)
pp 57-58

San Francisco Cinematheque

"Originally aired on KQED TV (PBS) in San Francisco in 1969, the Dilexi Series represents a pioneering effort to present works created by artists specifically for broadcast. The 12-part weekly series was conceived and commissioned by the Dilexi Foundation, an off-shoot of the influential San Francisco art gallery founded by James Newman. Newman, who operated the Dilexi Gallery from 1958 until 1970, saw this innovative series as an opportunity to extend the influence of the contemporary arts far beyond the closeted environment of the commercial gallery.

"Formal agreement was reached with KQED in 1968 with the station's own John Coney designated as series producer. No restrictions regarding length, form or content were imposed upon the works, except for Newman's stipulation that they be aired weekly within the same time slot in order to gather an audience.

"Of the 12 artists invited to participate in the Dilexi series (Julian Beck, Walter De Maria. Kenneth Dewey, Robert Frank, Ann Halprin, Philip Makanna, Robert Nelson, Yvonne Rainier, Terry Riley, Edwin Schlossberg, Andy Warhol and Frank Zappa), ten of them completed new works, and two, Andy Warhol and Frank Zappa, submitted extant works. The tapes and films are far-reaching in their approaches to the medium and the circumstance of the broadcast series.

"'If the 60s meant anything as a unifying principle or idea, it meant a lack of caution that I don't see around much anymore. Certainly, there is nothing like the KQED of the 60s. You could barely get past the reception lobby today at Channel 9 with a proposal for a Dilexi type series. It was wide open: all the facilities, color quad studio cameras, location film equipment, whatever, were available at what was calculated to be their cost, an amount not to exceed $1,000 per production. The artists were commissioned for $500 each. It seemed daring at the time, perhaps it was. Anyway, we just went ahead and did it and, to a degree, it worked.'"

Makanna's piece was "The Empire of Things", an experimental narrative, using a text by H.L. Mountzoures which describes a post-apocalyptic culture.

San Francisco Cinematheque
1991 Program Notes
THE DILEXI SERIES
Curated and presented by Steve Seid

http://www.archive.org/stream/sanfranciscocine91sanfrich/sanfranciscocine91sanfrich_djvu.txt
Retrieved: 7.18.11

Sandy Archer and Ronnie Davis: Cottage Residents to 1966

Bay Area theater people had close ties with Williams College during the 1960s at least.

One of the cottages, in fact the one which journalist Phil Small had rented previously, had a steady line of theater people in residence for the better part of a decade.

Until 1966, R.G. Davis and Sandy Archer rented and used the cottage. Each of their names are legendary to this day in theater circles.

Sandy Archer is well loved and remembered for her contributions as an actress, teacher, and overall inspiration to theater throughout Northern California. R.G. Davis (or Ronnie as he was known to people closer to him) is the founder of what has become the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Trained as a dancer and in pantomime, "after studying with French mime master Etienne Decroux, R.G. Davis founded the Troupe in 1959" as an experimental project of the Actor's Workshop, "creating pieces, some silent, some with words, that were considered avant-garde. Today it would be called performance art. So, in fact, the first year of our long history we did perform pantomime." In their earlier performances the troupe was named the R.G. Davis Mime Troupe.

In fact, it was R.G. Davis's arrest mid-performance that "thrust the Troupe onto the stage of the Bay Area arts community" on August 7, 1965. "The Mime Troupe's performance of Peter Berg's adaptation of "Il Candelaio" by Giordano Bruno was stopped in mid-performance by San Francisco police on orders of the Recreation and Park Department. The Mime Troupe's permit had been revoked on grounds of obscenity. After the police arrest Director R.G. Davis, subsequent organizing efforts thrust the Troupe onto the stage of the Bay Area arts community." The subsequent benefit either to raise bail bail or pay for court costs attracted the attention of promoter Bill Graham, and so began a long relationship between the SF Mime Troupe and Graham. The Mime Troupe won the lawsuit, establishing the right of artists to perform uncensored in city parks.

Unlike most theater companies around the world, the Mime Troupe took its politics seriously. Even in the 1960s, Mime Troupe shows were not just busted for “indecency” and “obscenity.” The performances most often harassed were the most controversial like the devastating civil rights parody that was A Minstrel Show and the biting anti-war farce L’Amant Militaire, which a Des Moines, Iowa critic slammed as “shocking”, “unpatriotic”, “blasphemous”, before confessing “I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed an evening of theater more.”

(From Mission Local
The S.F. Mime Troupe Turns 50
by Mark Rabine
December 10, 2009)
http://www.sfmt.org/company/archives/50anniversary/articles/missionlocal12_10_09.html
Retrieved: 7.26.11

In early 1966, the SFMT was taking the show on the road. Sandy and R.G. also had another place to live in across the Bay and had been maintaining the keys to this cottage for occasional use. A fellow Mime Troupe actor, Darryl Henriques, knew of this pleasant, quaint, infrequently occupied, and most desirable Berkeley cottage and suggested that Ronnie and Sandy turn it over to a friend of his who was moving into the area and needed a place to live, which they did do. Darryl's compelling argument to convince Ronnie and Sandy was their having use of two houses was "bourgeois".

Another visitor to the estate during this same period was Julian Beck, founder of The Living Theater. I recall seeing the Living Theater present "Frankenstein" in Berkeley. But long before that performance, I was shown a black and white photograph of Ronnie and Julian standing together in conversation on the great patio near the mansion.

It's probably because I associated with some of these people back in the mid-sixties and being steeped in moving through the same times that I find myself relishing these memories.




http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sandy-Archer/134897503226235
Retrieved: 7.18.11

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Mime_Troupe
Retrieved: 7.18.11

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/21/obituaries/etienne-decroux-is-dead-at-92-master-of-modern-french-mime.html
Retrieved: 7.18.11


Audioclip of Ron Davis in 1998 in the interview by Celine Deransart and Alice Gaillard for the film "Les Diggers de San Francisco".
Contains actual footage of Mime Troupe Bust in San Francisco
http://www.diggers.org/mime_troupe_bust.htm
Retrieved: 7.18.11
http://www.sfmt.org/company/archives/minstrel/minstrel.php
Retrieved: 7.18.11

Staging the Revolution: Guerrilla Theater as a Countercultural Practice, 1965-1968
By Michael William Doyle
[First published in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s, New York: Routledge, 2002]
http://www.diggers.org/guerrilla_theater.htm
Retrieved: 7.18.11

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Beck
Retrieved: 7.18.11

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_theater
Retrieved 7.16.11

The purpose behind the Mime Troupe, according to founder R.G. Davis:

"The radical stuff we did in the '60s was a combination of avant-garde and rejection of bourgeois theatrical stuff. Anyone, especially Joan Holden, who talks about the Mime Troupe talks about it as if it was a political entity and not an art entity. And we were art people, avant-garde people. We did events and happenings and I performed with other artists who were also breaking rules, Tape Music Center and dancers and young painters from the Art Institute. I then got political, but that was because I thought that political people were more interesting. People joined us because we were ready to open up to ideas, anything that was subversive, radical, disruptive, entertaining and freewheeling. Then I left the Actors' Workshop and decided to play to audiences that seemed to be volatile, people who were active. I would say that's the definition of a radical theatre group. Otherwise you're playing to the bourgeoisie and telling them that they're stupid, or what the Mime Troupe does now, tells the middle class that they're really sharp and that the stupid people are in government."

(Encore: R.G. Davis
by Sam Hurwitt)

Ronnie Davis when discussing agit-prop:

"When the Mime Troupe first went to the streets to do short skits, crankies (paper movies a la Pete Schumann), and puppet plays, we didn't try to insult or assault people; we decided to teach something useful. We began by teaching general city-folk how to stuff parking meters with tab-tops, using a simple puppet-and-actor skit to inform them of the.free use of parking meters. Another skit in this vein, telephone credit cards, was also designed to teach people something useful."

R.G. Davis, "1971: Rethinking Guerilla Theater", in Performance (1), Vol. 1, No. 1, December 1971

The New Radical Theatre Notebook
by Arthur Sainer
1975 p. 50