What does bohemian grove mean

The hopeful candidate then returns this membership application to his first sponsor, who fills out a part of it which asks for information on "musical, oratorical, literary, artistic, or histrionic talents. Next the form goes to the second sponsor, who answers the same questions as the first sponsor in addition to listing five members of the club to whom the applicant is personally known. The prospect then makes appointments to see individually the members of the Membership Committee. He goes by their places of business or law to be asked questions about why he wants to become a member of the Bohemian Club, but even more to be lectured by them about what it means to be a "good Bohemian.

In the meantime, the Membership Committee has been soliciting letters of recommendation about the candidate from some or all of the club members suggested by the candidate and his sponsors as people who know him well. The committee also circulates a monthly notice to all club members, listing people being considered for membership and asking for any opinions positive or negative anyone might have on any of the people listed.

The notice lists the person's name, age, occupation, and sponsors. Finally, after this rigorous screening, there is the vote.

Nine of the eleven members of the Membership Committee have to favor the candidate before he can become a member. Three negative votes and he has to wait at least three years before being proposed again.

Gaining the necessary votes does not make a person automatically a member, however, for there is a long waiting list. Many hundreds of people are backed up to become regular resident members. I talked to one regular member who had been on the waiting list for over ten years before becoming a member. New associate members have no trouble claiming their rightful place — there are no waiting lists for men of talent.

It is not surprising that the club constantly searches for jinks material. The talented members not only have the two-week encampment to plan for, but they must put on some kind of performance every Thursday night from October to May. Even this brief overview of the club and its activities makes clear that it is a hour, months-a-year operation. As a recent president used to say in his letter of congratulations to new members, "You have joined not only a club, but a way of life.

The highlight of a Grove encampment is an opening day initiation ceremony called "The Cremation of Care," in which the campers are given permission to forget their worldly duties and responsibilities, and instead focus on having a good time, just like in the old days, when they were young and supposedly carefree.

Although the ceremony is very elaborate and has a long tradition, readers have to understand at the outset that it is a lark, a spoof of ceremonies, that has no deep or serious intent, contrary to what some conspiracy theorists have claimed. It is just what it claims to be: a way to ease everyone into a mood where they can relax and enjoy themselves. The scenario unfolds something like this:. The boys begin to arrive at the Bohemian Grove on the Saturday closest to the middle of July for what will be a two-week encampment.

In actuality, most of them will just attend during one or two of the three weekends included in the encampment, jetting in to the nearby Santa Rosa airport from all over the country, or driving up from San Francisco. As they arrive, they first get settled at their camps, then wander around visiting with old friends.

That night they have their first dinner in the huge open-air dining circle. They hear flowery welcoming speeches, they give a cheer to the "Old Guard," those who have been in the club for 40 or more years, and they pay their respects to the "Fallen Leaves," those who have died in the past year. But the highlight of the evening is the Cremation of Care, an initiation into the spirit of the encampment. It is all very fancy. The script varies only slightly each year. It is also a put-on, a mock of rituals — but it is a ritual ceremony nonetheless.

Postmodernists might call it a meta-ritual. It is meant to signal that the encampment is a time for relaxation, drinking, and fun.

It is a return to the summer camp days of their youth. To gain a sense of what it's like to take part, imagine yourself comfortably seated in the beautiful open-air dining hall. It's early evening and the clear July air is still pleasantly warm. Dusk has descended, you have finished a sumptuous dinner, and you are sitting quietly with your drink, listening to the nostalgic welcoming speeches and enjoying the gentle light and the eerie shadows that are cast by the two-stemmed gaslights flickering softly at each of the several hundred outdoor banquet tables.

You are part of an assemblage that has been meeting in this redwood grove 65 miles north of San Francisco for well over a hundred years. It is not just any assemblage, for you are a captain of industry, a well-known television star, a banker, a famous artist, or maybe a member of the President's cabinet. You are one of 1, men — women are not allowed — gathered together from all over the country for this annual encampment of the rich and the famous.

And you are about to take part in a strange ceremony that has marked every Bohemian Grove gathering since Out of the shadows on one of the hillsides near the dining circle there emerges the low, sad sounds of a funeral dirge. As you turn your head in its direction you faintly see the outlines of men dressed in pointed red hoods and red flowing robes.

Some of the men are playing the funereal music; others are carrying long torches whose flames are a spectacular sight against the darkened forest. As the procession approaches the dining circle, the dim figures become more distinct, and attention fixes on several men not previously noticed. They are carrying a large wooden box. Upon closer inspection the box turns out to be an open coffin, and in that coffin is a body, a human body that looks real enough to be lifelike at a glance, but only an imitation, naturally, made of black muslin wrapped around a wooden skeleton.

This is the body of Care, symbolizing the concerns and woes that important men supposedly must bear in their daily lives. It is this guy, Mr. Dull Care, who is to be cremated this first Saturday night of the two-week encampment of the Bohemian Grove.

The cortege now trails slowly past the dining area, and the men in the dining circle fall into line behind the hooded priests and pallbearers, following the body of Care toward its ultimate destination. The entire parade mostly white, mostly elderly makes its way along a road leading to a picturesque little lake that is yet another of the sylvan sights the Bohemian Grove has to offer.

It takes the communicants about five minutes to make their march to this new setting. Once at the lake the several priests and the body of Care go off to the right, in the direction of a very large altar which faces the lake. They are accompanied by a cast of elders, torchbearers, shore patrols, fire tenders, production managers, and woodland voices. The major parts in this drama are played by "associate" or "performing" members of the club, middle-class men with musical, theatrical, artistic, or literary talents.

But sometimes very important men have small walk-on roles that show they are just one of the gang when they are at the Bohemian Grove. They are "carrying a spear for Bohemia," as the saying goes, which means they are chipping in, doing their part, being good sports.

If the year were , there would be three spear-carriers doing a little add-on part. They are former president George H. Bush, actor Clint Eastwood, and fabled news anchor Walter Cronkite. The followers, talking quietly and remarking on the once-again-perfect Grove weather, move to the left so they can observe the ceremony from a green meadow on the other side of the lake. Drinks in hand, they will be about fifty to a hundred yards from the altar, which looms skyward thirty to forty feet and reveals itself to be in the form of a huge Owl, whose cement shell is mottled with primeval green mosses.

This Owl is the totem animal of Bohemia, found not only at the lake, but everywhere you go in the Grove, and on shot glasses, coffee cups, and stationery. While the spectators seat themselves across the lake, the priests and their entourage continue for another two or three hundred yards beyond the altar to a boat landing.

There the bier is carefully transferred onto the Ferry of Care, which will carry the body to the altar later in the ceremony. Once the ferry is loaded, the torches are extinguished and the music ends. The attention of the spectators on the other side of the lake slowly drifts back to the Owl shrine; it is illuminated by a gentle flame from the Lamp of Fellowship, which sits at its base.

A guy named Dull Care? Strange, but true. You are starting to get the picture of just how hokey this all is. People who have seen the ceremony before nudge you to keep your eye on the large redwood next to the Owl. Moments later an offstage chorus of "woodland voices" begins to sing. Then a spotlight illuminates the tree you've been watching, and there emerges from it a hamadryad, a "tree spirit," whose life, according to Greek mythology, is intimately bound up with the tree in which it lives.

The hamadryad begins to sing, telling the supplicants that beauty and strength and peace are theirs as long as the trees of the Grove are there. It sings of the "temple-aisles of the wood" that are made for "your delight," and implores the Bohemians to "burn away the sorrow of yesterday" and to "cast your grief to the fires and be strong with the holy trees and the spirit of the Grove. With the end of this uplifting song, the hamadryad returns to its tree, the chorus silences, and the light on the tree fades out.

Now there's only natural illumination from the moon and stars, and it's time for the high priest and his many assistants to enter the large area in front of the Owl. Then he invokes the motto of the club, "Weaving spiders, come not here! The priest next walks down three large steps to the edge of the lake. There he makes a flowery speech about the ripple of waters, the song of birds, the forest floor, and evening's cool kiss.

Again he calls on the members to forsake their usual concerns: "Shake off your sorrows with the City's dust and scatter to the winds the cares of life. The pace is picking up. A brief song is sung by the chorus and suddenly the high priest proclaims: "Our funeral pyre awaits the corpse of Care!

Behold, the Ferry of Care, with its beautifully ornamented frontispiece, begins its brief passage to the foot of the shrine. Its trip is accompanied by the music of a barcarole a barcarole is the song of Venetian gondoliers as they pole through the canals of Venice.

Listening to the barcarole, it becomes ever more clear how many little extra bits and pieces of culture have been borrowed from many parts of the world by the Bohemians who lovingly developed this ritual over its long history. The bier arrives at the steps of the altar. The high priest inveighs against Dull Care, the archenemy of Beauty.

He shouts, "Bring fire," and the torchbearers enter 18 strong. Then the acolytes quickly seize the coffin, lift it high above their heads, and carry it triumphantly to the pyre in front of the mighty Owl.

It seems that Care is about to be consumed by flames. Ah, but not yet. Suddenly there is a great clap of thunder and a rush of wind. Peals of loud, ugly laughter come ringing down from a hill above the lake. A dead tree is illuminated in the middle of the hillside, and Care himself bellows forth with a thundering blast:. When will ye learn that me ye cannot slay?

Year after year ye burn me in this Grove, lifting your puny shouts of triumph to the stars. But when again ye turn your feet toward the marketplace, am I not waiting for you, as of old? To dream ye conquer Care! The high priest is taken aback by this impressive outburst, but not completely humbled. He replies that it is not all a dream, that he and his friends know they will have to face Care when their holiday is over.

They are happy that the good fellowship created by the Bohemian Grove is able to banish Care even for a short time. So the high priest tells Care, "We shall burn thee once again this night and in the flames that eat thine effigy we'll read the sign: Midsummer sets us free.

Dull Care, however, is having none of this. He tells the high priest in no uncertain terms that priestly fires are not going to do him in. The only light remaining comes from the small flame in the Lamp of Fellowship. Things are clearly at an impasse. Care may win out after all. There is only one thing to do: turn to the great Owl, the great totem animal of Bohemia, chosen as the group's symbol primarily for its mortal wisdom — and only secondarily for its discreet silence and its nightly prowling.

The high priest falls to his knees and lifts his arms toward the shrine. The inspirational music of the "Fire Finale" now begins, and an aura of light glows about the Owl's head.

The Owl is going to rise to the occasion! And if it's the s, it's none other than the voice of good old Walter Conkrite, although the part usually goes to a deep-voiced drama professor. After a pause, the sagacious bird finally speaks. No fire, he tells the assembled faithful, can drive out Care if that fire comes from the mundane world, where it is fed by the hates of men. There is only one fire that can overcome the great enemy Care, and that, of course, is the flame which burns in the Lamp of Fellowship on the Altar of Bohemia.

The priest smacks himself on the side of the head, as if to say he wonders why he didn't think of that profound point. The light goes out on the dead tree. The high priest leaps to his feet and bounds up the steps, snatches a burned-out torch from one of the bearers, and relights it from the flame of the Lamp of Fellowship. Just as quickly he ignites the funeral pyre and triumphantly hurls the torch into the blaze. The orchestral music in the background intensifies as the flames leap higher and higher.

The chorus sings loudly about Dull Care, archenemy of Beauty, calling on the winds to make merry with his dust. Midsummer sets us free! As this climax approaches, some 50 minutes after the march began, the quiet onlookers on the other side of the lake begin to come alive.

After all, it is a night for rejoicing. The men begin to shout, to sing, to hug each other, and dance around. They have been freed by their priests and their Owl for some good old-fashioned hell raising. They couldn't be happier if they were back in college and their fraternity had won an intramural football championship. Now the ceremony is over. The revelers, initiated into the carefree attitude of the Bohemian Grove, break up into small groups as they return to the camps that crowd next to each other in the central area of the Grove.

It will be a night of storytelling and drinking for the men of Bohemia as they sit around their campfires or wander from camp to camp, renewing old friendships and making new ones. They will be far away from their responsibilities as the decision makers and opinion molders of corporate America. It's straight out of tribal life the world over. No women. Lots of drinking and boasting. Men will be men, and boys will be boys.

The Cremation of Care is the most spectacular event of the midsummer retreat, but there are several other entertainments as well. Before the Bohemians return to the everyday world, they will be treated to plays, variety shows, song fests, shooting contests, art exhibits, swimming, boating, and nature rides. Among Bohemians, planned entertainment of any real magnitude is called a Jinks. This nomenclature comes from the earliest days of the club, when its members were searching for precedents and traditions to adopt from the literature and entertainment of other times and other places.

In the case of Jinks, they had found a Scottish word which denotes, generally speaking, a frolic, although it also was used in the past to refer to a drinking bout which involved a matching of wits to see who paid for the drinks. Bohemian Club historiographers, however, claim the word was gleaned from a more respectable source, Guy Mannering , a novel by Sir Walter Scott; there the High Jinks are a more elevated occasion, with drinking only a subsidiary indulgence.

The early Jinks at the Grove slowly developed into more and more elaborate entertainments. Already by the High Jinks had become what it is today, a grandiose, operetta-like extravaganza written and produced by club members for its one-time-only presentation in the Grove. The High Jinks, which is presented on the Friday night of the last weekend, is considered the most important formal event of the encampment. Most of the plays written for the High Jinks have a mythical or fantasy theme, although a significant minority have a historical setting.

Any moral messages center on inevitable human frailty, not social injustice. There is no spoofing of the powers-that-be at a High Jinks; it is strictly a highbrow occasion. A priest, of all unlikely people, holds the honor of being the only person to be the subject of two Grove plays. Saint John received his unique distinction among latter-day Bohemians in , when his sad but courageous story was told in a jinks "sired" the club argot for master of ceremonies by the poet Charles Warren Stoddard.

Saint John was a cutup in his youth, but had forsaken ephemeral pleasures — or at least most of them — for the priesthood. One of his first assignments was as a tutor to the heir apparent to the kingship of Bohemia.

John soon became fast friends with the fun-loving prince, often joining him in his spirited and amorous adventures. When the prince became king, he made Saint John the court confessor. All went well for Saint John until the king began to suspect that his beautiful queen was having a love affair with a local nobleman.

To allay his suspicions, the king naturally turned to his loyal friend and teacher, Saint John of Nepomuck, demanding that this former companion in many revelries reveal to him the most intimate confessions of the queen.

Saint John refused. The king pleaded, but to no avail. Then the king threatened him, which had no effect either. Finally, in a fit of rage, he ordered Saint John hurled into the river to drown. John chose to die rather than reveal a woman's secrets. Here, truly, was a remarkable fellow, and his story appealed mightily to the San Francisco Bohemians of the nineteenth century.

Several months after the poet Stoddard introduced Saint John to his fellow Bohemians, a small statue of Saint John arrived at the clubhouse in San Francisco from faraway Czechoslovakia.

It seems one of the people present for Stoddard's talk had been Count Joseph Oswald Von Thun of Czechoslovakia, who had been much taken by the club and its appreciation of his fellow countryman. Upon his return to Czechoslovakia be had commissioned a woodcarver to make a replica of the statue of Saint John which adorns the bridge in Prague near the place of his drowning.

This unexpected gift still guards the library room in the Bohemians' large club building in San Francisco — except during the encampment at the Grove, that is. For that event the statue is carefully transported to a hallowed tree near the center of the Grove, where Saint John, with his forefinger carefully sealing his lips, can be a saintly reminder of the need for discretion. The legend surrounding Saint John of Nepomuck became part of the oral tradition of the Bohemian Club.

New members inevitably hear the story when they happen upon the statue while being shown around the city clubhouse or the Grove. But oral tradition is not enough for a patron saint, and the good man's legend was therefore enacted in a Grove play in under the title St.

John of Nepomuck. It was retold in by a different author under the title St. John of Bohemia. How good are the Grove plays? He thinks maybe one in ten High Jinks would be a commercial success if produced for outside audiences. Another member is not so sure about their general appeal.

Whatever the quality, the plays are enormously elaborate productions, with huge casts, large stage sets, much singing, and dazzling lighting effects. Not to mention the little clearings on the hillside which are used to great effect in some plays. A cast for a typical Grove play easily runs to seventy-five or one hundred people. Add in the orchestra, the stagehands, the carpenters who make the sets, and other supporting personnel, and over three hundred people are involved in creating the High Jinks each year.

Preparations begin a year in advance, with rehearsals occurring two or three times a week in the month before the encampment, and nightly in the week before the play.

The expense of the play is one way they can relate to its worth. The High Jinks is the pride of the Grove, but a little highbrow stuff goes a long way among clubmen, even clubmen who like to think of themselves as cultured.

From the early beginnings of the club, the High Jinks has been counterbalanced by the more slapstick and ribald fun of Low Jinks. For many years the Low Jinks were basically haphazard and extemporaneous, but slowly they too became more elaborate and professional as the Grove grew from a few campers on a weekend holiday to a full-blown two-week encampment which requires year-round planning and maintenance.

Now the Low Jinks is a specially written musical comedy requiring almost as much attention and concern as the High Jinks. Personnel requirements are slightly less-perhaps people to the needed for High Jinks. Costs also are half or less than for a High Jinx. The subject matter of the Low Jinks is very different from that of the High Jinks. The title of the first formal Low Jinks in was The Lady of Monte Rio, which every good Bohemian would immediately recognize as an allusion to the ladies of the evening who are available in certain inns and motels near the Grove.

The Low Jinks concerned "The Sin of Ophelia Grabb" whose program is pictured here , a vulgar play on words if there ever was one. Ophelia lived with Letchwell Lear in unwedded bliss even though she was the daughter of the mayor of Shady Corners.

Since there are no women allowed in the Bohemian Club, men have to dress in drag and play women's parts. An example from a production is pictured here. In a male member of the cast called the burly men playing the parts of women "heifers," which soon led the audience to moo each time the heifers appeared on the stage.

They require planning, coordination, and money, and Bohemians are proud of the fact that they are part of a club which creates its own theatrical enjoyments. However, the Bohemians are not averse to enjoying professional entertainment by stars of stage, screen, and television.

The Little Friday Night is held on the second weekend of the encampment. The Big Saturday Night is on the third weekend-it closes the encampment. Both are shows made up of acts put on by famous stars. All of this talent is free, of course. No one would think of asking for money to perform for such a select audience, and if anyone should think to ask, he immediately would be dis-invited.

People are supposed to understand it is an honor to entertain those in attendance at the Bohemian Grove. Formal Grove shows and informal camp shenanigans do not exhaust the possibilities of the Bohemian Grove. Members can find a number of other ways to amuse themselves. Some wander about quietly, drink in hand, enjoying the redwood trails. Others walk down the River Road to look at the meandering water of the Russian River feet below; often they take the winding path down to the river and its beach, where they sit on the large beach deck, wade in the shallow water along the banks, swim in the specially developed swimming hole, or even paddle out in one of the Grove canoes.

Others can be found taking part in the skeet shooting and trap shooting that are provided. Some take regularly scheduled "rim rides" on Grove buses, journeying to the more distant parts of the Grove's several thousand acres while a tour guide recounts the natural history of the area. Many plan their late morning visit to the Civic Center a group of small buildings which serve as message center, barber shop, and drug store so they can make it to the noon organ concert which is held each day by the lake.

Seated at the base of the Owl Statue, the Bohemian band and the Bohemian orchestra each perform one afternoon concert during the encampment. A pleasant afternoon can be spent at the Ice House, the beautiful redwood building that houses an annual art exhibit made up of paintings, photographs, and sculpture created by Bohemian Club members. Over three hundred original works of art are usually available for viewing. For evenings without large productions, there are less formal Campfire Circle entertainments featuring the band, the orchestra, the chorus, or individual storytellers and entertainers.

Skeet shooting, hiking, swimming, art exhibitions — there is plenty to see and do in the Bohemian Grove even when a big production is not being staged. It is truly a place of many delights. But, despite all these attractions, it remains most of all a place to rest and relax in the company of friends.

Entertainment is not the only activity at the Bohemian Grove. For a little change of pace, there is intellectual stimulation and political enlightenment every day at p. Since the meadow from which people view the Cremation of Care also has been the setting for informal talks and briefings by people as varied as entertainers, professors, astronauts, business leaders, cabinet officers, future presidents, and former presidents.

The cabinet officers, politicians, generals, and governmental advisers are the rule rather than the exception on weekends. Figures from the worlds of art, literature, and science are more likely to make their appearance during the weekdays of the encampment, when Grove attendance may drop to four or five hundred since the s many of the members only come to the Grove for the weekends because they cannot stay away from their corporations and law firms for the full two weeks.

Members vary as to how interesting and informative they find the Lakeside Talks. Some find them useful, others do not, probably depending on their degree of familiarity with the topic being discussed. It is fairly certain that no inside or secret information is divulged, but a good feel for how a particular problem will be handled is likely to be communicated.

Whatever the value of the talks, most members think there is something very nice about hearing official government policy, orthodox big-business ideology, and new scientific information from a fellow Bohemian or one of his guests in an informal atmosphere where no reporters are allowed to be present. Politicians apparently find the Lakeside Talks especially attractive.

Some members, at least, know better. They realize that the Grove is an ideal off-the-record atmosphere for sizing up politicians. The journalist went on to note that the midsummer encampments "have long been a major showcase where leaders of business, industry, education, the arts, and politics can come to examine each other. He begins with an account of future President Dwight D. Eisenhower's appearance at the Grove. After noting he had met Ike briefly in , he says that he had a chance to take his measure when the well-liked general came to the Bohemian Grove to give a Lakeside Talk:.

Herbert Hoover used to invite some of the most distinguished of the 1, men at the Grove to join him at his "Cave Man Camp" for lunch each day. Hoover sat at the head of the table as usual, with Eisenhower at his right.

As the Republican nominee in an uphill Senate battle, I was about two places from the bottom. It boasts that the Cremation of Care ceremony derives from Druid rites, medieval Christian liturgy, the Book of Common Prayer, Shakespearean drama and nineteenth-century American lodge rites. Early Bohemians were hungry for exaltation and grabbed on to any tradition they could find to dignify their exile in the vulgar West.

The club was founded in , just three years after the transcontinental railroad was completed, by a group of newspapermen and artists who plainly felt social anxiety about their surroundings. Early club menus offered dolled-up western dishes such as "boiled striped bass au vin blanc" and "cafe noir. But the club's newspapermen were also socially ambitious, aiming to chronicle California's rise in the arts and sciences. Bohemian , they agreed in their early annals, didn't mean an unwashed shirt and poetry; it signified London, the beau monde, men of eminence whose purses were always open to their friends.

By such standards, San Francisco businessmen surely looked crude. The Bohemian Club's waiting list, which had first appeared away back in the s, grew to ridiculous lengths. I was told that if a Californian is not admitted before he is 30, he can despair of membership unless he achieves commercial or political prominence. Many older men die waiting.

And membership comes dear. Because the regular members require entertainment, "men of talent" pay greatly reduced fees. On Wouk's acceptance, for instance, he was put to work writing a history of the club.

The encampment became controversial in the early Reagan years when reporters, still suffering the hangover of Carter populism, questioned club executive appointees about the club's sexist practices. The Grove's keenest adversary is Mary Moore, who lives in a counter cultural shantytown in nearby Occidental. Moore was the San Luis Obispo County Fiesta queen, but by she had become, she says, a "woman-identified woman," and the Grove's thunderous maleness and what she calls its "closedness" disturbed her.

Of course, just about anybody could hate the Grove. With its dense concentration of extravagant war- and money-mongers, it's an easy object of protest, and 72 left-wing groups eventually joined Moore to form the Bohemian Grove Action Network.

In folk singing demonstrators tried to quarantine the Bohemians inside the Grove because they were so dangerous to the outside world. Fifty people were arrested. Meese, by the way, is about the only major Reaganite who didn't end up as a member. In its obsession with the encampment, BGAN has unwittingly taken on Bohemian traits, becoming a kooky mirror image of the Grove.

It wove spidery webs of string across Bohemian Avenue to block the way in. It urged its followers to form "Boho Clubs" to study members so they could be "held accountable by the American People" for participating "in the maintenance of the process of plutocratic patriarchy which threatens the planet Earth with omnicide from the nuclear menace.

But by BGAN's energies were ebbing. The media's anti-elitist mood, never all that ferocious, was spent. The reporters that Mary Moore had helped spirit into the Grove for hours at a time had come out with vague, watered-down versions of what went on, or their news organizations had suppressed the accounts.

By the gauntlet of hippies and solarheads and woman-identified women whom the Bohemians had been forced to maneuver their Jags and limos around to get to the gate had disappeared. The Grove was still there. When I got to Monte Rio, only a couple of signs of protest remained. Moore's answering machine message asking friends not to call her at her vintage-clothing store in the town of Sebastopol included a denunciation of the Cremation of Care.

And inside the Grove the guest list was well guarded. It was posted in a locked glass case during the day, and was removed every night. This was about the highest security I saw inside.

I'm admitting for the first time in my life having no willpower," a man was saying to his wife on one of the public phones. He looked bewildered and hung over, and I figured Bohemians were warmly and mysteriously saying to him what they were saying to me: "I can tell this is your first Grove. It was just past noon on Sunday, the middle weekend at the encampment -- the busiest weekend, with attendance approaching 2, men. The most dignified had arrived. On the River Road you heard some small business talk.

Had a red fist painted on the back of her gown. At lakeside the grass was crowded for the day's talk. Under the green parasol stood General John Chain, commander of the Strategic Air Command, who spoke of the country's desperate need for the Stealth B-2 bomber.

The important men come out for the Lakeside Talks, and each speaker seems to assume that his audience can actually do something about the issues raised, which, of course, it can. On the first weekend, for instance, Associated Press president Louis Boccardi, addressing his listeners as men of "power and rank," gave them more details than he said he was willing to give his readers about the plight of Terry Anderson, the Middle East correspondent held hostage since It was a transparent plea for help.

Other Lakeside speaking is more indulgent. Here Nicholas Brady examined the history of the Jockey Club. Here William Buckley described how he had sat at his desk and cried upon learning of Whittaker Chambers's death.

Here Henry Kissinger made a bathroom pun on the name of his friend Lee Kuan Yew, who was in attendance -- the sort of joke that the people of Singapore, whom Lee rules with such authoritarian zeal, are not free to make in public. The speeches are presented as off-the-record -- one of the absurdities of Grove life, given that they are open to several thousand people. As the Soviet Sagdeyev said in his speech, "There is no glasnost here.

After General Chain's talk, the usual quiet business chatter went on. Three other men discussed a friend of theirs who had left early that morning for New York. One of them seemed puzzled -- the friend wasn't the sort to get going at a. They all got a big kick out of this. Simon was Treasury secretary in the Ford administration and today is a major savings and loan conglomerateur, active in takeovers.

It would seem that this year's encampment was useful to him. Two weeks later he plunged into Sir James Goldsmith's battle to take over B. He was surely influenced by Prime Minister Rocard's Saturday afternoon Lakeside Talk, in which he dangled the most sanguine business expectations of the new European order. In reporters followed German chancellor Helmut Schmidt co the Grove gates, and the front page of the Christian Science Monitor termed the Grove "the West's hidden summit. A week after the encampment, a Washington correspondent for a French paper insisted to me that the last time the prime minister had visited the U.

In fact, the encampment has always had political significance. Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller all stopped in as they geared up for their respective presidential campaigns. Politicians say there is no place like the Grove to help get a campaign rolling. No wonder this year's guest list included the two biggest congressional bagmen of recent years: Representative Tony Coelho, former chairman of the House Democratic Campaign Committee, and Representative Guy Vanderjagt, his counterpart on the Republican committee.

These men were interested in something more than pseudo-Druidic rituals. The club says it serves as a "refuge" from the strivings of the marketplace, and though it's true that actual deal-making is discouraged, I heard business being done on all sides.

The pay phones were a hub of activity. On the blackboard near the bootblack stand there were phone messages for corporate raider Henry Kravis and Bloomingdale's chairman Marvin Traub. That day as I sat writing a letter actually my notes at the Civic Center, a one-story building in which various amenities Grove stationery, laundry facilities are available to Bohemians, I overheard a large fellow in cranberry-colored shorts on the phone, bragging to someone back at the office.

I said we might have a deal for him. They're going to have Pavarotti there in November. I said when we got back we'd talk about it. It was in the phone circle that Henry Kissinger alienated some brother Bohemians on the middle weekend. Wandering into the clearing, he announced to the air, "I have to make two phone calls.

The CIA agent denies involvement first in a calamitous ship disaster, then in Chernobyl. Kissinger's crusty performance was not appreciated by the men he'd cut in front of in line. One Bohemian, a patrician fellow with silver hair, wheeled in rage, saying, "I'll be goddamned. Everywhere you hear what is Bohemian and what isn't Bohemian, One night I wandered into Fore Peak camp and got a lecture from a man named Hugh about Bohemian values as they concerned Fore Peak's famous drink, a mixture of rum and hot chocolate.

Many years ago a doctor called it a Nembutal, and the name stuck, so much so that one Fore Peak camper wears a stethoscope and a white lab coat with Dr. Nembutal stitched on it. Hugh said that an old college friend came to stay in Bohemia and took over the mixing of the drinks.

He persisted in putting in too much rum to see how many guys would pass out. A tenet of Grove life is noncompetitive egalitarianism: all men are equal here. But in fact, class and status differences among camps are pronounced. Just as you have to be sponsored for membership, you have to be sponsored for a camp. The screens get pretty fine. Nonetheless, the ideal of equality is comforting. Among other things, it permits alcoholic failures to feel equal for a few days with their workaholic cousins.

Since everyone is supposed to kick back and forget work, it's the fuck-up's annual revenge. At Sundodgers camp there is a motto on the mantel: The productive drunk is the bane of all moralists.

It tells the productive they can drink, it tells the drunks they're productive. A high point of the middle weekend was the performance of The Low Jinks, the Grove's elaborate musical-comedy show. Over the years the Jinks has become the leading entertainment at the encampment, surpassing the mannered and ponderous Grove Play, which is performed the next weekend. The Jinks is vigorously lowbrow.

It takes place on the Field Circle stage, which is wedged in between two camps, Pink Onion notable for its pink sheets and Cave Man notable for big-deal right-wingers and a plaque commemorating Herbert Hoover. The Field Circle seats are steeply canted; sitting in one feels like being inside a megaphone. The mood was American and bellicose. For a good half hour the band warmed up the audience, playing the fight songs of many California colleges and the armed services and culminating with "The Star-Spangled Banner.

I felt like a member of the greatest nation ever, the greatest gender ever, the greatest generation ever. This year's Low Jinks was called Sculpture Culture , and the humor was not just lame but circas college follies lame. Rex Greed, an effeminate gallery owner who sells toilets "a counterpoint of mass and void" , tries to convince artist Jason Jones Jr. When a character describes modern art as "the talentless being sold by the unprincipled to the bewildered," the crowd's roar seemed to contain the grief of hundreds of businessmen who have shelled out for headquarters art they do not understand.

The girls were all played by men, and every time they appeared -- their chunky legs and flashed buttocks highly visible through tight support hose -- the crowd went wild. After one character called the secretaries in the show "heifers," the audience couldn't resist breaking into "moos" every time they came back onstage. But the biggest crowd pleaser was Bubbles Boobenheim, a showgirl turned patroness who rubbed her prosthetic behind against the elevator doors at stage left.

The doors were used repeatedly for wrong-floor gags. When one character; a PR executive, expressed a desire to make his mistress an honest woman, she objected, reminding him of an old Bohemian saying: "If it floats or flies or fools around, don't buy it, rent it.

From time to time law enforcement has tried unsuccessfully to bring cases against local procurers, and the Bohemian Grove Action Network circulates testimonials by a former paid mistress of a club member "I only saw him troubled by one thing," she wrote. One day in the Grove, I tipped a camp valet and he offered some unsolicited information.

Hookers came to a certain bar in Monte Rio at ten each night, he said. It was the same bar-lodge-motel where the local police had arrested a man for pandering a few years back. But the charges were dropped, and the man is remembered fondly in the Grove. A Bohemian I overheard on the beach one day said that the man's genius had been in keeping vacationing families in the motel ignorant of the other business going on there, "Now, that's good management," he declared, capturing the robust laissez faire spirit of the Grove.

The sexism and racism of the Jinks were of a peculiar sort. Black jokes are out because there are a handful of black members -- though one day near the Civic Center I did hear a group of old-timers trying to imitate Jesse Jackson. As for Jews, old membership lists suggest that they have taken a very small part in the club for decades. The Jinks jokes about women were straight out of an old joke book.

The mood is reminiscent of high school. There's no end to the pee-pee and penis jokes, suggesting that these men, advanced in so many other ways, were emotionally arrested sometime during adolescence. The most striking prop in The Low Jinks was a sculpture of a female torso whose breasts and buttocks had both been attached to the front, an improvement that looked vaguely hostile.

And all the talk about male fellowship often sounds just like a college freshman's version of No Gurls Allowed , an institutional escape from women, from their demands, aggressions and vapors. At certain times of the year women are allowed to enter the Grove -- but only under "chaperonage," according to a statement by the club president.

Chaperonage for adult women. It's another Bohemian wee-wee word, something you haven't heard since you were The club's nemesis here is the state of California, which keeps chipping away at the Grove's maleness, lately threatening to take away its liquor license and its tax-exempt status because it discriminates against women.

The state has established a beachhead at the Grove's front office, a hundred yards outside the main gate, where, under legal pressure, seven women have been employed. Inside the Grove there is a feeling of mournful inevitability about the day women will join the encampment. Bohemians talk about how much it will muddle things. Members have cited their privilege to walk about in "various states of undress. The peeing is ceaseless and more than a little exhibitionistic. Everyone talks about it.

Bohemian reminiscences describe such bizarre initiation rites as escorting new members to the redwood at which one of the founders "did his morning ablutions. One featured a spurious design for a commemorative stamp of club member U. Postmaster General Anthony Frank relieving himself on a redwood.

At least six inches. This dick-fussing often manifests itself as that starkest of male nostalgias, the hankering for the punctual erections of boyhood. According to figures, the average age of Bohemians is Impotence is on many people's minds.

The poster outside Monkey Block camp advertising this year's Grove play, Pompeii , featured a gigantic erection under a toga. The set for the play included a wall inscription in Latin meaning "Always hard. Bohemian discourse is full of oblique organ worship as well.

There's all the redwood talk. The meetings within the grove involve official business including policy speeches, which are regularly made by it's members and guests, and many regular social events, and it's standard club rituals. The secrecy of The Bohemian Grove and its long line of prominent members, has unfairly led conspiracy theorists such as infowars to conclude that the clubs purpose is somehow sinister or something outside of harmless social fun.

The Bohemian Club is a celebration of culture and bohemia.