Rainbow Returns

JERUSALEM

“I showed up in New York at age thirty looking like a Biblical prophet: long wavy locks, abundant facial hair. A prophet who wore tie-dyed tunics, bell-bottom jeans and love beads. For most of the Seventies I’d been a San Francisco street performer. Though I shouldn’t presume to call my act unique, if there was ever another Harvard-educated Fulbright scholar who played concertina and sang for the crowds waiting to board the Sausalito Ferry, I haven’t met him.

For over six years I had been living communally in a compact pre-earthquake house a short stroll from Golden Gate Park at the western edge of Haight-Ashbury. I was the senior member, having outlasted housemates who stayed for more than three years, and others for barely a month. During my time the Yellow House had almost thirty occupants, though never more than five at a time. The individuals changed, but the peaceful, coöperative, nurturing vibe remained constant, offering welcome to all who entered.

( Well, mostly. The eviction of Emily and her baby “Pockets” comes further on.)

The Ferry provided my paying gig, but once I had a concertina repertoire of a few dozen songs at my fingertips, there was no shutting me up. I had a powerful and (evidently) pleasing voice that I enjoyed unleashing in show tunes, original songs and especially operatic arias.”

“The gamble I made around 1970 didn’t even seem like one at the time, although the stakes were nothing less than my life. From today’s forty-year-plus perspective, it would be easy to call that gamble a mistake, but somehow I’m not convinced. I hope writing this book will lead me to a place of discovery, where the rekindled flame of those years in the Yellow House will shed light on what they ultimately were: either frivolity and madness, or a summons to greater sanity and wisdom.

But I get ahead of myself.”

Much of what is written below comes from Stephen’s marvelous Memoir:

There is so very much, more there! A must read for those taking this tour!

Oct 1, 2025

724 Shrader Street

1456 9th Avenue

In the days of 1960’s Flower Power, which drew so many young people to an ‘alternative lifestyle”, some of the established religions undertook to channel hippie spirituality in their own direction. The Jewish version was The House of Love and Prayer, originally at 347 Arguello Blvd. and later on Ninth and Judah in the Sunset District. The driving force for the synagogue was Shlomo Carlebach, a German-born rabbi and folk singer. Shlomo was a mesmerizing teacher of scripture by way of story, expert in thought of Nachman of Breslov and others among the Hasidic rabbis. Committed to many aspects of the Jewish orthodoxy, Carlebach was liberal and open about others. For example, he did not believe in the separation of women behind walls in The House of Love and Prayer.

These were kindred spirits and spiritual brethren to Stephen Mo Hanan. When you entered their house you were loved and then you departed you were missed.

1 Ferry Street

777 4th Avenue

Vaillancourt Fountain

11:00am

1456 9th Avenue

“On a good weekend at the Ferry, from April through October, passengers for Sausalito would start lining up about half an hour before departure. The old terminal at the foot of Market Street funneled ticket holders into a long passageway, walled to a height of four feet, with a blue-and-white striped awning for shade. It led to the gate where at loading time they surrendered their tickets and boarded the boat.”

1:00pm

THE GATHERING

Terry and Mary Vogt have graciously offered for everyone to gather at their house after the ceremony

301 Van Ness Ave

1456 9th Avenue

“David Dances was first performed at

A.C.T. The production of David Dances

brought another significant person

into my life. The actor Nehemiah

Persoff had a nephew in the show

who summoned him from LA to see

it. He loved it and asked me to send

him a script so he could promote

it. I cobbled a new version

together, retaining Phil’s

improvements but restoring

the cuts his creative

limitations had obliged me

to accept. Nicky (as

Nehemiah was called)

liked this version even

more than the one he saw

and started sending it to the Los

Angeles theaters where he had

connections, starting with the Mark

Taper Forum, where he had starred

in an acclaimed production of The

Dybbuk, a rarely revived classic

originally written in Yiddish.”

“Introversion was

never an issue.

I serenaded

Luciano Pavarotti

at the stage door

of the San Francisco

Opera House

(“Che bella voce!”

he exclaimed and

took me briefly under

his hefty wing). I

serenaded the opera

lovers waiting in the

lobby for standing room

tickets, with no thought

of passing the hat. On

line like the rest, I just

loved that rousing music

and loved to send it

forth, and if there

was something incongruous

about a shaggy wide-eyed hippie earning applause for belting Verdi with a squeezebox, I loved that, too.”.

Oct 1, 2025

Rainbow Returns, the Tour

1) The Tour may begin at the Shrader Street House at 724

Fell Street. Possibly breakfast in the neighborhood.Walk through the park

9 00 am

Rainbows Reflections

“The Yellow House at 724 Shrader Street was in fact yellow and white, but there was so much more of the former (everything except the gingerbread trim) that it gave its name to the building itself. It was buttercup yellow when every other house on the block was still beige or grey, a full year before San Francisco started flinging money at housepainters on acid, birthing the mid-70s rainbow eruption of polychrome Victorians.”

“I moved into it in October of 1971 with three others. It felt like home from the moment I first stepped through the door. Yet I might have never done so, except for being arrested while singing on the street in Washington a few months earlier. Why, you may ask (my parents did), was I even doing that?”

“A few years later, at the Shrader Street commune in the week prior to Easter, somebody

brought home an eight-inch high chocolate bunny in a pink box with a clear cellophane

window in front. It sat on top of the refrigerator for over a month, an ornamental

presence too cute to eat.”

“The house on Shrader Street, as I observed several dozen pages ago, felt like home

from the moment I first stepped through the door. I was brought there by Joe, who heard

about it from Chuck and Barbara, a divorced couple who, out of unwarranted optimism

born of financial need, thought they could thrive together in a four-person household.

They seemed pleasant enough at first and, though they eventually drove me to thoughts of double homicide, the gap of decades enables me now to thank them for introducing me to what, after they split, became a wonderful home.

The house sat one block east of Golden Gate Park and a block and a half south of

Haight Street, a short walk from the Number 7 Haight bus or the N Judah trolley. Haight-

Ashbury was no longer the hippie utopia of the mid-60s, but neither was it the junkie skid

row it had devolved into. The Haight was on its way back up, as evidenced by the cheerful demeanor of most people you met in the neighborhood. Faces certainly brightened whenever they beheld the buttercup yellow facade of 724 Shrader.

There were two floors. The first, as in so many San Francisco houses, perched

above a street-level garage. To the right a flight of thirteen broad steps led up to the entrance door, beyond a small porch framed by a wooden arch. The parlor, facing the street through a bay window and with an adjoining “salon” room, served as one of the two bedrooms on that floor. Chuck nabbed it, leaving Barbara with the other one (small and dark), separated by a hallway that ran past the bathroom to the back, with the common room on the left, eat-in kitchen and walk-in pantry on the right, and beyond the kitchen an enclosed utility porch from which wooden stairs descended to an ample back yard: a short concrete patio leading from the garage to a neglected grass plot that had obvious garden potential, on one side a huge fuchsia bush, and in a thorny tangle at the back an aggression of blackberry vines. Up a two-landing U-shaped staircase behind a hallway door was the second floor, with two more bedrooms. I chose the one which overlooked the yard and thence the adjacent yards and backsides of the Victorian frame houses along parallel Cole Street. Joe’s room (subsequently Doug’s, Annabel’s, Rich’s, et cetera) was huge, but nothing more than a gloomy unfinished attic, with naked joists, studs and rafters providing atmosphere at the expense of gentility. A small circular window facing the street admitted the only daylight. The garage was a mystery. Wedged along the entire length of it were three enormous papier-mâché clowns, three times life size, in gaudy circus colors, headless, each lying on its back with legs in the air, the neck of one jammed against the tail of the next, like chickens spitted on a rotisserie. Where they came from no one ever learned. And disposing of them took a back seat to more immediate problems.Of all the boxes I shipped via Greyhound, one, the most precious, failed to arrive in San Francisco. It was the box packed with my annotated “core” texts: Huxley, Buber, Jung, Ram Dass, William James, Teilhard de Chardin, favorite plays and novels and poetry, everything that served (in the words of the Airplane’s “White Rabbit”) to feed yourhead. What was the universe telling me by the disappearance of this one box? (In those days I was convinced that the universe was always telling us something; my current hunch is that the universe designed us as a means to investigate itself.) Was this a big lesson in non-attachment, a warning against making books into idols, a reminder that the only truth I needed was already inside me, a cosmic prank, all or none of the above? Greyhound eventually reimbursed me for the loss, without overcoming my sense that the contents were priceless.”

“Joe quit the house to help launch a metaphysical bookstore in Eugene, Oregon with

Hanan, Ron and Sally and Desmond. His hasty exit was fueled by a visit to Shrader house from the jealous, baseball-bat wielding boyfriend of a lady Joe had flirted with. Joe’s immediate replacement was a young actor named Doug who saw our notice in the health food store. He was in a show that was about to go into rehearsal for a February run at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, a new musical with the unlikely title of Long Live the

Bruegel People. In no time I was cast as well. I had a long-term acting job!

“Nora James Percival, known as Jimi, was the wardrobe mistress, and her search for a new home brought her soon to Shrader Street, where she began to lift life at the Yellow House onto a far higher plane.”

“As February of 1972 dawned, Shrader Street seemed on its last legs. The only good

news was that although the house had been sold the new owner was content to be an absentee landlord with a long-term investment. Mike didn’t even raise the rent. A bearded

longhair himself, he was grounded in fairness and empathy and a modest standard of

what was enough. Not every capitalist was insatiable, at least not then. But economics weren’t the problem. Bad vibes were the problem.”

“It was March of 1972 and after barely five months I was now the commune’s senior

member. Doug, in the attic room across from mine, was next in line, but forfeited the position by moving in with his Potrero Hill girlfriend. He was replaced by Annabel, from a

fledgling theater troupe Doug was starting called Shorter Players, all of whom were under five feet six. A redheaded fireplug juggler/acrobat, she had freckles and a ready smile and was a marvel to watch practicing. Her diet was largely grains and vegetables and she enjoyed preparing them for anyone inclined to share.”

2) Second stop, the site of The House of Love and Prayer at 1456 9th Avenue.

10 00 am

Another frequent destination was the House of Love and Prayer, hippie synagogue

extraordinaire. A short ride from our house on the N-Judah trolley, it was a modest building in the Inner Sunset peopled by young followers of the so-called Singing Rabbi, Shlomo Carlebach. He was an internationally renowned singer and guitarist who had abandoned the conventional rabbinic track of his youth in exchange for a concert and recording career, pouring forth an endless stream of jolly and/or soulful melodies in the Hasidic tradition of worship through joy. Aquarian Ageheads, regardless of religious background, flocked to “the House” whenever Shlomo was in town. Sessions with him were two-pronged. There would be blissful bouts of song with thirty to forty men and women up on our feet clapping, ding and joining in on his instantly catchy choruses. Scat-singing “Yi-di-di” was fine if you couldn’t follow the Hebrew beyond repetitions of Halleluia. The musical interludes would alternate with just sitting cross-legged on the floor, listening intently as Shlomo spoke or chanted in piquantly accented English about the soul and its yearning for wholeness. He did it so earnestly you could taste the urge in your own heart. He taught in tales and parables using images from Kabalistic lore, growing from the psychic soil of Judaism but accessible to anyone with a spiritual appetite–witness Jimi and Mevlana’s enthusiasm (subsequently Colton’s, too). Irresistibly charismatic, Shlomo made no claims to perfection, greeted everyone as Holy Brother or Holy Sister, and was as great-hearted an individual as I have ever encountered. Source of a maxim that for decades has stirred me with its depth: “If you care what people think of you, you’re not loving them.” I could fill pages on why I find this so meaningful, but you might get more juice from thinking it over yourself. The repercussions are immense.

“The possibility that I, a child of Orthodox Judaism, might one day find myself singing on the street, let alone roaming in a loincloth through a Mendocino redwood grove hung with tie-dyed banners marking the summer encampment of a tribe of free-spirited, guitar-strumming, I Ching-consulting, natural foods-eating, psychedelically awakened, consistently amiable clothes-optional hippies seemed as remote as the likelihood of an African-American winning the White House.”

3) Third locations are the Ferry Terminal, address 1 Ferry Building - Vaillancourt Fountain, 50 The Embarcadero.

50 The Embarcadero

11 00 am

“After passing the fountain, I wait at the intersection beneath the double-decker Embarcadero Freeway (little imagining that someday an earthquake will force its removal), and when the light changes I cross to the north end of the venerable Ferry Building. The clock tower says ten. The first boat of the day departs at ten-forty. Though seldom as big as the next two boatloads, there’s usually an adequate line of Sausalito-bound passengers waiting in the chute under the awning. This permits me to start my day with an easy vocal warm-up and no need to project much. If at this hour there’s thirty people, there’ll be twice that number by the time the gate opens and they start to load the boat. More on a really busy morning.”

4) The Get Together, 777 4th Avenue

1 00 pm

“By the end of August the fog had receded, burnishing the Park in that sweet mellow light usually reserved for September. Smiling hippies were everywhere, playing frisbee, jamming in the shade of Monterey pine and cypress trees, rolling down the slopes by the Conservatory of Flowers, tripping through the tree fern grove, a kaleidoscope of frolic. I wasn’t sure if the climate actually made people happy or merely attracted people who were happy to begin with, but I knew this was my destined home.”

5) Fifth is the home of A.C.T., 415 Gerry St. Explore the neighborhood.

4 00 pm

“ACT was downtown San Francisco’s establishment theatre company, proudly professional, corporate-sponsored and housed in the venerable Geary Theatre. (Eighteen years later I was performing in a show there, singing—while spinning every which way, even upside down, in a floor-mounted gyroscope—until the run was abruptly cancelled after the 1989 Loma Prieta/World Series Earthquake wiped out much of the Geary’s interior, and even though said cancellation resulted in my playing Captain Hook opposite Cathy Rigby for over a year on the road and on Broadway (this is not the place for so elaborate and consequential a digression). My preliminary audition as Leontes/Arturo was on a Saturday morning and after a few minutes’ wait I was asked to strut my stuff again the following Thursday for head honchos Fletcher, Hastings and Ball. Whatever the outcome, an alternate fate was sealed that same Saturday afternoon. The callback offer made me jubilant and a mere two blocks away was Union Square, where all manner of street performers held forth perpetually. San Francisco and Berkeley teemed with interesting acts, inevitably fronted by an upturned receptacle, hat or guitar case, accumulating contributions. In my subdued but colorful audition drag (and eager to proclaim my arrival in town) I hopped up on a stone bench in a corner of the square and punched out the tail end of “Nessun dorma,” all that “vincero, vincero” stuff about triumph on the morrow. There was applause and a movement of bodies in my direction

but I waved, hopped right off and dashed for the nearest cable car.

It deposited me at Ghirardelli Square where in no time I came upon a bocce ballcourt where a covey of white-haired men were playing and schmoozing (if Italians schmooze). I thought these guys might go for the more esoteric stuff and, again benchboosted, offered a tidbit from “La Gioconda.” The sound of lustily sung Italian, I blush to say, made their balls drop. They cheered and bravoed and waved their arms in the air.

I was so happy to be playing to a crowd that I kept it up for a good fifteen minutes, trotting out whatever Italian aria I could remember, hoping the guys wouldn’t notice when I substituted gibberish Italian for text I didn’t necessarily know. An additional crowd of about a dozen people had gathered around the bench. When I finally said “Thanks, that’s it,” and stepped to the ground, one of the white-haired guys came by to

offer me the contents of the baseball cap he had circulated: in bills and change close to ten dollars (serious purchasing power back then)!

The passing decades haven’t blurred the memory of my immediate thought: if I get arrested in Washington and paid in San Francisco for the same thing, it’s a cinch where I ought to be living.”

Hanan always held high expectations for himself. In later life, he sometimes expressed to friends heartache because he had never quite achieved the level of renown and influence he sought.

Greater fame would certainly have brought greater prosperity, but the real disappointment was something deeper. He sensed that he’d somehow failed to fulfill the great task he’d been inspired to undertake, and couldn’t understand what he might have done wrong. Delight, gales of laughter, and standing ovations were often his to command as a performer, but fame and admiration weren’t really the point. It all went back to the revelation on the Mount of Olives he’d experienced as a young man. In his own words: “The entire manifest cosmos springs from a single, conscious, non- physical Source with twin attributes that are yet one: Love and Intelligence.”Yet all across our harsh, beautiful world humans struggle to survive and suffer terribly, continually doing irreparable harm to one another.How to reconcile these irreconcilables? It’s because, he thought, they don’t yet know the source of creation that I have now touched and been touched by. He became a secular evangelist of sorts.The theater was for him a sacred precinct within which the human spirit could be renewed and uplifted, made whole in a profound and indelible way. What he craved was positive influence on the imagination, aspirations, and behavior of those who wandered and were lost in disillusioned bitterness He hoped, through his plays and songs to help them “hear the beat of a more idealistic drum”…and to help all of us in “overcoming, through joy and humor, our coarse cynicism about the human species."

May we, likewise, continue to do our utmost to thrive and beam, HC”.

“Soon after Rich left I got a letter from ACT inviting me to submit David Dances for their 1974-75 Playwrights’ Fellowship Program. The deadline was June 15. The revisions I had in mind dealt with expanding the role of the ensemble, who in the first draft didn’t have much of a through line. My experience of kinship and community in Mayan villages inspired me to add this dimension to the play, emphasizing David’s role as a bringer of unity to a people deeply divided under the paranoid influence of King Saul. Any resemblance to America in the Nixon years was blatantly intentional.”

6) The Sixth is The Opera House. 301 Van Ness Ave. Then Dinner at Zuni.

To his credit, Phil cast the play well and brought in a good design team, considering the shoestring budget. Two of the best actors in the ACT company, Sydney Walker and Raye Birk, played the crucial roles of Saul and Samuel. Sydney was a Broadway veteran with a number of Shakespearean leads under his belt. He had played with Laurence Olivier, Rosemary Harris, Nancy Marchand and a host of famous names, though none of this warped his charming modesty. A deeply spiritual and kind man, he introduced me to the writings of Krishnamurti, and his personal empathy endowed the violent King Saul with a flavor of repressed heartbreak that lifted the character from villainy to tragedy.

7 00 pm

Convergence of the twain.

Pavarotti was in town - the great Pavarotti, then in his prime. He was stunned by power of Luciano’s performance that night, and once the curtain fell, made his way to the stage door in company with all the other super- fan enthusiasts and autograph seekers. Eventually Pavarotti emerged to acknowledge the accolades of his admirers with characteristic generosity. Hanan, positioned just a bit back from the immediate press of fans began to sing. “What kind of fool does that,?” wondered the crowd as their heads swiveled round. But he kept on singing, pouring out a sincere, spontaneous paean of praise, gratitude and admiration. His voice - and the spirit within the voice - were indeed beautiful. Soon it became clear that Pavarotti himself was listening., listening intently and with pleasure. He motioned to Steve to approach him, The crowd parted and made way. The two had a quiet, semi-private conversation, and the Luciano wrote down something and handed it to him. “When you get to New York, and when next I come to sing at the Met, come find me. I will give you a lesson.“ And so, indeed it came to pass.

Howard Cutler’s Thoughts

Day two, Oct 2, 2025

I”f the interview had been a year later, I would have asked them to meet me at Esalen, though the thought of Lottie and Jonah joining me nude in a hot tub at the edge of a cliff in Big Sur was impossibly farfetched, no matter how much hash in the brownie. When we visited the shrink’s office on a lovely 1970 autumn day in downtown

D.C., these were among the things I didn’t know about psychotherapy:

1. There are competing schools.

2. In addition to Freudians and behaviorists there is a newer movement underway.

3. This movement is known as humanistic or Third Force psychology and it has a

lot of cool enthusiasts.

4. Jungian analytical psychology is cooler still.

5. On the other hand, there’s Valium”.

So many stops along the way, so many stories to tell.

“When the City and Bay and Golden Gate Bridge first popped into view from Marin County, I felt like Dorothy and her companions gazing in awe at the Emerald City. Or maybe eagle-eyed Cortez, silent, upon a peak in Darien (Keats, dudes). Gleaming white in the distance was the rising Transamerica Pyramid, a year from completion and already an incomparable landmark. What kind of city would build a skyscraper like that? So cosmic! So whimsical! So bold! It already felt like home and we hadn’t even crossed the bridge.”

“Knowing that we’d be face-to-face in about a month released a lot of blocked psychic energy. I looked around. San Francisco was celebrating April with lush floral display. Golden Gate Park was in radiant bloom, with plum blossoms, beds of primrose, towering rhododendrons and on the slopes of the Arboretum’s Succulent Garden, strange hillside armadas of pink and coral stalks with waxy bell-like petals. Beneath the fuchsia bush in our own back yard a clump of calla lilies had emerged in fragrant beauty. The Yellow House was about to enter its first golden age, flower children on the march.”

Where there is Heart there is no border

Nothing can separate true friends

Love makes a curve of every corner

Joins the beginning to the end

Music can span the widest spaces

Temples long lost can ring with song

Stones can be conjured into faces

Nothing can disappear for long

So even though we seem parted beloved

There is really no such place as away

For the whole world is a shrine where

I sparkle and you shine

In your features I see mine everyday

Once you were dancing in the ocean

Once I was singing in a tree

Now we are separately in motion

Testing our own infinity

Love may be slow but never idle

Waves travel miles to reach the shore

Somewhere along the rising spiral

We’ll share each other’s glow once more

Stephen Mo Hanan