Little Monte Rio offers much variety this time of year. The 115th Annual Variety Show arrived last week. Tickets for it sold out in April. On the day of the show, folks began lining up at 7am for optimal chair placement in a grassy amphitheater backdropped by towering redwoods. Over 2,000 people attended. Comedians, singers, musicians and magicians performed till almost midnight. Livingston Taylor, James Taylor’s brother, served as master of ceremonies and squired the show along, as the Bohemians like to say.
And speaking of the Bohemians, they’re celebrating their 148th midsummer encampment. While the hoi polloi gathered for the Variety Show, the elite arrived in private jets for revelry and connections under the redwoods in a slightly larger venue in Monte Rio—the Bohemian Grove. Over the years presidents, generals and captains of industry have mingled with artists, actors, musicians and media people, previously called journalists. The collection of—air quote—“campers” includes about 2,000 members and invited guests. Membership in the club, highly coveted, is strictly by invitation. The waiting list can be years or decades long. Following the two-week encampment’s opening ceremony, called the Cremation of Care, life’s daily worries are left behind.
FUN FACTS: No one attending the Variety Show knows who will perform when they purchase a ticket in April or show up in July—the talent line-up is drawn from Bohemian Grove attendees. Proceeds benefit the Monte Rio community through St. Catherine’s Church, the fire department and the local school foundation. Hoi polloi is Greek, meaning “the masses.”
The Bohemian Grove Club first met in San Francisco in 1872. Its founding was intended to help creatives flourish. Summer camping started in 1878. In 1899 the club purchased 160 acres from M.C. Meeker, but the grounds have now expanded to about 2,700 acres. The artists gathering in the 1870s quickly realized that talent alone would not propel their creative interests. Accordingly, journalists invited newspaper owners and artists invited patrons, and so began the unique mixing of talent, money, conversation and creativity that became the Bohemian Grove.
Despite the club’s motto, “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here” (meant to keep politics and business out of the club’s social conversation), many important connections are made at the Grove. Eisenhower first met Nixon there, and Nixon became his vice-president. Allegedly, in 1942 a Grove meeting on the super-secret Manhattan project occurred that was depicted in the movie Oppenheimer.
