Determined to keep joy in the resistance

Susie Buell was one of San Francisco’s most avid supporters of Hillary Clinton, whom she admired for her political stands and loved as a personal friend. Buell was stunned when Clinton lost, but she was determined to avoid becoming mired in despair.

For months, she’s been emailing newsletters brimming with resolve and suggestions for action. On June 1, Buell will host “Joyous Persistence,” a serious daylong pep rally with talks, and also music, comedy, art and picnic lunch at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre. “Joyous” refers to Buell’s mind-set (and, she says, that of participant Joy-Ann Reid of MSNBC). “Persistence,” of course, refers to Mitch McConnell’s criticism, “Nevertheless, she persisted,” of Elizabeth Warren’s takedown of Jeff Sessions at his confirmation hearing.

The headline event is a conversation between Reid and Warren, whose presidential possibilities have been much discussed, and who has a new book, “This Fight Is Our Fight.” Also on the program: Anna Deavere Smith, whose expressed goal it is to tell young artists that they and their work can make a difference; Shannon Coulter of Grab Your Wallet, which advocates spending money on products and services in keeping with spenders’ political views; Cheryl Haines of the Haines Gallery and its For-Site Foundation, which brought Ai Weiwei’s work to Alcatraz; lieutenant governor candidate Eleni Kounalakis and more.

The program includes only two men — Gavin Newsom and Marc Bamuthi Joseph of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts — but the sessions are open to all. The theater seats 900, tickets start at $100, and Buell said on Friday, May 19, that they’re “pretty close to full.”

“We want to make it poetic, we want to make it artful, we want to make it joyous,” Buell said. “It’ll entertain our hearts and our minds at the same time.” What with all this year’s Summer of Love festivities, she’s hoping this gathering will begin the “Summer of Something.”

“It’s a boost,” said Buell. “I feel very comforted by it.”

As Sam Whiting wrote, “On the Road to the Summer of Love” is at the California Historical Society until Sept. 10 and is about the history that led up to that era. The golden anniversary of that summer is being celebrated, of course, at the de Young, too, and in a just-closed exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum/ Pacific Film Archive. Dennis McNally, guest curator of the Historical Society exhibition, makes the case that it’s all a year too late.

The Summer of Love, he argues, began to bud in the summer of 1966. It was six months later, when 50,000 people attended the January 1967 Human Be-In, that the national media “took notice.” Stories about what was happening resulted in “every bored high school kid coming to San Francisco,” from all across the country and elsewhere, in the summer of 1967.

According to McNally, “everything that happened in San Francisco in 1967 was a holding action,” an attempt to accommodate “100,000 pilgrims” who arrived after they read about events that had occurred in 1966. It was in ’66, he says, that “people in their 20s had been experimenting with psychedelics, sexuality and freedom. There was a genuine psychedelic community in the Haight.” That summer, when the Grateful Dead rented a mansion in Rancho Olompali, they threw a party and 1,000 people showed up. It was only after that that “freaks” (the name they called themselves) became “hippies” (the name applied by outside media).

As to much-discussed tie-dye, McNally pointed to a picture of the Free Store, where people could give and take donated clothes at will. The Haight was flooded with newcomers who’d arrived with dress shirts, and realized that they weren’t needed. The shop was brimming with unwanted white shirts; tie-dyeing was a way to recycle them. What with being busy 24/7 on the witch hunt, there hasn’t been all that much time lately for a laugh. The giggle famine ended on Thursday, May 18, when we attended Word for Word’s production of “Smut: An Unseemly Story (The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson)” at Z Space. This paragraph is presented to you, readers, as an evocation of the comedy, much as a tweeted food pic evokes a delicious feast. The gut-busting reality beats the description. The show, based on an Alan Bennett novella, runs through June 11.

Ramzi Fawaz, professor of English and LBGTQ studies at the University of Wisconsin, is here for the summer interviewing people who read the original version of “Tales of the City” in The Chronicle between 1976 and 1983. Reach him via email at fawaz@wisc.edu.

“Work is good. It’s like ‘Game of Thrones,’ and I hate everyone.” Young woman to young woman, overheard in Redwood City by Valerie Sarfaty