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But what the Yippies are really pointing toward is Chicago. There, come the last week of August, they intend to hold a six-day "Festival of Life" in comic contrast to what they call the Democratic Party's "National Death Convention," which will be running concurrently. The Yippies aim to set up a lakefront tent village in Grant Park, where they can groove on folk songs, rock bands, "guerrilla" theater, body painting and meditation. Through the park they will bear on a blue pillow their very own presidential candidate: Lyndon Pigasus Pig, a ten-week-old black and white porker now afattening at the Hog Farm, a hippie commune in Southern California. Other possibilities being considered: a lie-in at Chicago's O'Hare Field to prevent Democratic delegates from landing or, failing that, a fleet of fake cabs to pick up delegates and dump them off in Wisconsin.
Looking back on the melee at Grand Central, many non-Yipping hippies are wondering if the politics of YIP are not already too controversial for comfort. The Chicago shindig, they fear, could well result in a far larger number of clubbed and lacerated heads. Yippie leaders themselves are in a mood for "better communication with authorities." Last week, promising to behave themselves, some Manhattan Yippies opened talks with the Mayor's office about holding a YIP-out with rock bands and theater troupes in the Sheep Meadow on Easter Sunday.
* A messianic ritual meant to bring back the buffalo and ward off white bullets, the original Ghost Dance movement was not infallible. At Wounded Knee, S. Dak., on Dec. 29, 1890, more than 200 Sioux Ghost Dancers were machine-gunned to death by the U.S. cavalry in the last "engagement" of the Indian wars.