Anyone in those parts got a drone they wouldn’t mind sacrificing for some footage of the place?
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Nothing especially sinister. Just a place to be gay and naked.
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Spot on. Phil Frank was indeed a member and a friend of my late FIL, who was himself a member for 50+ years (he joined as a singer). He’d come back from the grove – his camp, Aviary, was mostly singers – I think he did this to tease me a little bit – “oh yeah, Jimmy Buffett came by for a while and Steve Miller. Oh, and whose that guy you like from the Grateful Dead? Bob Warren?”
“Bob Weir??!” I’d go all Chris Farley at that shit.
As for all the famous people he ever met, I only ever really remember him telling me a story about crooning one night with a handful of Apollo astronauts in the early 1970s.
ETA: Phil Frank would do a lot of their posters for their show, so if you ever have occasion to be invited t the Club, the bar is festooned with a lot of really fun handpainted poster art.
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You would be so bored with the footage. It’s old guys drinking and putting on old musicals.
That said, not an insubstantial amount of drag.
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Maybe it’s just me but “Bohemian Grove” sounds like the name of a place where rich people cosplay what they think poverty was like “in the good old days”.
(Thanks to MAD Magazine.)
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You’d think so, but I believe this is a concept the Rich and Powerful™ cannot wrap their heads around. It’s not about practicality, it’s about power. One isn’t a true R&P unless one has “help” who are subservient and beholden to the Master. Acknowledgement of the help’s humanity is limited to a patronizing smile and a pat on the head. To pay them fairly to keep them quiet is recognizing the staff as human beings. What’s more it suggests that these creatures might have power over him, however tenuous. No true R&P would entertain that thought.
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In an upstairs/downstairs scenario, the “itch” downstairs and at the gate can worsen to the point that it leads to destruction of the very thing they itch for. Upstairs patrons/keeper/owners totally forget that the good folk downstairs must be kept happy. Nobody would angrily return an “underdone” steak knowing the now angered chef stepped on it before cooking it up to “perfection”. True story.
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The article is a little breathless.
“…It is said to be where J. Robert Oppenheimer first discussed the Manhattan Project, which resulted in the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan in World War II.”
“It is said”? So much cloak-and-dagger for something so well documented.
(Although it was hardly “first discussed” there – but the meeting at the Grove really formalized the program into its constituent parts.)
https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Resources/photo_gallery/s-1_photograph.htm
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I’m curious how the upcoming Christopher Nolan movie is going to portray that meeting.
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I’m looking forward to that movie for sure, although given Robert Downey Jr is Lewis Strauss, I think the movie is going to be more about the AEC hearings and Oppenheimer’s fall than it is about the Manhattan Project / Hiroshima.
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I was going to make an upstairs/downstairs reference in that comment, but I was multitasking mom’s doctor visit at the time. 
The Grove gatekeepers doing this petty skimming are like the head butler who has a finger in all the pies downstairs.
They’re kind of like social media sites. The location is great, and it has history, but the real value of the Grove are the guests meeting each other. Replacing it would be quite a project, but the guests are the people with the resources to do it.
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Oh, so like Hippie Hollow in Austin.
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… they have antibiotics for that now 
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I always just assumed that they liquidate* employees at the end of the summer. Less witnesses that way.
*Like with a blender or acid or something.
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I dated someone in highschool whos father was a member and he brought me there a few times. Lots of really expensive brandy and cigars. Place had a sorta creepy summer camp vibe.
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Big Boys Camp.
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