If You Met Bear At A Show

...maybe you should have been?

Always wished to meet him.   Pretty cool that you did, Burnz.

Didn't Lilly hang with him in that town in Australia?

"I’m wondering if anyone recalls the guy who would walk around shows, mostly west coast shows, wearing a tunic like garment that had lights arrayed in the shape of Dead symbols like a dancing bear. He would also carry a disco ball and spin it as he walked. He was always in motion; one second you’d see him on the floor and then you’d see him at the top of the arena."
___________________________________

"It was not a surprise to his friends that he decided to name his houses in homage to Dead music. After all, for more than a dozen years he was a popular figure at the Dead's Bay Area concerts. He roamed the aisles and stage as "the dancing bear," twirling a multilight ball on a stick and dressed in a homemade costume of faux fur that displayed a colorfully lit version of the Dead's signature dancing bear.

Levitsky concedes that the psychedelic drugs that fueled the audiences enhanced his own appreciation of Dead music, but says that once he undertook his dancing bear routine, he had to turn down offerings from other Deadheads. "When you were climbing around a stage and up stairs, you really had to focus," he says, laughing.

A throwback to the hippie era clad in sandals and tie-dye T-shirts, Levitsky enjoys the simple pleasures of hanging around with Stanford students, whom he periodically invites to go on weekend camping trips at a 65-acre site he owns in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Big Basin."

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Hanging-Tight-Stanford-guru-reviv...

^^^Yeah.  Thought of that dude as soon as I saw the title of this thread.  He was at all the Shoreline shows.

Two of the young women my girlfriend and I lived with in Charlottesville had become tour buddies with Bear's son Starfinder.  At the Spring '90 tour stop at the Capital Centre, I met Bear at the Greenpeace table on the concourse.  He was trying to sell some of his artwork, belt buckles fashioned as Steal Your Face logos.  I was surprised how short he was.  He was cordial, and not whatsoever imposing.  He had lived in Charlottesville once too, briefly attending UVA before dropping out.  I was saddened when I heard he'd died in a car crash in Australia.  The liquid was really fresh in those years.

Yes Jazz. Lilly spent a lot of time at his place before he died. 

Dude ate nothing but meat.

And I too thought of the guy at shows in costume when I saw the title,

Last encounter was 8/22/81 at a JGB show in Fairfield, CA. 

We went home with a glass vial of the finest liquid ever create. 

Met Bear a lot of times at the Greenpeace table. Very approachable and friendly, unless you extolled the virtues of vegetables or Shakespeare!