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This year again I served on the Banking Council, appearing every evening at Dinner Circle and carrying one of the two 5-gallon buckets we have with "Magic Hat" in decorative letters on a sheet of paper taped to their outsides. Some of the evenings Diamond Dave showed up to help out, and when he did he used a real hat, the one that normally sat on his head. Most evenings we found singers and guitar players willing to accompany us as we went around. After dinner was all served out, we would take all the containers out to the middle of the circle and count the contents, separating the bills by denomination and laying them out in piles on a small piece of quilted cloth that I carried in my pack for the purpose and laid on the grass. Every pile was always counted at least twice by two separate people. This was the time we called the banking council meeting, and we told all who asked to come at this time with their requests.

Repeated and consistent participation in person every evening in all this was de facto the qualification for being "on the bank" and having one's opinions have real weight in decisions, but we always allowed anyone who showed up a meeting to take part in the discussions. There were three who came consistently over the course of the gathering, Marken, myself, and Owl, who repeatedly insisted that he wasn't "really a member of the banking council", but played a big part in all the decisions we made.

When not at the circle, one of the buckets sat on the counter at Information, and sometimes the other was carried around the gathering by a volunteer we managed to inveigle up. Some days the money from the daytime Info hat was more that what we gathered at dinner.

All of our meetings were pretty much controversy-free until the 6th., when at Info we finally took up the matter of a sister who had come to us before showing us a receipt from a produce distributor for over 3000 dollars. Her kitchen had bought all that in a city near her home and brought it to the gathering in the early days, and now she wanted to be reimbursed for it by the Magic Hat. They had bought some of it on credit. She was willing to ask for only a third of it, only $1,060.

But Owl piped up and said that the Hat isn't a credit institution, that they should have restricted their buying only to what they had, and that if we did what they asked for even only three or four other kitchens, the bank would be wiped out. At the time we had just a little under the $5,000 that Plunker was wanting for cleanup. I was soon agreeing and blocking. The meeting dragged on for almost two hours, she trying again and again to haggle us up, until we finally all agreed to let her have $300. Earlier at dinner another brother came and told us he was "destitute" and needed gas money to get him back to New York. We told him that going-away money was normally something we gave only in the final days of cleanup, and some suggested that he look for a rider who had gas money. "You know that sister Loopy, who is always going around naked? She's looking for a ride to New York. You can take a naked girl all the way back." But he got angry and stormed off, muttering about how he had been hauling water and digging shitters and "this Rainbow is a one-way trip".

When all was done on the 8th., we had $4759.25 left, including the change, and when I left Marken was still holding it, but we had planned to entrust it to Floppy at Lovin' Oven, whom Plunker recommended. This is a discrepancy of +$129.32 from the remainder of $ 4629.93 obtained from subtracting the total recorded expenditures from the total recorded income, so some of the money collected in the early days didn't get written down. This is an error of 0.98 percent.

My traditional numismatic embezzlement consisted of a 1979 Susan B. Anthony dollar and a 1976 Eisenhower silver dollar.

These daily totals are only of the paper bills collected. The change was all thrown into a common can and counted all at once at the end. The change amounted to 3.26 percent of the total.

On June 23 and 24, no Dinner Circle was held due to the ground being covered by a foot of snow. On July 7, the Dinner Circle space was preempted by Vision Council.