By E. Graydon Carter

Out in the back pasture, rusting in the high sage grass of Ken Kesey's Pleasant Hill, Ore., cattle farm, rests Further, the wildly painted, 1939 International Harvester bus that ferried his celebrated Merry Pranksters on their acid-fueled, cross-continental odyssey in the summer of 1964. To Kesey, 46, author of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, the immobile old wreck is a pop-cultural relic of those headier days when "a person was either on the bus or off the bus." As it happened, even the driver disembarked. "I thought raising a family was a lot more important than writing," he says. More than 15 years ago, Kesey gave up the full-time literary life for one of pushing a tractor, tending cattle and going to meetings of the local PTA. Now, with all but one of his four children off at college, the self-styled "John Wayne of dope smokers" is returning to his Selectric for a novel set in Alaska--and readdressing what he described recently as "the dilemma the '60s had stumbled over, the problem of how to go with the holy flow and at the same time take care of basic biz." In other words, the problem of whether to ride the bus or the tractor.

At $2.50 for ten place settings, the paper knock-offs of Nancy Reagan's $209,508, 4,372-piece White House china are just another example of how, these days, a total lack of necessity is the mother of invention. The plates are the handiwork of Chicago Designer Hudson Brown, who says with an inadvertently revealing touch of social commentary, "Where else could you do something like this and get away with it?" Nitpicking picnickers might quibble over the accuracy of Brown's design, but last week he got a customer who has had First Hand experience with the original Lenox pattern. An order for 200 buffet and party plates was placed by the First Lady for a presidential staff meeting.

By pop-extravaganza standards, the audience of 700 was minuscule. But there were at least 699 too many people for Carly Simon, 36, who was supposed to sing publicly for the first time with Sisters Joanna, 41, and Lucy, 38, in New York last week, to celebrate the Riverdale Country School's 75th anniversary.

Stricken with a bolt of her legendary stage fright, Carly said miserably she wished "they would shine the light on the two of you and let me sing in the dark." The benefit audience had not paid $100 to $500 a ticket to miss seeing Carly, however, and so, rising for her alma mater, she shared equal wattage with Joanna, a fellow Riverdale alumna and a mezzo-soprano with the New York City Opera, and Lucy, who is writing music for a Broadway-bound show. In the end, Carry's stage fright eased, and the Sisters Simon lit up the place.

Over the past 30 years, almost every jazz poll imaginable--from Playboy to Down Beat to Japan's Swing Journal--has chosen Gerry Mulligan, 55, as one of its top saxophonists. But last month New York Philharmonic Conductor Zubin Mehta, 46, offered Mulligan his first chance to get his licks in as a sideman in a classical orchestra. Mulligan promptly accepted a choice seat in the Philharmonic's woodwind section and the soprano-saxophone solo from Ravel's Bolero. The jazzman found one problem with his four-performance gig, which ended last week. "I'm used to standing up when I play," he said. "It's difficult for me to breathe sitting down." Still, Mulligan thought his sax appeal was intact. Said he: "I played it as well as it can be played.'' --By E. Graydon Carter

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