Laytonville, Calif.- Nearly every child who ever saw a circus has harbored the fantasy of running away to join one. And here in the wooded groves of Mendocino County, 200 miles north of San Francisco, a camp combines that fantasy with another vision: Building a peaceful, harmonious world.

At Camp Winnarainbow, children from 7 to 14 years old can spend the summer being a clown, swinging from a trapeze and meditating in a teepee under the watchful if mischievous eye of Hugh Romney, better known as Wavy Gravy, the name he assumed as court jester to the 1960's counterculture.

Wearing a beanie topped with a propeller and a pink plastic pig and sporting false teeth decorated with multicolored stars and squiggles, Wavy Gravy presides over the camp he sees as a training ground for leaders of the 90' who have imbibed the values of the 60's.

One recent morning, the blowing of a conch shell signaled everyone to the circle in front of the rainbow-capped stage to hear Wavy Gravy deliver the morning reading. It included a passage from Walt Whitman on getting to know wild animals and left them to ponder this from he chief scripture of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching: "Do you think you have the patience to wait until the mud settles and the water clears?"

Children sing from a songbook that includes "Home on the Range" and "Great Balls of Fire." Then it's exercises and off to classes in juggling improvisation, trapeze, mime, and unicycle.

Al Coate, 13, a first-year camper practiced a dance on stilts while telling how he learned about the camp. "Whenever I went to Grateful Dead concerts, I'd get a backstage pass and all of the kids there were talking about the camp," he said.

The connection between the rock and roll band and the camp is strong. The band donates money so children from homeless shelters and welfare hotels can attend. Jahanara (nee Bonnie Jean) Romney, co-director of he camp with her husband, Wavy Gravy, finds children with the help of social service agencies.

Spring Maxfield, who is spending her eighth summer here, helps work with there children. Listening to her talk about that experience is to make a brief mental visit to the hopes of the 60's and demonstrates how well the camp has succeeded in it's goal to train noncompetitive leaders in an "environment that is loving, harmless." When inner-city children first arrive, she said, they are often aggressive and "still on an ego kind of thing" but by the end they are "really mellow."

Despite the counter culture language, possession of drugs or alcohol means automatic expulsion from camp.

Members of the Grateful Dead also donated the camp's awesome sound system, which allows Wavy Gravy to blast the children out of bed with Jimi Hendrix's version of "the Star Spangled Banner" as recorded at Woodstock. And when Mickey Hart, the band's drummer, decided to work with the children, they ended up making a large tom-tom, even scraping and tanning the cow hide themselves. "We made an offering to the cow and told him his skin would be the voice of the drum," Mr. Hart said.

Camp cooks prepare all of the food and hope to provide all their vegetables from the organic garden in a few years. One man, whose nom de camp is "Garnish," was busy with the rest of the kitchen staff pulling loaves of freshly baked bread from the oven. "My wife went to India so I got to go to camp," he said by way of explaining his presence.

A camp counselor who said he came to the United States from England "after Thatcher got in," Spends summers at Camp Winnarainbow and the rest of the year helping the Romneys in their work for the Seva Foundation, a humanitarian aid group working to eradicate preventable diseases in the third world. The group's name is from the Sanskrit word for service.