http://www.thecabin.net/stories/082208/sty_0822080026.shtml
8/22/08
By Korky Vann
The Hartford Courant
By the time we got to Woodstock, as Crosby, Stills and Nash later
sang, we were half a million strong. What Joni Mitchell failed to
include in the anthem's lyrics was that while 499,000 of us were
traveling light as we headed to upstate New York in August of 1969,
one of us had seriously over-packed.
It didn't take long for the real hippies to size me up as a poseur.
Maybe it was the suitcase, pajamas and toiletries that gave me away.
Possibly it was my hibachi, charcoal, six-packs of Tab and cooler. In
hindsight, I think it was probably the red-and-white-checkered tablecloth.
Most of the other citizens of Woodstock Nation, I discovered, had
prepared for the journey by packing nickel bags, not overnight bags.
Smart move, since reaching the festival site involved a 5-mile hike
from where we had to leave our cars. It's hard to look cool or flash
a peace sign when you're lugging a cast-iron hibachi.
A long-haired guy, whose only provisions were some grass and a jar of
bubbles, looked at me and said, "Babe, you've got a lot of st."
He was right.
The Age of Aquarius was not yet dawning at Central Connecticut State
College, where I went to school. Civil rights, women's lib and the
anti-war movement were radical, intriguing new concepts, but for a
squarely middle-class, teenage girl from Hartford, Conn., making the
leap from mainstream to counterculture was not going to be easy.
When I'd begged my parents to let me go to Cuba to harvest sugar cane
with the newly formed Venceremos Brigade, my father looked at my
mother in astonishment and said, "Is she crazy? She's never even
mowed the lawn." In contrast to joining Fidel's army, a weekend
concert on a bucolic dairy farm a few hours away seemed to them a
much saner option.
I'm not sure what I envisioned when I set off for the Woodstock Music
& Art Fair, but it couldn't have been anything like what actually
took place. Ads and posters promised an "Aquarian Exposition" and
"Three Days of Peace and Music." It turned out to be an uninterrupted
stretch of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.
By the time we arrived, fences and gates were down, collapsed under
the waves of attendees who'd walked up and over the chain-link walls
around the field.
We found a spot on the hill, set up our things and watched the
concept of personal space vanish, replaced by one big experiment in
communal living. I kept my tablecloth and pajamas out of sight and
slept in my clothes.
We tuned in, turned on and dropped out for the rest of the festival
-- through rain, mudslides and ongoing warnings not to take the brown
acid. We had to. Our car was in a 15-mile-long parking lot. The New
York State Thruway, site of a major traffic jam, was closed, man.
I dumped my hibachi, sat on my suitcase, drank warm Tab, kissed
strangers, danced, listened to Jimi Hendrix play the Star Spangled
Banner and discovered the meaning of "contact high" and "free love."
When I finally got home, I learned that the whole world had been
watching as a half-million individuals had created a peaceful
mini-nation that had dealt with bad weather, food shortages and poor
sanitation and maintained a surprising level of order and control.
It's been said that if you can remember the '60s, you weren't there.
Wrong. I remember clearly the constantly moving, buzzing,
overwhelming mass of people; an ongoing sense of disorientation; the
smell of marijuana; falling asleep as Ravi Shankar played; waking up
to Joan Baez's beautiful soprano voice; and the feeling that I'd been
part of something extraordinary.
I always wanted to go back and see that field again. Turns out, I
wasn't alone. Over the past four decades, thousands of Woodstock
alumni have made the pilgrimage back to Max Yasgur's dairy farm to
stand on the hill and remember the magical, mystical event that came
to embody an era.
So when the Bethel Center for the Performing Arts announced this
summer that a museum devoted to Woodstock and the Sixties had opened
on the original site, I packed a bag and headed out to relive my
Woodstock experience -- this time without the hibachi.
What I found at the Museum at Bethel Woods (part of the larger Bethel
Woods Center for the Arts, a concert venue), is an archival time
capsule from the decade of peace and love -- artifacts such as rock
posters, peace symbols, Day-Glo lights, flower power signs and Hog
Farmer Wavy Gravy's overalls. The Hog Farm created a festival
security force whose job it was to "enforce the peace, not enforce the law."
Museum director Wade Lawrence says the combination of multimedia
exhibits, interactive features, photographs, films and displays are
designed to immerse visitors in the sights and sounds of the
Woodstock Music and Art Fair -- and the Sixties. (Smells of pot are
conspicuously absent.)
"What we've done is integrate fashion, politics and pop culture with
history to give visitors a more comprehensive perspective of the
Sixties," Lawrence said.
Permanent exhibits unfold in three galleries: The Sixties; The
Woodstock Music and Art Fair and The Impact of Woodstock and the
Sixties. "The Evolution of Fashion," for example, takes visitors from
Jackie Kennedy tailored suits to mini dresses and go-go boots to bell
bottoms and dashikis.
An interactive map allows visitors to explore 20 hot spots of the
festival, including the Main Stage, Hog Farm, Campgrounds and Woods.
Booths are available for visitors to record personal stories about
Woodstock and the Sixties.
Films are a major part of the museum and many include
never-before-seen Woodstock footage. "Planning Woodstock," is a
collection of four shorts covering the birth of Woodstock and how
organizers convinced some of the biggest bands of the time to play in
a field in upstate New York.
"1968: A Year That Shook America," produced by The History Channel,
examines the most significant events of 1968, from the Tet Offensive
and Vietnam War protests, to the assassinations of Martin Luther King
Jr. and Robert Kennedy.
Visitors pile onto a Merry Pranksters psychedelic bus to view a film
with original footage of the many cross-country journeys to
Woodstock. The film is projected onto the front windshield.
"The Festival Experience," beamed onto four giant screens and
featuring stars overhead, surround-sound and video of naked
festival-goers, is a 9-minute snapshot of the three-day experience.
Festival attendee Nolan Asch, visiting the museum for the first time,
was impressed by the exhibits and the memories they invoked.
"I've never stopped telling stories about my experience at
Woodstock," says Asch, who was 20 when he made the trip from Yonkers
to Bethel. "When you see these films, you realize how amazing it was
that there were so many terrific performances given in such awful conditions."
The real heart of the facility is outdoors at the original festival
bowl. Site interpreter Duke Devlin, who left a commune in West Texas
and hitchhiked across the country to reach the festival, now guides
visitors around the grounds and offers living history, psychedelic-style.
"I had David Crosby out here with me," says Devlin. "He said, 'Duke,
the vibe is still here.' He's right.
"You go out onto the field and you're back in the middle of it all,"
Devlin said. "You can see it, you can hear it, you can taste it and
then it vanishes. It was a once in a lifetime experience. It changed
all of us who were there and there'll never be anything like it again."
I did and I could and it was and there won't.
Right on.
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