Virginia Is For Families

, originally uploaded by Davidlind.

Today Beth and I spent most of the day downtown at the Richmond Folk Festival. There was such a positive response to the National Folk Festival in the past few years that the  sponsors in the area generously volunteered to continue their support.

There were some world class acts here this year and I will share some things about them in the next week. I’m pretty tired tonight but I did want to post something about it now.
The weather was perfect. People were having a great time. It’s lots of fun seeing all the old hippies come out in their wheel chairs.
Just kidding. We will have to wait a few more years for that. But there was a lot of dancing and jumping around. Shouts and applause. Didn’t smell any hemp however. Darn!

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My neighbors Tom and Pete went to Woodstock for the festival back in 1968. They asked me if I wanted to go with them. “Where will we stay?” I asked. “We have a tent” they said.

I thought about it for awhile and decided to stay home and go fishing instead. Solitary creature that I was even then it was not a tempting idea to jump in their car for the three hour ride from central MASS to NY on the MASS Turnpike to Woodstock.

Besides it might be crowded. So they went and when they came home they laughed about it for days. They told stories about it that seemed unbelievable.

They told stories about girls that made me wish I had not decided to go fishing.

So I bought the DVD of the concert a few years ago and watched it at home. And now I can drive up to Bethel and go to the museum.

“It’s no easy task commemorating the wild abandon of 450,000 people blissfully gyrating in the rain. But the new Museum at Bethel Woods, opening today at the concert site, attempts to do just that.

Psychedelic colors swirl over a life-size hippie bus and a VW Bug, while wall displays discuss everything from civil rights to LSD. In many ways, this ode to the 1960s mirrors the “Summer of Love” exhibition at the Whitney last year.”

- JUSTIN R. SILVERMAN NY Post

I wonder if they will have life size hippies there too. Maybe they will have an exhibit of a hippy family. . . mom, dad and the one naked kid running around like the wild child they wanted him to be.

It might be something like one of the prehistoric exhibits at the National Museum of Natural History in DC.

I don’t know. I guess we will have to go up there and find out. I could take some photos and think about Peter and Tom. I did go with them one time to Lake George in upper NY. We camped out and drank lots of beer. Then we went to a dance in a large building and I saw someone who looked good to me and asked her to dance. We danced for awhile and were having a wonderful time so at some point I started kissing her. And she was kissing me back right there in the middle of the dance floor. I doubt I even knew her name.

I remember Peter and Tom coming over and telling me it was time to go. Somehow they pried me away from this girl and away we went.

Back in those days when I was young, impulsive and often foolish. It all seems like a dream now. And the spirit of that age is gone. I doubt they will be able to reproduce it up there on a spot that used to be a dairy farm. The VW bus will look cool but it will probably be empty. It will seem hollow in a way that museums often do.

Virtually all the people who were at that party have gone in different directions now. Even the hippy family and their wild child have most likely gone their separate ways. But they all have a memory of an amazing weekend when they recognized themselves in the people sitting around them. I was not really one of them. But I often understood why they felt the way they did.

And a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people treated each other with courtesy or even kindness for awhile. They did more than share a few loaves of bread. They shared their hopes, their dreams and their lives with each other.

Crosby Stills Nash & Young – Woodstock

Well I came across a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him tell where are you going
This he told me

Well I am going down to Yasgur’s farm
Going to join in a rock and roll band
Goin’ to get back to the land to set my soul free

We are stardust, we are golden
We are ten billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

Well then can I walk beside you
I have come to lose the smog
And I feel like I’m a cog in something turning
And maybe it’s the time of year
Yes and maybe it’s the time of man
And I don’t know who I am
But life is for learning

We are stardust, we are golden
We are ten billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers jet planes
Riding shotgun in the sky
Turning into butterflies
Above our nation.

We are stardust, we are golden
We are ten billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

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Do you have any memories of Woodstock?  Did you ever feel like the things that were happening then made you a different person?

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