WOODSTOCK STORY

I don't know if this is true or not - but it could have been. DID ANYBODY HERE GO TO WOODSTOCK? - I know I didn't because I was having a baby. I guess I could have had her there at Woodstock but instead I opted for San Antonio. Read on ~~~ Peace

To Be Old and in Woodstock

By GAIL COLLINS
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/opinion/collins-bio.html


Forty years ago this weekend, I was at the Woodstock concert, and now I am getting alarmed about all the retrospectives. They’re beginning to make me feel like Frank Buckles, the 108-year-old last surviving veteran of World War I. Although I will never come up with a line as good as Frank’s secret to a long life. (“When you start to die, don’t.”)

Also, it has brought back my concern about the fact that I do not have any memory whatsoever of having heard any music. Woodstock-wise, I am the walking definition of anhedonia.

I spent a lot of time trying to talk a state policeman into helping me charge the battery on the car I had borrowed from my boyfriend. And, having left the picnic basket behind on the front porch, I was in charge of finding food for myself, my brother and the six friends who came with us. This took a great deal of time, and involved making my way to a little town down the road, where the store shelves had been stripped nearly bare and the people seemed to feel as if they were living out an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

Fortunately, it turned out that eight people could live on peanut butter and marshmallow fluff for much longer than you might imagine.

But it was still a great adventure. The lesson I took away from it is that whenever anybody asks you to do something off the wall, you should really try to do it — unless it involves being unethical or a two-plane connection. You might not enjoy it while it’s going on, but somewhere down the line the anecdotes will always come in handy.

When I was actually at Woodstock, it never occurred to me anybody was going to want to discuss it 40 years down the road. In fact, the only time I envisioned the concert having any impact on my future was on the way home when I decided all of us were going to die in a massive traffic jam.

It was already dark when a girl walked up to my car — which was easy to approach, since we hadn’t moved for several hours — and said something like: “All the people ahead are going to sleep, so you might as well just settle down for the night.”

Then she gave me a flower and walked away. This was a sweet gesture, but I was so overwhelmed by the wish that the flower was, say, a saltine cracker, that I didn’t really respond.

As the hours slowly ticked by, I decided that the cars were never going to move again — and that months later rescuers would find our desiccated bodies, some collapsed behind the wheel, others slumped over the glove compartment where they expired while searching for a stray cough drop.

I fantasized that this mass tragedy would cause all the people over 30 to regret the terrible way that they had ignored the wise advice that the younger generation had been offering on how to run the world. Then the much-discussed revolution would finally occur, the world would achieve peace and harmony and we would be remembered as the Woodstock Martyrs who made it all happen.

Or, you know, we might just decide to get out of the cars and walk.

The Woodstock-mania must drive young people crazy since it is yet another reminder that the baby-boom generation is never going to stop talking about the stuff it did, and that when they are old themselves there will probably still be some 108-year-old telling them how everybody slept in the mud but that it was worth it because Janis Joplin sounded so awesome and the people were all mellow.

Current younger generation, I know you would be equally good-natured if you found yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere, cut off from the world with 400,000 other people and a bunch of bands. But it will never happen because although you will have many, many fine adventures of your own, you will never be cut off.

My sister-in-law Laura just got back from the Lollapalooza concert in Chicago, which was the exact opposite of Woodstock in the sense that it was an extremely pleasant way for a middle-aged person to spend a weekend.

The thing that struck her most — besides the misting tents, the lobster corndogs and the truffled popcorn — was that “at any point you could look around and 50 percent of the people were texting or reading a text. Which is fine for keeping in touch, but I wonder how truly involved you can get with the music.”

As the person who went to Woodstock and didn’t see the concert, I can’t really comment on that last point. But 40 years ago, I knew eight people who would have killed for that lobster corndog.