Forty Years Ago

On the one hand this is the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, the largest "free" concert, an icon of what went right and wrong in the 1960s, with a soundtrack to boot. The summer of 1969, I was a dancer at the National Shakespearean Theater, the outdoor Silvan nestled in the capital mall, where we put on 39 dreadful performances of a hippie version of "As You Like It."

I had been recruited by the director who watched me playing leap frog in a park, my hair flying, my state of mind very altered and uninhibited, my laugh infectious. He asked me to audition, and I arrived with a copy of the entire works of William Shakespeare to read the part of Rosalind, the woman turned man, to protect her identity. I got my period in the middle of the audition, and still got the role of a hippie, dancing and singing in the chorus. Like most young to the theater, I fell in love with an older man named Christopher, who played the evil villain, who was unfortunately married at the time, and a terrible alcoholic. That is the summer I went vegetarian and have stayed there mostly ever since.

When Woodstock began looming in front of us, the producer of the show dangled Actors' Equity cards in front of us: if we made it to the performances during the Woodstock festival, we would get the legitimacy of being Actors' Equity. She lied; we never got them. My friends who drove up never got there anyway. However my friend Arlene and I made a pact: if we ever heard the other tell our children that we were there, we would never contradict her. It would be our lie, but as it turned out, we never pretended that we were actually there. My friend Georgette whose father worked for Glamour magazine, was featured in the documentary film, and her parents did have a fit when the news hit their small town in eastern Long Island. Georgette was often photographed by her father for the "Don'ts" section of Glamour.

My friend Franklin just sent me Pete Fornatale's book Back to the Garden, so I will relax this weekend and dip back into time to recall what I missed.

1969 had it's darker side, too. It was the year of the Charles Manson murders. Read the post on TheDailyBeast.com by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi.

On the night of August 9, 1969, three women and one man entered the Bel Air, California, house rented by film director Roman Polanski and savagely murdered his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and four other people. One night later, in nearby Los Feliz, a small group invaded another luxury home and killed businessman Leno LaBianca and his wife. In both crimes, as well in as the earlier murder of a local music teacher named Gary Hinman, the killers used their victims’ blood to mark the crime scene with slogans such as PIG, DEATH TO PIGS, and HELTER SKELTER.

In 1971, Cece and I drove cross country in a leisurely trip from DC to Berkeley with many stops in between, because it was our road trip, six weeks long. Cece with her Valium and me with my bottle of tequila read out loud while the other drove, the book The Family, the story of Manson, written by former Fug Ed Sanders. When we arrived at Cielo Drive, the site of the murders, late one night, we drove until we found the house itself, by then, its number was changed to prevent disaster tourists like ourselves. We were totally freaked out.

It doesn't seem like forty years ago when five hundred thousand white kids arrived to dance in the mud, and a troupe of deranged went on a murder spree, but it is. The anniversary of Woodstock will not pass unnoticed, but the anniversary of Charles Manson's killing spree might.