Notation: The Woodstock Music Festival began on August 15, 1969, as half a million people waited on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, for the three-day music festival to start.

35,000 people were

expected, instead,

approximately 450,000

people attended...

Woodstock Two

  Westlake Lake

   March 19,2011

  Secured to one of Landings finger docks.

   1:48 PM

Waiting as a tray with two glasses of ‘Pinot’ and a wire basket holding four dinner rolls and eight pads of butter were handed from the waiter on the dock to Marsha, who carefully accepted, and placed the tray on the table.

“Anyway…” Sharon went on “...Bethel is about ninety miles north of New York City, and as we’d be approaching from the south...”

Taking a sip of wine, then hungrily tearing one of the rolls in half and spreading a pad of butter onto it.

“...it was better than five hundred-fifty miles to Bethel, and knowing that we’d better get to Woodstock early, we temporarily turned the store over to our assistants, telling them ‘we’d be back in five, maybe six days’.”

“Clyde and I started to ‘Woodstock’ at…” taking a sip of wine “... eight-thirty om the tenth figuring we’d be in Bethel at about this same time the next morning — on the eleventh, giving us, so we thought, plenty of time to find a spot to ‘locate’ our tent.”

2:11 PM Slouching lower on the cushion in order to stretch her legs forward. Sharon’s sneakers off, the heels of both feet resting on the other cushion two or three inches from Marsha’s left hip.

“Fortunately we owned a hardware store that had just about everything Clyde and me would need, so that morning we loaded the old van…”

A picture coming to Marsha’s mind.

“ ‘Van’...” chomping onto one of the dinner rolls “...that wouldn’t be an old…”

Apparently both seeing the same mind picture.

“No…” laughing “... it wasn’t a ‘Volkswagen’ van. It was an old Ford Station Wagon we used for deliveries.”

Knowing this would be the last of it, slowly sipping her fifth glass of wine also.

“So did you?”

In too much of a slouch to drink from the wine glass without spilling any, sitting up and taking a sip. “Did we what?”

“Get to Bethel the next morning?”

“Well, yeah. We had two ‘flats’ that slowed us up a bit, and we stopped at … oh, about nine that night and slept on the side of the road in the Ford for a couple of hours, getting onto the Bethel outskirts at about seven on the eleventh.”

“Pretty much as you planned.”

“Yeah, almost exactly as Clyde and me planned.”

Folding her legs beneath her, which, so Marsha thought,

might have been rather difficult for a woman of Sharon’s age, causing Marsha to also fold her — much longer and thinner legs beneath her.

“The two lane road leading into Bethel could not have been moving slower.”

Sharon’s voice taking the tone of one that might be drunk or stoned. Or in Sharon’s and Marsha’s case, both.

Sharon’s words coming in a low, somewhat monotone, as though wanting to say what she wanted to tell, while attempting to remain awake while falling asleep.

“The eleventh was one of those oppressive overcast, drizzly days with the drizzle so slight we did not have to turn the wipers on, until we had to turn the wipers on then the windshield became all streaky and muddy.

Snaking through Bethel on that morning, I had the impression that this town had survived only long enough to receive the financial benefits this musical festival of ‘Peace and Love’ would bring.

The whole downtown was possibly three city blocks long and we were moving slow enough for me to recognise two bars, that even at this time of morning were overflowing with tie-dyed hippie types. There were two restaurants both with lines of the same hippie people standing in the warm drizzle waiting to get in.”

Sharon’s legs unfolding and dropping to the deck as she reached for a second roll, tore it in half, putting pads of butter on both half's.

Still on the second half of her first roll, Marsha sipped wine.

“It seemed forever before we got to the improvised parking area where there was a guy directing cars…” giggling “...and ‘Volkswagen vans’ to park in some semblance of order.”

“Even then…” Sharon said “... three days before the start of Woodstock, there was an ocean of vehicles in this improvised parking lot. And as we found out; before the festival ended there were cars left on the soft shoulders of both sides of the two lane road from the festival grounds all the way to town.”

“My, God...” Marsha said “...it had to be absolute chaos!”

“Marcie…” swirling the wine glass by it’s stem “...they expected thirty/thirty-five thousand people and ended up with ‘four hundred, fifty thousand people’… And there’s not enough ‘Andy Gump portable toilets’ in the world to handle a stationary mob of near a half million people.”

“Three days to go for a three day rock concert for ‘all’ these people…” Marsha asked “...where’d they shit?”

“There were long groups of, maybe, fifty Andy Gumps on the field in front of the parking area and way on the far west side of the stadium area, and back about a quarter mile from the stage.”

“A hundred-fifty toilets for near a half million people?”

“Yeah! And remember this was mid-August in humid, and ‘really’ mosquitoey New York

State.”  

2:28 PM

Drinking the last of her fifth glass of wine. The maharajah laced quarter cookie doing its job well.

“Apparently other people discovered this bit of somewhat open field because by the time we got there…” Sherry said “... there must have been fifty couples dropping their blankets on whatever unoccupied spots of ground there was…

All as far as from the stench of the portable toilers as possible.

S o Clyde pulled the wagon a bit closer to the southern banks of portable toilets than we wanted, where we did find a few feet of empty ground to pitch the tent.”

“Could not have been ‘too’ pleasant there.” Marsha said fallaciously.

Recalling! Forty-two years later, curling her lip in disgust. “When there was no breeze, we could smell it. If the breeze came from any direction but the north, Clyde and me could smell it.”

“Settling in…” Sharon said “…young and old, male and female, all hippie and beatnik types. Most of them no more than an elbow away, introduced themselves — average ages looked to be between eighteen and forty.

Everyone was friendly enough. Actually more than ‘when strangers first meet’ friendly.

The two closest to us…” a bitter chuckle “...‘everyone’ was close to us!”

Sharon buttered the second half roll.

“The girl… “ Sherry said “...Girl my ‘ass’, had to be at least as old as me, said her name was ‘Autumn Dawn’, but it was okay to call her ‘Dawn’…” scoffing “… ‘Miserable Night’ would have been more appropriate.

Lady had huge tits that swayed beneath the thinly stretched tie-dyed T-shirt. Black — dyed, I’m sure — hair, bound into tightly braided pig tails that hung over her shoulder.

But the guy…” drunkenly smacking her lips “...couldn’t have been older than nineteen. Light skinned. ‘Beautiful’ face. Tall and thin and what looked like…” giggling “...I found out later ‘was’ natural blonde hair that hung to his shoulder. Youngster said his name was ‘Morning Lust’, but I could just call him…” sighing deeply “... ‘Lust’.

Both ‘Dawn’ and ‘Lust’ were dressed in what seemed to be Woodstock’s uniform of the day: Ratty, second-hand store, bell bottom jeans and tie-died T-Shirts.

‘Look’…’ Dawn said to me fter a few seconds of Clyde studying Dawn’s tits and me lusting for Lust ‘...we underestimated our food supply’…’

“Looking, I’m sure…” Sherry said “...at our stash of canned and dry packaged food.”

‘… so if you’d care to share a little?’ Dawn said, pulling an old fashioned canvas tobacco pouch from her back pocket, she yanked the string opening the pouch and, holding it beneath my nose, for the first time in my life I got a whiff of maharajah.

My husband, though, had spent two years at ‘Ohio State’ and knew what pot was, so Clyde made a ‘food for maharajah’ deal with Dawn and Lust that made the whole next three days— Remember, Marcie, that I was a rather straight- laced, thirty-five year old Ohio woman that was just getting used to ‘Elvis’, and once we got to Woodstock, giving for the residual stink from the portable toilets, I found the massively growing crowd rather freighting… No! Actually terrifying!

At least until golden haired ‘Lust’— after first taking a ‘hit’, passed his saliva dampened joint to me, and I could taste it.

And then...”

“You had your first hit of maharajah, then?” Marsha asked.

The buttered half roll not yet consumed, moving it in a small circle on the table.

Quiet a long moment. Thinking a long moment, then moving to my side of the table and sitting closely alongside, Sherrie’s voice dropping to a conspiratorially low tone.

“I’m going to tell you something…” Sherry whispered — as though anyone was anywhere near close enough to hear “...but you’ve got to promise not to tell ‘anyone’, especially Milt, ‘cause I don’t think he’d understand.”

Anxiously wanting to hear what this innocent appearing; giving for her age, still beautiful seventy-seven year old woman had to do with ‘Morning Lust’ at Woodstock back in nineteen sixty-nine.

“Of course…” Marsha whispered sincerely “...I promise!”

Next: New Phase:  Woodstock Three