A Prologue

 First off, I want to sincerely thank all those old and new readers that have followed what I have written and posted to Authors Den.

 Now, at age eighty-eight, I found that I have nothing more, so to speak, to say.

 With the posting of ‘Busted and Banned’, I found that I— so I had thought— have nothing else to write.

 As writers we have all had those periods when nothing comes to mind, so giving up, I had thought ‘It’s okay, I’d written enough so forget it!’

 But now what? Wake up… Say "good morning" to my wife, get dressed and walk Gracie, have an early breakfast and then what?

Due to failing eyesight no longer driving, so now what? Spend the day watching television, ocassionaly coming on and going off the computer?

 What to do to fill the hours long hole in my life that for the past twenty-five years had been spent with Marsha and Mitchell, Sharon and Milt and the time of Elysium and Sharon’s story of the five miserable days spent in the cow field of a dairy farm in Bethel, New York?

 In true life, at the time of Woodstock, in 1969 I had been married nineteen years, had four children and a home I struggled to afford, and the furthest thing from my mind was ‘Rock & Roll’ music and ‘Woodstock’.

 Actually, in looking back, for me, the best thing about the ‘Hippie’ era was the fact that many of those women had discarded their bras.

 See? Really, my writing is not a far thing from the real me, even at age eighty-eight.

 So here I was, for four days trying to figure out how to fill the writing void in my life when suddenly I realized that, other than ‘just’ the music, the Woodstock Festival was an interesting time with interesting people to further expand on, and  new people to create, but no longer to, once again be posted episode by episode, because...

Having been there, having done that, it's not going to happen again.

So now, at this time, I am onlly going to post the 'Woodstock '69' prologue to the novel, if my eyesight and thought process holds out,  I will be writing and eventually hope to have published.

                                    WOODSTOCK ‘69

    The iconic rock festivale of the twentyth century

    A Untold, Semi-Fictional Rendition

                                                    by

                      Mark M. Lichterman

Copyright © Mark M. Lichterman March 1, 2023

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                      Prologue

                                   When

                    August 15–17, 1969 (scheduled)
                     August 15–18, 1969 (actual)

                             Where & What

 Woodstock didn’t take place in the town of Woodstock. It was on July 15,1969— precisely one month before the festival began — when the towns officials rescinded its permit for the Woodstock Festival, on the grounds that there were not enough mobile toilets available.

This was true . There were not near enough mobile toilets available for a crowd of thirty-five thousand people, let alone a mob of near a half million people. But also, the people of Woodstock became apprehension at the thought of their beautiful little town becoming overrun with anti-establishment, maharajah smoking, ‘Hippies’ and ‘beat nicks’.

 ‘Woodstock Music and Art Fair’, was held during hot and humid mid August of 1969 in Bethel, New York, 40 miles southwest of the town of Woodstock.

Billed as ‘an Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music’ and alternatively referred to as the ‘Woodstock Rock Festival, took place on the three hundred acre cow field of a huge dairy farm located in the foothills of the Catskill mountains.

 An estimated audience of thirty-five thousand people — 16,000, two day tickets actually sold —the Woodstock Festival in actuality was over-run by near four hundred, fifty thousand people.

                                    Why

                            The Vietnam War

                 November 1, 1955 to April 30, 1975

Dragging on, ‘Vietnam’ dividing the nation, hundreds of thousands of young people— becoming known as ‘Hippies’ and ‘Beat-nicks’, took to the streets in protest, while others fled to Canada to avoid the draft as meanwhile, many of their parents and acquaintances formed a ‘silent majority’ in support of the war, creating a counter-culture that appeared to grow more outlandish as the sixties decade wore on causing a generation of young people to ‘drop out’ altogether.

 Dressed in outlandish clothing— In protest, females discarding bras, men allowing their hair to grow, often far beyond shoulder length — these, so called, ‘Hippies,’ practicing ‘free love’, moved from their established homes and communities to often form ‘communes’, away from the turbulence that had come to define everyday American life in the 1960s, creating their own unique, anti- establishment, ‘Fuck the man’! life style.

 Woodstock, the legendary music festival, was also a miserable manure infused mud pit and— lost in nineteen-sixties nostalgia— is the undeniable fact that Woodstock, although undoubtedly a once-a-century cultural happening, was also a miles long, traffic-snarled, rain-soaked, mud and shit-caked mess.

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                        Table of Contents

                                   Prologue

Chapter                                            Page

1               Sharon and Marsha                  1