The Woman Looking for Jesus
After Woodstock, there were dozens of similar huge pop/rock festivals around the country. One was held in Lewisille, Texas, north of Dallas in the summer of 1969. Maybe a hundred thousand people went there, camped out and listened to most of the same performers who had been at Woodstock.
We took our six-month-old daughter and Marcus Younger, my old '57 GMC pickup and an army pup tent--and joined the fracas. One night during the event, I was wandering around near the "free stage" when I heard a commotion in the dirt parking lot. I ambled over to find a well dressed woman about forty, drunkenly berating a couple of teenage boys who, in their freshly laundered jeans and best white shirts, cowered before her drunken tirade.
She had them backed up against a van, shaking a finger in their faces. "...just show me one freaking hippie; you aren't hippies--just show me one stinking hippie..."
I had never considered myself a hippie, even though I had longish hair and a beard. But at this moment, I was pretty far "out" there, out of the mainstream that is, since I had dropped some purple acid earlier. I had just walked across a field of wet grass and was delighted with how the dew felt like wet diamonds on my sandaled feet. I had a red bandana tied around my head, and with the windblown hair and beard, the sandals and the "trip" I was on, I thought I might be just what the woman was looking for. I stopped behind her and tapped her on the shoulder.
"Will I do?" I said in my best Hippie accent.
She whirled around and tried to focus on my face. In one motion she dismissed the kids and grabbed me by the arm.
"Com'ere," she said, pulling me out to the middle of the dirt parking area. "Siddown," she commanded, plopping down on her butt in her hose, heels and high priced Neimann-Marcus dress. It had artistic patterns reminiscent of Mondrian, the famous painter.
"Why are you hassling those kids?" I asked her, thinking she might be their mother or something, "Do you know them?"
"No. They aren't goddamn hippies. Are you a hippie?"
"I don't know, why is it important?"
"What's all this crap about?" she demanded, her wave encompassing everything that was going on.
"What crap?"
"This hippie crap, all this freaking free love, drugs, rock and roll--d'you believe in God?"
"Yes."
"Jesus Christ?"
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