Up In Mr Yasgur’s Loft

     By The Time We Got To Woodstock I’d already embarrassed myself. Though a Jew, at eighteen I’d little previous contact with the Orthodox so when I collected the two young, male, black-hatted hitchers I gave no thought to my girlfriend’s mesh top. They did, said a quick Shalom (the good-bye kind) and, given the unprecedented snarl on the two-lane road into Bethel, they found another slow ride fast.

     Hours on, after stumbling about over Mr Yasgur’s farm, we found miraculous space on the second level of his barn, a soggy, muddy, trudgy mile from the concert bowl. So many fellow Aquarians smoked up in that barn loft all night long that the Cows Protested Moo and all night long the humans yelled unsuccessfully to the terrified cows, Shut Up! They didn’t.

     Next night, amidst dope-induced livestock din, a tall, very thin young man in an earth-toned suit and toting a dark brown leather businessman’s case sat down by us in the hay in as Buddha-like a pose as a man might, really, really stoned. He unhinged his sample case and smiled proudly at what seemed to us to be many thousands of multicolored pills, all sizes, so many shapes, organized in rows and tiers.

     In unmistakable Aussie he said, “From Roo Land, just in from Roo Land, My Man! What can I give you?”

     “Australia, cool..how’d you get here?”

     “Drove, man.”

     “No, thanks.”

     A cow lowed.