Woodstock and Going to the Farm

I was walking in the Pennsylvania Mountain’s with my granddad the summer of Woodstock.  He told me his life was complete for one reason, “He lived to see Tommy Dorsey and all the other Big Bands!”  His eyes danced describing the scene. “That’s exactly how I feel hearing my generation’s music and going out,” I told him. During this mutual sharing, my granddad reached down and dug a root out of the ground. After he washed it in the river, he told me to chew on it. He then asked me what it tasted like? I responded,” root beer.”  He explained that each spring he would make tea from the root of the flowering sassafras that made him high for a couple days. “Now where getting somewhere Granddad,” I thought. The idea for the tea was passed down from Indian’s who considered it a spring purification and medicine.  Just when I was thought I was being given the tree of wisdom from my medicine man granddad, he said there was one problem, too much will make you ill. I still tried making the tea a few times I don’t think I made it strong enough out of fear. (It was the basis for root beer until banned in 1976.)

During Woodstock, I was in the traffic jam making my way to the concert when the police closed the New York Turnpike. We were told to turn around.  It was probably a good thing for I had jumped into a car and hadn’t told my family. In my mind, it will be bad for the rest of eternity in what I missed though. After that summer, I started college and was in musical bliss listening to all my generations Big Bands. I can still picture myself in the University of Pennsylvania’s quad when Ina-a-Gadda-Da-Vida was the anthem coming out of every open dorm window in a surround sound cosmic stereo. It was brilliant. You didn’t have to move for seventeen minutes and change a record while it played. The songs length was a factor that contributed to the haze of smoke coming from those windows.

The next few years, I was part of my own little Woodstock. A group of friends rented and lived on a farm outside of Philadelphia. Though we all didn’t live on it, we shared going to “The Farm.”  I actually drove a tractor and we had meals from food we grew, sort of. It left such an undeniable memory that we just got together to celebrate forty years of friendship this summer! To attempt to write about these friends feels part of a sacred trust. We are still hippies in the very truest manifestation of it’s meaning; People who give and get energy from each other, who have not dropped out, nor lost our ideals, still share a sense of common goodness, and now have a feeling of having been through the trenches and reaching the other side. I lost contact with the group, though many of the others had stayed in touch.  When I thought of my friends, it was through a sense of nostalgia. It was like yearning sensation to return to a good dream. We shared a time in history that was both the best and worst.

When we got together again, I realized people don’t change that much. I heard the same laughter and show of concern. It is good to feel part of something that no one can take away. Time moves on for all of us, but we are essentially the same people. And, we still question authority.  Maybe, we should reexamine the government’s role in the sassafras studies? What did the Indians get out of that herb that they drank for hundreds of years until we killed them? Tea party anyone?

Lighting A Fire

Last Saturday night, my husband attempted to light a fire in our outdoor table with a fire pit center.  It started off bad. Through the corner of my eye, I saw him walking out of the house with an electric candle lighter and lighter fluid. We had company and I didn’t want to yell, but I had to say no! He proceeded to tell me that there was water in the copper fire pit well and he wanted to burn it off. My response was cautiously optimistic, after I handed him matches and took back the lighter. If he threw a match from a safe distance, he stood a chance!

Later I walked up the path to our gazebo with the fire pit. My guy managed to get a half lit fire going with wood logs, store bought for the occasion. I walked up as was explaining to friends; he couldn’t get a good fire going because we don’t have kindling. Here is where I have the problem. We are in the middle of the woods. Pick up some sticks from the ground! He continued by saying, he really only likes to use the compressed paper logs you buy, but couldn’t find them that day.  Our neighbor then said, “Oh, Jew logs!”

As they sat there laughing, I’m thinking, you have a doctor and judge unable to make fires without man made product intervention. We live in the woods and have had many trees and branches cut down. We have paid to have it all hauled away and then buy logs. It annoys me, but what annoys me more is, being unable to make a comment like that about the log!  Childhood jokes started popping into my head. When I was growing up, for some reason all our jokes started with using Polish people. I never knew why. Now, I wanted to say a joke like, how many Jewish men does it take to start a fire?

I know. I know… these jokes are totally politically and ethically incorrect! My husband and friend can make the log comment to each other because they are both Jewish. I’m not, so can’t chime in. I watched George Lopez last night and started thinking about all this. His entire act was making fun of the Latino’s. He can do this because he is Latino and don’t get me started on being Black and who can use the N word.

Being an Anglo Saxon Protestant, we crack me up!  In this political climate, we are often becoming the butt of the joke.  As a matter of fact, we just keep getting funnier, the more we become closer to a minority.  For the first time in my life, I am going through a white ugly complex! I think someone needs to point out that some of the political hysteria these days has something to do with the white elephant in the room. White Democrats and White Republicans are loosing dominance in the US.

As we squirm, we should start looking at ourselves differently and let’s go for it and be more different! Let’s ponder why one needs to be like their neighbor. Why in the affluent area, I hoped my whole life to live in: the women create fish lips through injections then starve themselves, teenage boys and girls all look the same, most social functions bring tears to my eyes in attempt to divert yawning, much of the art, furniture, clothing, houses, stores, and street’s all look alike. I love the word schmuck. I learned it from my guy: schmuck, schmuck, and schmuck! I still believe it’s good to learn how to light a fire though.

Briefcases of Money

In 1982 I was as a custom jewelry designer with eight years experience. During that year I saw things I shouldn’t have seen. In looking back, I was naïve, but at least astute enough to know when to bow out after holding briefcases of money!

For those years, I was custom designing jewelry in gold with gemstones for a cast of characters at a store around Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia and The Watergate building in Washington.  Through the 70’s and early 80’s I met: diplomats who came in limos looking for gifts, high-end escorts with distinct tastes in what they wanted to wear, men who loved their wives, men who loved their wives and their mistresses (these are the men who would ask for two of each,) serious career women who felt empowered enough to make a statement with their own money for the first time and a bevy of beautiful women that started out as men. Lastly I created for lawyers and businessmen with disposable cash or cash that needing to be disposed of. The request was more, more diamonds, more of everything! It was a fast moving decade that seemed to move faster with people’s use of cocaine.

During this time, I found out my marriage was over and I was to be alone with a baby. I went into Philadelphia or Washington three days a week to design jewelry while leaving my daughter in the country. It killed me every mile I rode away from my girl. I had never really dated and had never been alone. For the first time, I experienced a panic attack and felt blindsided by life.

Two men came into the store with bodyguards to have something designed. One was the infamous Liberace who wore a floor length white mink coat. The other was named Billy Motto who dressed a little more casually. Billy was so handsome and so charming though; it’s not possible for me to describe him without sounding silly. Billy was always in need of jewelry to be made for somebody. He mostly left the designing up to me. One day, I presented him with a piece of very expensive completed jewelry. He said, “keep this one, it’s yours.” It was not something I understood and told him I couldn’t do that. Soon after, my boss started to mention when Billy was coming in. He would tell me, if you want to take the afternoon off to go to lunch with him, go ahead.  I never stepped out of the store with Billy. Something didn’t feel right.

Billy’s “friends” would always come with him. They would talk in a close, playful South Philly dialect banter. Being from the suburbs of NY, I didn’t even know what a hoagie was. Philly street-wise I wasn’t. I had no idea what to make of Billy’s seeming macho manliness combined with these close ties with his posse. I first thought, isn’t it nice to that a man has such close friends? As time went on I realized the men were some type of guards. It was about at this time, I saw my first briefcase of money. A briefcase was on my desk and I went to move it. I opened it to see who’s it was. It was filled with only one type of paper, stacks of big bills! I quickly closed the lid and never said a word, until now. As a single mom, I didn’t ask questions. I just wanted to keep my job. It wasn’t the only briefcase I saw.  I am on record saying, I honestly never saw anyone holding the briefcases though.

One day I received a phone call. A lawyer called and said. “ Billy wants you know your divorce is taken care of.” Billy had found out about my pending divorce. I had to say, “no thanks,” to the lawyer. I really didn’t want to know what he meant by “taken care of.”  At the same time period, I was asked to go to Atlantic City for parties in which Billy was attending. I never showed up. I had no idea what Billy did for a living other then he told me he ran a vegetable stand business. As I became more observant, I decided to quit the jewelry business. My world was moving too fast.

A couple of years later, I read an expose in a magazine about Billy. As I read the article, my hands shook. Billy’s business was a huge cocaine and “vegetable business.” It was considered one the largest in the US history. He was in prison. The article went on to discuss just how “charming” Billy was. He gave expensive gifts to everyone. Even his Priest loved him. The Priest said, though I know he has been convicted of doing things, he has been a good person to the community. He took care of his family, Parish and charities.

I did some research this week on him. One of his appeals went to the Supreme Court. He got acquitted and left prison earlier then his full sentence. Another case was fifteen years later for a sports gambling business. He served 72 days and got off even though he had broken parole. It seems, a lot of people liked Billy. I have nothing bad to say about Billy. He is out of jail. (If interested look up the book, The Doctor Dealer.)

Back To The Future

When I was sixteen I went to my High School prom in Chappaqua, NY. A new musician played the whole evening named Jimi Hendrix. It was a few months before Hendrix’s career broke open.  It was through this prom night I learned what an epiphany meant for the first time.

When Hendrix first began to play, something happened. Everyone became quiet. It was exactly like the scene out of the movie, Back To the Future, when Michael J. Fox stepped back in time and was at his Mother’s prom. Michael J. Fox picked up the guitar and played music from a future era. To understand the sequence of time in history for my prom, I was wearing hair piled up so high, the only thing missing was a model ship as Marie Antoinette wore. I was also wearing white gloves!

Hendrix had just come from Europe and was wearing clothes from another world. As his hands went up and down the guitar, he had a crazy smile. His grin just kept getting bigger, as our jaws kept opening wider in a, what the hell am I witnessing way. I honestly remember the evening’s importance because it changed my thinking. It was for me the realization that there was a whole other world out there that I wanted to know more about. I was hearing the wild, savage, future.

It was also the only time I was a stalker. I followed Hendrix to the parking lot and to the men’s room. I smelled pot coming from his van as he went back and forth between set brakes. I didn’t know what pot was. I remember going to see the Vanilla Fudge, Chambers Brothers, and Credence Clearwater concerts at the Electric Factory some months later. Every concert I went to, I would think, there’s that smell again. I got in trouble for going into the parking lot that prom night and had my first experience with detention. Later as I went home to change out my prom dress, I honestly remember ripping my “hairdo” apart and feeling the sensation of a crazy rage need for change.

A couple months later it was summer. I went with my family to Cap Cod. I saw that Jimi Hendrix was playing in either a Hyannis Port or Yarmouth club. I went and waited outside until he drove up in what I think was a silver Corvette. I followed him to the back door. In my NY hometown, girls could get into a bar at 16. This was not the case in Cape Cod. I asked him to please get me in. He ignored me. The next night I waited again and did the same thing. This time I said, as he walked by, “But you played at my prom!” He stopped and actually looked at me. He said, “ How old are you?”  I said, “16.” He then said, “your ******* jailbait” and had the sense to walk away.