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Show SvecialFeatures Page 22 Museum gives chance to revisit Woodstock BYKORKY VANN The Hartford Couront By the time we got to Woodstock, as Crosby, Stills and Nash later sang, we were half a million strong. What Joni Mitchell failed to include in the anthem's lyrics was that while 499,000 of us were traveling light as we headed to upstate New York in August of 1969. one of us had seriously overpacked. It didn't take long for the real hippies to size me up as a poseur. Maybe it was the suitcase, pajamas and toiletries that gave me away. Possibly it was my hibachi, charcoal, six-packs of Tab and cooler. In hindsight, I think it was probably the red-and-white-checkered tablecloth. Most of the other citizens of Woodstock Nation, 1 discovered, had prepared for the journey by packing nickel bags, not overnight bags. Smart move, since reaching the festival site involved a 5-mile hike from where we had to leave our cars. It's hard to look cool or Hash a peace sign when you're lugging a cast-iron hibachi. A long-haired guy, whose only provisions were some grass and ajar ol bubbles, looked at me and said, "Babe, you've got a lot ofs**t." He was right. The Age of Aquarius was not yet dawning at Central Connecticut State College, where 1 went to school. Civil rights, women's lib and the anti-war movement were radical, intriguing new concepts, but for a squarely middle-class, teenage girl from Hartford, Conn., making the leap from mainstream to counterculture was not going to be easy. When I'd begged my parents to let me go to Cuba to harvest sugar cane with the newly formed Venceremos Brigade, my father looked at my mother in astonishment and said, "Is she crazy? She's never even mowed the lawn." In contrast to joining Fidel's army, a weekend concert on a bucolic dairy farm a few hours away seemed to them a much saner option. I'm not sure what I envisioned when I set off for the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, but it couldn't have been anvthin." like what actually took place. Ads and posters promised an "Aquarian Exposition" and "Three Days of Peace and Music." It turned out to be an uninterrupted stretch of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. By the time we arrived, fences and gates were down, collapsed under the waves of attendees who'd walked up and over the chain-link walls around the field. We found a spot on the hill, set up our things and watched the concept of personal space vanish, replaced by one big experiment in communal living. I kept my tablecloth and pajamas out of sight and slept in my clothes. We tuned in, turned on and dropped out for the rest of the festival - through rain, mudslides and ongoing warnings not to take the brown acid. We had to. Our car was in a 15mile-long parking lot. The New York State Thru way, site of a major traffic jam, was closed, man. I dumped my hibachi, sat on my suitcase, drank warm Tab, kissed strangers, danced, listened tojimi Hendrix play the Star Spangled Banner and discovered the meaning of "contact high" and "free love." When I finally got home, I learned that the whole world had been watching as a half-million individuals had created a peaceful mini-nation that had dealt with bad weather, food shortages and poor sanitation and maintained a surprising level of order and control. It's been said that if you can remember the '60s, you weren't there. Wrong. I remember clearly the constantly moving, buzzing, overwhelming mass of people; an ongoing sense of disorientation; the smell of marijuana; falling asleep as Ravi Shankar played; waking up to Joan Baez's beautiful soprano voice; and the feeling that I'd been part of something extraordinary. I always wanted to go back and sec that field again. Turns out, I wasn't alone. Over the past four decades, thousands of Woodstock alumni have made the pilgrimage back to Max Yasgur's dairy farm to stand on the hill and remember the magical, mystical event that came to embody an era. So when the Bethel Center for the Performing Arts announced this summer that a museum devoted to Woodstock and the Sixties had opened on the original site, I packed a bag and headed out to relive my Woodstock experience -- this time without the hibachi. What I found at the Museum at Bethel Woods (part of the larger Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, a concert venue), is an archival time capsule from the decade of peace and love - artifacts such as rock posters, peace symbols, Day-Glo lights, flower power signs and Hog Farmer Wavy Gravy's overalls. The Hog Farm created a festival security force whose job it was to "enforce the peace, not enforce the law." Museum director Wade Lawrence says the combination of multimedia exhibits, interactive features, photographs, films and displays are designed to immerse visitors in the sights and sounds of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair - and the Sixties, (Smells of pot arc conspicuously absent.) "What we've done is integrate fashion, politics and pop culture with history to give visitors a more comprehensive perspective of the Sixties," Lawrence said. Permanent exhibits unfold in three galleries: The Sixties; The Woodstock Music and Art Fair and The Impact of Woodstock and the Sixties. "The Evolution of Fashion," for example, takes visitors from Jackie Kennedy tailored suits to mini dresses and go-go boots to bell bottoms and dashikis. An interactive map allows visitors to explore 20 hot spots of the festival, including the Main Stage, Hog Farm, Campgrounds and Woods. Booths are available for visitors to record personal stories about Woodstock and the Sixties. Films are a major part of the museum and many include neverbefore-seen Woodstock footage. "Planning Woodstock," is a collection of four shorts covering the birth of Woodstock and how organizers convinced some of the biggest bands of the time to play in a field in upstate New York. Monday, Aug. 25, 2008 Something riotous is happening in Arizona less enthusiCritics are :>r role rarely the hero P. Kennicott ! au of anything in ... . . nobody has n the movies. Washington Post really asked They are at Tpv -* him to play: best incompethe teachertent weasels, inspirer-artist one notch who leads kids below the to the glory of "those who adolescent can'tdo,teach" epiphany. He Grade 8+ category. At knows the worst, they are "Hamlet T precedents, Machiavellian ^^^——'^^^— — — — the Mr. figures, like Hollands and Addison DeWitt, the suave but their opuses, the Dead Poets slimy manipulator in "All About Societies and their sensitive Eve." boys who want to write poetry, Enter Noah Sappersk'in, the not make war. He can't act and high school drama critic whose he can't teach drama — but devastating reviews set in he can (ital) behave (end ital) motion the absurd chain reac- dramatically, and perhaps that's tions of "Hamlet 2." Featuring enough. the brilliant British comic Steve He is, of course, looking for Coogan, with star turns from redemption. He will save the Amy Poehler, Elisabeth Shue drama program, save his own and David Arquette, "Hamlet job and expand minds by stag2" is a dazzling little comedy ing a grand musical extravathat seems, on first glance, to be ganza. It turns out to be an having a lot of fun with the stock acid-trip version of "Hamlet," figures of the high school musi- and with musical numbers such cal and the inspirational-teacher as "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus," it is flick. But Noah, a diminutive a worthy successor to another figure played by Shea Pepe, musical-within-a-movie, the quotes the French literary critic Hitler farce from Mel Brooks's Roland Barthes and all but begs "The Producers." you to take the film seriously as Coogan's manic dance of social commentary. mugging and bathos is done Noah's target is Dana Marschz on the razor's edge of believ(Coogan), the hapless man- ability, but he is pure bliss in the child and talentless actor who role, by turns hysterically funny is spinning out the tail end of and wildly pathetic. 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