Woodstock Not: Laurel Made Our History

Woodstock Not: 
Laurel Made Our History in Life (Magazine) 

"Laurel is on the pages of Life magazine!” Roger shouted. It was days after Woodstock and celebrity was in the neighborhood.

Laurel was our celebrity. She didn't just GO to Woodstock - she was memorialized in the pages of Life magazine. It was Instagram 1969. No one was surprised. But like a celebrity, Laurel was also a stranger.

Whenever and wherever she appeared, Laurel smelled like fresh sex in broad daylight. Laurel was gloriously wanton, whorishly flush when she'd smile at a new man. She was at least 25 years old, the first old hippie I met in the 1960s.

Blue-eyed and beautiful, her dark roots peeking through short blonde curls, Laurel could run her fingers through her hair and take over a room upon entering. She commanded the panting admiration of younger men, older men and most in between. She was sleeping with Roger and Tom and maybe Rob, and didn't care if Richie Havens or Joe Cocker would show up to play at the rock festival. She was looking for somebody to do. It wasn't even a landmark event in the making.

That day in 1969, she was looking for a ride to some farm, Max Yasgur's farm.

A bunch of us, about 10 people who said we were friends, were sitting around a rundown basement apartment off Western Avenue when we heard about it. There wasn't a breeze and the temperature was about 102 degrees with a fan. Frank - on parole - was rolling jays; everyone was looking for something to do.

There were going be some bands playing in the Catskills, but "who's going to be there" was really about who we knew, not the musicians who might not show up. Laurel would be there. She was unemployed or in between jobs or men but she had the time. I didn't.

I was in awe of Laurel's freedom; she was amorally joyous in her inhibitions, grabbing what she wanted (including one of my boyfriends). She abandoned conventions without a hint of reflection or regret, inspiring envy and revulsion all at once. Laurel was a force - she was tall, taut, seductively draped in men's bleached white t-shirts, her underarm hair growing openly, not accidentally. She didn't care.

She was also the "queen" of wannabee hippies gathering around Washington Park in the upstate New York City that year. We'd all meet around 11 am by the fountain in the park, daydreaming about migrating to Haight-Asbury in San Francisco and who'd get there first. 

A man walked on the moon a few weeks earlier. But back at the fountain, Freddie was dropping acid, George didn't know he'd jump off the bridge a few years later, and Tom was going to be a lawyer someday.

The rest of us were mostly just a pack of renters or nearly homeless people on the run from menial jobs in mediocre lives. A refugee from affluence, I was lost from suburbia, trying to "find myself" between Bernie the hustler, and Neil the felon. That day in August, it was hot and steamy and I was lost.

Laurel was wildly found, not lost. She knew who she was.

She would be on the pages of Life magazine within the week. Covered in rainstorms, dirt, and men, Laurel would be beaming victorious, celebrating her sexuality, the image of Woodstock's women.
But that weekend - the weekend of Woodstock - I was getting ready to go back to school, waitressing part-time on the graveyard shift at the Union Diner, an institution since shut down and razed.

And that's where my story of Woodstock ended. I had to work. There I was, a mile from a band of earnest hippies ready to board a Volkswagen bus painted in psychedelic designs and sling around in mud and marijuana for a few days of music -  and I had to work. It didn't seem important at the time. Some guy’s farm was about an hour's drive away and it was just another rock concert. I didn't even try to get the night off from work. I needed the tips.

So I spent that night saying I'd see you all and went to wait tables and greet the drunk and half-drunk guys at 4 am looking for scrambled eggs and soup. And sometimes me. 

While Laurel and everyone I thought I knew were taking down tents and closing off traffic in the Catskills, I was wiping off tables and splitting tips with the cook who carried porn in his back pocket.

The news about Woodstock wasn't pretty or exciting or history in the making at the time. There were traffic jams, muddy people getting high, acoustics unplugged, and bands that would be has-beens in no time.

But it was Woodstock, a sit-in for the revolution, a handful of rebels, most of whom would go home and have regular jobs and ordinary lives. I was on the periphery of Woodstock, but it wasn't relevant. I didn't know the bands or the crowds and didn't miss the mudslides. I could always claim to have gone because, after all, who would challenge me among 400,000 strong?

But my truth was better because the truth was that I knew someone who did go, someone on the pages of Life magazine.

What mattered was knowing Laurel, unashamedly sexual Laurel who slept with everyone we knew and made the pages of Life magazine, raised her hairy armpits in defiance that weekend -  her breasts wrapped in a damp, muddy t-shirt.

Laurel smiled orgasmically into the Life lense, mud-covered and alive.

She made our history.