Down Hippy Road

"I used to wear a hemp necklace. Like a choker, you know, with clay beads" I said, slowly sipping "The Love" pale ale from a recyclable but not necessarily compostable cup.
"Do you think I'm too old for a hemp necklace?" I posited.
We may have been drinking beer all day and inhaling blue tinged second hand smoke in the Purple Hat tent for a good part of the evening but there was no delayed reaction.

"Yes," he said. "Definitely."
A lovely little smirk playing on his lips reminded me that while I am often told how young I look for my (nearly) 33 years, I can't get away with everything someone in their early twenties could pull off. I get that. I swore off short shorts years ago. Lycra does not agree with me. But now there was more to add to the list under the "hippy" genre: I vowed never to wear my floor length patchwork skirt again, the skirt that covered my bare feet as I stumbled through the streets of Greenwich Village during my first weeks of college. My Birkenstocks were already long gone, my waist length hair a distant memory, my clove cigarettes snubbed out a decade prior. But I was holding onto my Bangkok skirts, dammit, my kerchiefs, my au natural (slightly weathered, laughlined, freckled) weekend face.

I may feel obligated to adhere to certain chronologically restrictive rules but it was clear that at this music festival others had no such boundaries. A middle aged man wearing a fuzzy purple hat and tie-dyed shirt walked by, whispering about chocolate and good times. A woman with pigtails and an ethereal golden shirt sauntered closer to the stage, grooving out as the music quickened and pounded through the amplifiers.
I wonder if they are stockbrokers and used car salesmen and bank tellers in their "real lives," pulling out the tattered shorts and tie dyed shirts, the dirt-grazing cotton skirts and backless tops for festivals only.
We all play a part. How many folks were putting on their festival faces for a weekend of revelry and tunes? And where do the rest of them, the dread-locked and dolphin tattooed, the girls with dirt smudged faces and shining eyes, where do they live?
Then I glanced at my dirty fingernails, tried to run my fingers through my ratty unbrushed hair, my campfire-dirty cotton dress hiding thrift store bought brand name jeans.
Who do they think I am?

Whoever we all are, I fell asleep each night in my little tent in the woods surrounded by hundreds of other little tents, family living roomed sized tents, RVs, campfires, the wafting smell of grilled food, laughing, amplified music reverberating through the trees and darkness.

I woke up each morning to more music, more yelling and giggling, an ash pile smoldering with a charred layer of campfire brownies stuck to a cheap metal mess kit bowl, the memory of their sticky gooeyness a sweet reminder of the camaraderie around the fire the night before.

It was my first music festival and I stayed down Hippy Road.
I got bracleted and stamped and beered and musiced and grilled fooded for a full three days and nights in the tall trees of northern Florida.

Groovy.