Time Travel Accomplished!

I have been in a time machine. Seriously. I went over to Bethel Woods last month and toured the Museum, and I was a 17-year-old girl again.
The Museum at Bethel Woods is seriously state-of-the-art and world class. It takes its visitors on a trip through the post WWII years, charting every aspect of our Baby Booming lives, from our clothes, media and hairdos through to our politics, civil rights movements and war protests.
It takes us on that journey through time, building to the watershed event of the concert on Max Yasgur’s farm, forever known in the collective cultural shorthand as Woodstock.
And, yes, I really WAS there. You can check the Sullivan County Democrat’s front page for August 21, 1969, when both I and my best friend Richard Bjorklund were commissioned to write our perspectives on the event.
And there, through the magic of the creators of the Bethel Woods
Museum, I was back in those muddy fields listening to the music that fueled our teenage years, reliving the events that changed our lives and experiencing the wonder we felt when we all came together for those three amazing days of peace, love, and music that, through a miracle of happenstance, took place literally in our own backyard.
The Museum’s design is nothing short of brilliant. You wind through it, stopping at video alcoves where you can watch clips on the politics of the fifties and sixties—remember the Chicago 7?—as well as firsthand accounts of those trying to get to the concert, the Hog Farmers who were commissioned to feed the musical masses, and the locals who stepped up to feed all those hungry kids in their backyards.
Then you get to experience the actual feeling of sitting on a hippie bus “goin’ up the country” to the festival, which is fairly amazing. Then it’s on to the muddy fields, in a multimedia experience where you are front row center for some of the more memorable performances of the festival.
Finally, the piece de resistance of the museum is the film shown in a small theater which examines some of the music of that festival and its place in the history of those times. By the end, I found myself blinking away tears for those days when we were so frightfully young and idealistic and ready to change the world with our revolutionary message of peace and love. It was full time machine mode.
I cannot recommend the Museum highly enough. I told my children that if they really wanted to understand who I am and where I came from and what my generation all came through, they need to visit the Museum. It is, in the vernacular of that time, totally groovy.
Visit the Museum’s website at http://www.bethelwoodscenter.org/museum.aspx. Admission is $13 and is timed. It is open daily all summer, from 10 a.m. -7 p.m. There are special hours on concert days. The Museum will be closed on Saturday, July 26th.