The Woodstock Festival

It was Sunday afternoon and Joe Cocker and the Grease Band had finished their powerhouse set and suddenly the sky turned black and everyone knew it was going to rain again. It did. The ground on which two or three hundred thousand kids were sitting was begging to be turned back into mud and it got its wish and it couldn't have mattered less to anyone. The wind hit, then too; it seemed to come from some half-forgotten Biblical apocalypse but no one was ready for the Last Judgement so we turned calamity into celebration.

"Cut the power, cut the power," they shouted on stage, and the kids yelled "Fuck the rain, fuck the rain," but it was really just another chance for a new kind of fun. Odd gifts of the elements, our own latter-day saints appeared out of nowhere. In front of the bandstand a black boy and a white boy took off their clothes and danced in the mud and the rain, round and round in a circle that grew larger as more joined them.

Moon Fire, a kindly warlock, preached to a small crowd that had gathered under the stage for shelter. A tall man with red-brown hair and shining eyes, barefoot and naked under his robes, he had traveled to the festival with his lover, a sheep ("call her 'Sunshine' if you're a vegetarian, 'Chops' if you're not," he said.) Off in a corner was his staff, topped by a human skull, the pole bearing his message: "Don't Eat Animals, Love Them/the Killing of Animals Creates the Killing of Men." He carefully explained how sheep were blessed with the greatest capacity for love of all animals, how a sheep could actually conceive by a man, though, tragically, perhaps because of some forgotten curse, the offspring was doomed to die at birth. Albert Grossman, his pigtail soaking wet, was standing nearby and Moon Fire ambled over to lay on his blessing. Grossman dug it. Rain simply meant it was a good time to meet new people.