How I Didn’t Go To Woodstock

(From Joseph Kaufman)
The roots of The Legend of Cosmo & the Archangel took place in August, 1969. I was 13 and a junior counselor at a day camp for boys called Camp Sumner, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Sumner was an old camp, my father as a boy had gone there before me, and it was located on Lake Pontoosuc, originally home of the Pontoosuc Indians. It was a Friday afternoon, the boys were all driven home on their yellow buses, and dust from all the tires still hung in the air. My senior counselor, an 18 year old fellow named David Weeks, asked me if I wanted to go to Woodstock.

I asked, “What’s Woodstock?”

He said, “A music festival.”

I asked, “Where is it?”

He said, “In upstate New York, about 3 hours from here.”

I asked, “Who’s playing?”

He said, “Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Jethro Tull, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, Crosby Stills Nash and Young.”

I said, “Sounds great.”

He asked, “So, you want to go?”

I asked, “When are you going?”

He said, “Right now.”

I asked, ‘Right now?”

He said, “Right now. Do you want to come?”

I said, “I have to ask my mother first.”

And he wagged his hand dismissively at me, “Ah, you little Momma’s boy, get out of here.”

And that’s how I didn’t go to Woodstock. And, still, I didn’t remember the incident until many, many years later when I was driving home from shul and heard on the radio the Crosby Stills Nash and Young song about going to Woodstock. And as I drove and sang along with the radio—how many times had I heard the song?—for the first time the music evoked in me a jealousy that I hadn’t been born five-or-so years earlier. For, five years of age difference in 1969 was a difference of a generation: eighteen- and nineteen-year-old kids had to deal with the Viet Nam war and the draft as well as all of the country’s wrenching politics and radical cultural shifts—the music, the dress, the sexual revolution, women’s lib. And it produced a maturity in those older baby boomers that us younger ones never quite got. And I was envious of their exposure, their opportunity, their maturity, this great chance at life. I feel like I’ve been playing catch-up ball ever since. And that was compelling to me and I wanted to write about that—about them.