Good Friday of my senior year - 1970! - found a merry band of us heading up to the mountains outside Woodstock for the long Easter weekend. Alas, we had to wait for Mim - our fearless leader & driver - to take a late afternoon Statistical Analysis class down at Penn.
Mim parked the car & gave us instructions on how to spend the l o n g two hours she'd be busy with class. The oldest out of the five or six kids, I was left in charge. While Mim was clear on what she wanted us to do, she didn't think to go over where she DIDN'T want us to step foot. Which left me free to put The Plan into effect.
One thing that Mim took total pride in was being an utter iconoclast. So, of course her baby sister wanted to walk in those same shoes. Little did Mim know that I'd spotted a news item in the Philadelphia Inquirer about Penn's anti-war protestors, radicals & neighborhood activists using a just-off-campus bookstore as a meeting spot.
Hey, I wasn't Mim's sister for nothing, so as soon as she lit off for her class, I gathered my rag tag group of kids & off we went, in the one direction she never thought to forbid.
To this day, I remember the looks we got, a half dozen suburban elementary & high school kids walking into a radical domain. We stopped, soaked it all in - radical denizens frozen where they sat, faces turned toward us, time suspended. Our band of curious innocents had no idea our presence was as radically subversive to their established order as theirs was to the larger establishment. We just knew the smartest move was to turn & high tail it out of there!
It was crazy foolish, the nuttiest sort of thing to do - and precisely the sort of thing that Mim herself unknowingly inspired. The sister who made me a vinyl mini-skirt & bought me a paper dress to ensure I experienced in some small measure the era around us. Who did her best to steer me away from Robert Goulet to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin.
Who wanted her little sis to be this Not this
She was absolutely the spur to our stupid, awesome foray into dangerous territory.
Still, I guessed Mim might not take it as an homage to her revolutionary vibe.
So, a band of shaken but excited kids swore to keep our sortie into the subversive side of The '60s a secret. Which it was, until now.
So, a band of shaken but excited kids swore to keep our sortie into the subversive side of The '60s a secret. Which it was, until now.
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