After what I can only presume from her posts was a really fun trip to Taiwan, Cindy’s back home!! I was bored without her, but luckily I had Fiza to take me to Jerry Day last weekend, so I can guest-blog about it. It’s this free concert held annually in McLaren Park to celebrate Jerry Garcia’s birthday, and I had an awesome time. The bands, particularly Melvin Seals & the JGB, were pretty good, and I like bluegrass and gospel, so bluegrass/gospel-inspired music was fun for me.

But the real draw was the people watching. The crowd was a strange mixture of college kids, yuppies (who helped along tiny children), and genuine hippies, who had possibly been in the same clothes since the sixties. Why any parent would drag his or her child to the cauldron of pot smoke that Jerry Garcia Amphitheater was sure to become was beyond me. But my heart kind of melted for the tie-dyed, haggard-looking hippie with the bubble machine who spent the concert entertaining the kids, for the older guy holding his son up to the bubbles and asking, “See? Look at the colors!”. For the crazy middle-aged woman dancing with her tiny chihuahua. Here the march of time was apparent and proud, the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the counterculture gathered to celebrate their youth, whenever it occurred.

This was by turns funny and scary to me, the sober 21-year-old sitting on the hill who had never heard a Grateful Dead song in her life. Something about the day- either the pot or the shared love of a band- induced a forced equality. The obviously homeless mingled with successful-looking fortysomethings and their kids; when a frightening, angry drunk screamed “I LOVE YOU! SAY IT BACK!” to no one in particular, some actually responded. The Deadheads didn’t understand their differences and didn’t want to; they had simply forgotten that their differences existed.

It’s a hollow equality, but it’s equality. A proud Canadian walked up to the concert’s Obama booth and proclaimed, as if it naturally followed, “You all had better get Obama in the White House after the last four years. Let me tell you what that guy has done- he shipped his politics overseas, and now there’s a war. And now it’s harder to get pot in Canada, so pretty soon we’ll be like you.” Was he talking about the war on drugs? In Iraq? Do Canadians just get grumpier without weed? I looked it up… The 2007 bill he was referring to targeted violence and organized crime associated with the drug trade, so maybe Canadians are just arguing more minus their hash.

Anyway, this amorphous monster of peace, love and understanding did brush up against reality at its edges. I watched as a whacked-out woman in her 40s, dressed in a bell-bottomed, belly-baring nightmare of a Halloween costume, twirled a hula hoop with her hands in an attempt to entertain a little girl. The girl took one look into the woman’s dilated pupils and goofy grin and, with one hand on her father’s leg, began to struggle backwards up the steep hill on which she stood. Somewhere out there is an apple-cheeked two-year-old who will be afraid of hippies and circular things for the rest of her life.

Sadder was when the monster began to bleb off in different directions. At the bus, “Betty, not the other Betty who was with the Dead, but the guy Betty” introduced himself to us and tried to sell us some LSD, which, he stated, he was already on. I silently looked away as three surrounding Deadheads struck up a conversation. Yet on the bus, the gulf between the homeless Betty and the more productive widened with every block, and one by one they began to ignore him as he struggled to get their attention. It was Fiza’s friend Sam who helped Betty find the Muni and get on the train. We all left at the end of the day, but the real lotus-eaters stay stuck on the island.
–Varsha