hey – it was such a meaningful time for all of us…here’s my two cents to help flesh out the story….

growing up in East Point, graduating in ’64, I had gone to college in NY but spent the year in Manhattan, drawn by concerts at the Apollo and the civil rights marches – and exploring the new world of open sexuality, which was unheard of in high school – it was a way, we felt, of really getting to know someone, of touching soul to soul…a connection with ‘Others’ that had never been a possibility before…

when I came home I became pregnant, despite every effort not to, and married my high school sweetheart who was just back from Vietnam, went to south Georgia for his year of college and then tried to settle down in S. Fulton – it was 1967 and every fiber of my being was screaming to be free – causing a holocaust of heartache and karma that I’m still feeling the effects of – I tore away and rented a tiny apartment on 13th Street, where I smoked pot and sang along with Janis Joplin records constantly, while waiting for a scorpio boyfriend who rarely showed up…meantime, I sewed fringe on my jeans, and made a skirt out of another pair… I’d walk up to the Strip and just Be there, letting experiences happen…we’d sit with our backs up against the storefronts, sharing buzzes and watching the gawkers with their car doors locked streaming by – we’d smile, marveling how we’d once been in that world but were now in a new one…

the music had so much to do with altering our vibration, working with our DNA…we lived and breathed in it…..the acid trips seared it into us…a spaceship that emptied us into other worlds we’d never known existed that we were now free to explore…the warm, wasted Hampton/Allman Brothers concerts in the beautiful Park were the ultimate sense pleasure and profound experience of dissolved boundaries…for a period of years, even after I’d moved out of the area, I’d sit up in the big magnolia trees and groove on the Piedmont Park scene…

we loved the clothes at the Merry-Go-Round on the Strip, where as the producer’s executive assistant I bought some costumes for the motorcycle movie “J.C.” that we were filming locally – I still have the long fringed vest and some paisley flared Levi’s…

we felt so backwards and deprived, knowing the real ‘action’  was on the West Coast, and not being able to get to Woodstock…I heard about the real hip places in Atlanta, but never seemed to belong to the most ‘in’ crowd anymore than I had anywhere else – but there were Jimi Hendrix and others at the Municipal Auditorium, and I still have my program from the Pop Festival at Byron, where we were cooked in a hot stewing pot of bliss and misery and made One…we were wet, hot or hungry, or all three – we had money trouble, family trouble, car trouble, housing trouble, bad trips, exploitation, and people leaving us stranded in strange places, like the ever-weird Cobb County – we had a ‘mind-blowing’ time at the Grand Funk concert at Lake Spivey, but no way to get home – we had ‘crabs’ and depression and bewilderment – and we came into our realization that the visible world isn’t all there is, that we are one with everything, and we are incomprehensibly creative….

after all these years I remember the profound tenderness of a one-night stand with Bill Fibben, of the Great Speckled Bird – of so many other encounters – the cosmic love we experienced and expressed is still awakened and active deep in our cells – it formed deep commitment, and we went to work with it, rolling out in the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, in empowerments of every kind, in changes to every civic structure…this realized Love went into everything – in the 80’s numbing echo of the 50’s we’d hear people say the hippies were all gone, they’d sensibly sold out to better-paying jobs…but we hadn’t really – those who weren’t as radical did go corporate, but didn’t lose all their realizations, and now at retirement age they’re even visible again in the conscious, progressive activities of our time – some of us stayed high and even after we ‘cleaned-up’, never did go back to the ‘muggle’ world – we’ve continued with our ‘back-to-the-land’ simple living ways, we’ve become healers and artists, gardeners, musicians, helpers and  teachers of various sorts….

I’m in the mountains now – my daughter survived both my neglect and my repentance and we’re very close, both committed to Peace…I’m deep into multi-faith spirituality, healing, singing, chanting and dancing, and finally learning to interface with matter better, to make an honest living sharing gifts of cosmic-conscious life with those who missed the days of revolution and transformation that changed the world in that seminal evolutionary moment experienced in Atlanta on the Strip………

Peace, ya’ll………………love Carol