Carol Towarnicky: Woodstock I: One bright shiny moment

BY THE TIME I got to Woodstock, the half-million who'd given a name to my generation were long gone.

It was 1984 and this newspaper had assigned me to cover the 15th anniversary of the festival at - get this - Grossinger's, the iconic Jewish resort in the old Borscht Belt that was struggling to stay afloat. (It closed two years later.) The owner's son got the idea to offer a weekend package for a reunion of the hippies who survived the mud and frolic at Max Yasgur's farm a short ride away.

It featured a workshop in tie-dyeing, a midnight showing of "Woodstock," the four-hour documentary, and an appearance by John Sebastian, who advised, "Don't eat the purple tzimmes." (If you don't get the references, no explanation is possible.)

The media outnumbered actual Woodstock vets, but, amazingly, Abbie Hoffman himself showed up - having emerged from the underground, he was dressed in a navy-blue polo shirt, his hair flecked with gray.

I wasn't at Woodstock in 1969. I was in Dayton, Ohio, turning 21 the day before the concert weekend, working at my first newspaper job. Like most of America, I learned about the culture-defining event from black-and-white photos in the Monday paper.

Like much of my cohort, I was sure that the love and peace that prevailed at Woodstock heralded a new era - "Woodstock Nation," in the title of Abbie Hoffman's paperback. (The back cover urged would-be readers to "Steal this book" - also the title of a later Hoffman opus - but I paid full price.)

According to the myth, the deadening effects of soulless materialism had been overcome by peace and love and music. Joni Mitchell sang it, I believed it, that settled it:

"We are stardust/We are golden/And we've got to get ourselves/Back to the garden."

BUT BY THE time I got to Woodstock 15 years later, my copy of "Woodstock Nation" was on a bookshelf in a house with a mortgage. I drove a Plymouth minivan and had two kids in tow: my 8-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son (who wore his red-zippered Michael Jackson jacket all weekend). Neither remembers anything about it now, of course. But my daughter has strong feelings about it now.

A year before the 1984 reunion, the movie "The Big Chill" had set off a wave of boomer soul-searching. Now that the draft, and the danger, was over, some who had avoided it could (safely) wonder if they had missed a test of manhood. Some also pondered the question: Had they "sold out" just as their parents had? Could we ever get back to the garden?

The column I wrote cut us some slack.

"Things will never be the same again in America . . . Blacks will never again accept second-class citizenship, women will never go back to the kitchen. Certainly, the American people won't send their sons as soldiers to foreign countries without thinking about it beforehand . . .

"Anniversaries like these remind us that we didn't exactly transform the world. But at least we wanted to . . . And there's still time."

But what did we do with the ensuing quarter-century? True, we've come far enough to elect a black man as president, but it appears to have driven a big chunk of the populace quite mad. And 20 years after we were so sure we'd learned the lessons of Vietnam, the American people certainly did send their sons (and daughters) as soldiers to foreign countries.

About a week ago, I visited Woodstock - the town, not the concert venue.

Most of the stores have a hippie theme, doing a brisk business in reproductions of the 1969 poster of a dove and a guitar that announced "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 days of peace and music."

But life and commerce go on. A free concert on the town square featured a woman young enough to be a granddaughter of the hippies who skinny-dipped in Filippini Pond that summer weekend in 1969.

And I know that, in this life, the only garden I'm getting back to is the one in my yard in Philadelphia.

Carol Towarnicky, the mother of Mara Goldwyn, is a member of the Daily News editorial board. E-mail her at carol.towarnicky@verizon.net.