Dusting off a story about the Summer of Love

I just returned from two weeks of dancing in the dust (cough, cough) at the Burning Man arts festival in Nevada. In the midst of a windblown week, on a calm and brilliantly sunny day, I told stories as a featured performer on the spoken word stage at Center Camp -- the downtown hub of this temporary city of 50,000.
The light is aways extraordinary in this circus tent, topped with multicolored spiral flags and filled with half awake people clutching cappuccino, wearing surreal dust goggles and pant masks. There were drum circles, folksingers, Capoeria dancers, yogis and people kissing and hugging. In the middle of this scene, I told stories of how it all began.

I had been up all night, on a candy colored metal flaked bicycle ride with my friend Samsara, where we pedaled under the waxing and waning full moon lunar eclipse. The night ended on the bamboo dance floor we helped build, where just as the moon started to return from the shadow of the sun, Samsara cranked up Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" at full volume. It was 4 am, but strangely, nobody woke up, and none of the neighbors complained.

When I stumbled into the cafe at 1 pm, still wearing the black fishnets and top hat I fell asleep in the night before (with contact lenses glued to my eyes) -- I was not exactly in any presence of mind to tell an hour of stories in front of the largest audience I've ever seen. Then again, they weren't exactly awake either.

I started with a story about the Be In and the Summer of Love, 40 years ago, where a young, handsome Tim Leary took the stage, and someone tossed what looked like confetti into the crowd. (It later turned out to be something stronger.) By the end of the summer, everyone had long hair, and the hippie era was born.

Then I told "1967" - about a peace march my friend Patty and I staged in our suburban front yard, back when we were both five. (My father spanked me when he saw the crayon-scrawled picket signs that said: "Make love, not war.") Then I brought it into the future, with a story about my first Burning Man, in 1993, when the whole festival could have fit inside that cafe and renegades shot up Minnie Mouse stuffed animals in a drive by shooting range. We've evolved.

Now, 40 years later, an endless summer of huge events like Burning Man make the Summer of Love and the Be In look drab and tame in comparison -- as I looked out into a room filled with thousands of girls with multicolored yarn hair, and the men in man kilts and lingerie, it seemed so much freer today, so much more self expressive. And we do it all while maintaining corporate jobs and double lives. We may turn on and tune in -- but we don't drop out. We're involved.

It's a different world now, one where we talk about making peace instead of ending war, where we don't try to change the world outside us, we try to change ourselves first. We are the future, and it's not a bad place to be, if you can stand the dust.