Hope I don’t die before I get Medicare: Woodstock museum opens
June 4 , 2008

If you’re my age (and I don’t mean just Age of Aquarius) and the mere act of getting up out of the beanbag chair doesn’t make you feel old, that’s about to change.

You ready? I just read that the Woodstock festival now has its own museum. A museum as in, one of those places that’s devoted to really ancient stuff that nobody but really ancient people care about. So, yeah – that sounds about right.

According to an article I read, organizers intend The Museum at Bethel Woods to be more than a way for former (and not-so-former) hippies to relive their youths. Accordingly, the museum features exhibits that deal with the political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s, and a concluding section where public figures and ordinary people reflect on what, if anything, they recall from back in the day.

Referring to today’s gray-beards, who once regarded anybody over 30 as suspect, museum director Wade Lawrence was quoted as saying, "This is our demographic." Piling on the indignities, he said, "It's kind of odd to think of Woodstock in terms of AARP, but that's probably the magazine we're going to advertise in." Not Rolling Stone, not Spin, but in the magazine for the American Association of Retired Persons – right next to the large-print ads for tie-dyed Depends and electric scooters that look like little VW microbuses.

Set in the Catskills region of upstate New York, the museum is part of the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, a $100 million complex that includes two outdoor performing arts stages and an Adirondacks-style lodge for indoor performances and events.

The article I read said the centerpiece of the museum is a three-story, silo-like space. Call it “silo-like” if you want but, to me, it sounds like a 40-foot bong.

Although it just opened, directors are already looking to expand. One new annex now on the drawing board will house a life-size replica of Sly Stone’s coke stash, while another will be a permanent home for David Crosby’s paunch.

One of the museum’s exhibits will show how woefully – almost comically – unprepared festival organizers were to handle about a half-million concertgoers. Food ran short, portable toilets overflowed, and local roads were backed up for miles. These plans had been in deep storage and had not seen the light of day until 2005, when they were dragged out and used to plot the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

One of the guides at the site is Duke Devlin, who came from a commune in Amarillo to attend Woodstock. Devlin never left, and today works on a nearby dairy farm and runs a produce stand. He was quoted as saying, “I'm proud of what we did here, but I never thought we'd be talking about it 39 years later." Myself, I’m not surprised we’re still talking about it; telling the same old story over and over is a pretty common trait amongst old people.