Shades of summer past!

Wilson,
This time the letter isn't for you. It's for my friend, Val, who will join me this Monday evening, after I return from meeting the folks at One World Play Project. And she's going to be eating her heart out. Not because she'll miss a chance to meet the people who make those wonderful unbreakable soccer balls. It's about missing the Haight-Ashbury summer fair!

Throngs of mostly normal-looking people jammed Haight Street for several blocks to catch a glimpse of a period that came and went before they were born.. Hippies indeed left their mark!

Val is an old friend and I invited her to come along on my San Francisco trip. She has never been here, and Haight Ashbury was on her bucket list. On Sunday I took a bus ride to check out Golden Gate Park and how well my muni pass for a week of public transportation worked. But the bus got diverted by a blocked street. It was the fair! This was pure seredipity, and it took me back to my misspent youth and the 1960s.

Like, far out, man, it was like good-tripping into a time warp, warp, warp, warp.

Wilson, you weren't around then, of course, but you know about love, because you represent agape, brotherly love. And 1967, the year I headed off to the military,  was the Summer of Love  (including the brotherly type) in San Francisco. It was a Utopian celebration that started in Golden Gate Park and became the impetus  behind the runaway hit, Hair. Geeze. That was 49 years ago, but you wouldn't know it by some of the characters who showed their faces and colors on Sunday.

 I shot a bunch of photos of the activities and people and the neighborhood, and I'd like to share them with you. I'll add captions to some, but many speak for themselves. Here they are:

Flower man was selling psychedelic umbrellas and beads.

Was it the mushrooms? The old gaffer-- (oops, probably my age) --said he sees right past the peace symbols on those shades. That symbol, by the way, is created by combining two military semaphore symbols, "N" and "D", bound by a circle. The initials stand for "nuclear disarmament."

Psychedelic type faces can be hard to read, but who cares, man? It's groovy.

Signs representing two different eras content for the tourist's dollar.

Tie-dyed T-shirts

Oh, wow, man. Out of sight! Way cool. It's like, wow, like the biggest owl eye you ever saw, man. It's far out! No, wait, it's psychedelic!  No, it's so far out it's in! Gotta have it on my mantle. That Michelob bottle needs to go--all the candle wax I dripped on it one night 50 years ago to make it look really old has faded and chipped off...

One block away, opulent, manicured Victorian-styled homes, accented with gingerbread motifs and spiced with hints of psychedelia, reinterpret the ostentation of  the counter culture that was absorbed  and co-opted, yet continues to inform the mainstream.

Around the corner from the street fair, a young entrepreneur sought donations for his lemonade stand to benefit a civil rights academy named for Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person in California to be elected to public office. He could only accept donations because of the city ordinance, his mother explained.

Dead Heads should know this Ashbury Street address--it's where THEY hung out.

And Jerry Garcia's spirit still plays on here--on the sidewalk at the bottom of the steps.

Love, 

Robert