31 Tomorrow may rain so I'll follow the Sun Part 2

I did my best, standing in the park getting petitions signed. I was polite and said "please." Got plenty of signatures. Handed them in, not sure what happened next. Time was getting closer to Earth Day. Maybe a couple of weeks away. I was given an address. I think it was in the Bronx. I had to take the subway and I'm kind of glad my two other cohorts were with me. I had already seen plenty of wasteland in parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, but the Bronx was like a third world country. No exaggeration. The buildings were crumbling. There were vacant lots with piles of bricks where burned buildings once stood.

Looked like this. Reality.

There were a couple of desperately poor, drugged out people on the stoop. This was an abandoned building though. Went in, I remember we had to climb a couple flights of stairs. But the stairs were falling through and had to be careful we didn't step on any broken ones. I hate to say so, but there was also excrement on the stairs. God help us. Ok. So we got to the right floor. Went in the room and it was enormous. Remember how big the apartment was in Rosemary's Baby? Imagine that but with no rooms. Just a huge room, kind of like a loft I guess. There were quite a number of hippie type people working away. Big pieces of material. Steel tubs. So we were going to help make the huge banners they were going to hang in Union Square.

 

I almost hate looking at tie dye now because it is mass manufactured. Try looking it up on a search engine and it's almost all new photos of fake hippies trying to sell something.

 

The oldest personal item I still have.

This scarf is 50 years old.

But I made a couple of shirts back then, so I was assigned tie dying one of the huge banners by myself. It was a pretty damn massive job. There were ropes across the back of the room to hang things up to dry. I had some pretty big rubber bands which was good. Pretty hard squeezing and twisting, so it was lucky that I wasn't weak. Took most of the day. Hung it up and didn't see it till the day. Holy cow. Believe it or not, I found a picture. Let me also say, there's got to be a photo of me that day somewhere. On microfilm maybe? They just keep showing the same six photos over and over on the internet. In case you ever run across a hidden box of photos, I was a marshall. I stood on the inside of the barriers and was pretty close to the stage. Long hair. I'm pretty sure I had on my grandmother's silk robe over my jeans. Came down about like a midi dress. Black with all kinds of color stripes. If not that, it was a dark blue silk coat about the same length. May have had on a gray knit beanie.

 

Here it is.

Pretty sure I made the banner towards the front. I liked the orange, magenta, purple combination. I am pretty proud of that. I wonder where they went?