The other night, my wife and I watched a good portion of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee marking 70 years of service to the people of the United Kingdom, the Realms and the Commonwealth. I looked at the ten of thousands of energetic faces and the crowds briskly waving the Union Jack, and people swaying and jumping, dancing, drinking beer, and singing along to many of the songs. There were individuals of every stripe, color, and persuasion ... and I wondered, “Where are the toilets?”
Every single person, young and old, curly, straight-haired, and shaved looked sincere in their revery. They appeared excited beyond reason, happy, exuberant, bubbly, estatic, expectant, overjoyed and a million other synonyms.
I was as entertained by the performance of the audience as I was by many of the fantastic old musicians who, in their ancient old bodies and skinny-legged pants delivered their best performance in many a year aided by quite possibly, their liberal use of recreational drugs and medicinal alcohol.
Coincidentally, I’ve never ever met a single, married, or divorced person who attended Woodstock in 1969, the first outdoor concert very early in my career as an American youth that I didn’t go to, then added to the gigantic list of other outdoor concerts I never attended either, as years passed on; I just never possessed that kind of sustained energy. However, I do remember an outdoor concert in Duluth, Minnesota, that of Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, that my then 12-year old daughter, Bonny, and I did attend the evening of July 3rd, 1999.
It was not my idea. Plus she had no idea who these old codgers were probably, but she humored her old dad. The most exciting part of the evening was the huge storm that she and I slept through in a tent, in someone’s backyard, when sometime after midnight and into the morning, when over 500,000 acres of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness north of Duluth was blown down leaving many campers there seriously hurt and stranded in remote campsites: https://www.weather.gov/dlh/July_4_1999_BWCA_Storm. Bonny slept through it all; me, not so much.
Another thing I thought about during the Jubilee,was the War in Ukraine, where in that exact moment of time, the 2nd of June 2022 or thereabouts, people in Mariupal, Zaporizhzhia, and Sievierodonetsk were having the time of their lives too except no one was celebrating or feeling joyous or waving their little Ukrainian flags with all their hearts; nor was the grand Ukrainian Government Building lit up with gigantic images of Zelensky projected on its walls pleading with the world to help them in the battle for their lives and the future of ours as well.
We are worlds apart, yet a part of the same world, alas.
I saw the Woodstock movie. Does that count?
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