JUST A HIPPIE GYPSY

Round Robin Challenge - VILLAGE

One of the biggest adventures of my life took place the summer I graduated from grammar school in the late 1960's. As a present, I went to New York City for several weeks and stayed with my mothers sisters family in Hollis, NY.

I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. New York City had to be the most exciting, stimulating, thrilling and dangerous place for a 14 year old girl.

My cousin Eileen is four years older than me and had just graduated from high school. I worshiped her. She had a steady boyfriend Allen... (who is the dark haired hunk with the black eye in the photo) and a cool best friend named Mona Lisa (I kid you not. I was totally smitten with them and for those two weeks they absorbed me into their lives. I felt like such a grown up!

They showed me their New York. Which included the wild and wonderful Greenwich Village. They took me to a place called Cafe Wha? Can you see it? Little old country girl from the sticks at the Cafe Wha?

For fun, I found my first journal (the Bible) and this is what I wrote

......went and blew our minds. It was fantastic. The Wha? was sensational in every aspect! The stage was a horse shoe type and it has strobe lights around it they went crazy in the middle of it and the effect was maddening. I had a drink called a tiger we all had them and pretzels - cool beyond description.

And yes, there were pictures.

When I tried to think of some image to photograph for the challenge this week I had big ideas about finding some high building that I could look down and make Ft. Wayne look like a village. I kept thinking if I were in Kentucky I could find that Indian village of tee pees that are used as a road side motel! I even went to the Fort in down town...but it was a fort, not a village. I was getting desperate...until I remembered that crazy wonderful day with kids so much older than myself accepting me as one of them. In Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village on a July day so many years ago.