By Gina Sampaio of Sister Serendip
Right after college, while I was still young and foolish, I decided to be a hippie for a little while.
I didn’t go whole hog. I mean, I never changed my name to, like, Celestial Butterfly or anything. One of my best friends did lose her virginity to a man who went by “Cicada.” Poor thing didn’t have sex until she was, like, twenty-two years old and then got CRABS . . . from a man with a bug name. It’s not funny. But to those of us who love her best? It’s still really fucking funny.
I did not get an insect name, but my friends did start calling me Mama Gi in that stage of my life, long before I had any kids of my own, because I’ve always been the caretaker. When we’d be getting ready to go to a weekend-long music festival, I’d be the one to remember that we’d need, like, food. Or sleeping bags. So they dubbed me Mama Gi, and they’d say, “Mama Gi! She can pack a lunch and she can pack a bowl.” (For those who don’t know what that means, well, uh, just ask your teenager.)
Way back in high school I was totally enamored with the sixties. I was listening to music that was older than me by at least a decade, and I wrote fiery letters to corporations that were polluting the Earth. I found it so unfair that Woodstock happened five years before I was even born, and I lamented the fact that the Vietnam War was over because “now there’s nothing left to protest!”
The problem (well, besides the Vietnam War being over) was that I was too much of a goodie two shoes in high school to be a proper hippie. I outgrew that problem during college.
The first time I tripped on acid, I wasn’t sure it was working. But then the cloud mermaids started changing colors. Everything was magical. Eating corn was a mystical experience. Trying three flavors of gum at once? An AWESOME idea. We were surrounded by music and sunshine and half naked hippies playing hacky sack or dancing–everything was lovely and amazing. And then the unthinkable happened.
I got my period.
Mama Gi may have remembered to pack food and sleeping bags, but she did not remember to stick an o.b. into her bikini top. We were going to have to trek back to the tent, which was only maybe a half-mile away at best, but there were just so many things to distract us. Dragonflies! Sparkly people! DANDELIONS. How could we ignore them?
I realized pretty quickly that getting back to the tent was just too damn hard. I looked around at the thousands of people at that Phish show, and it occurred to me: half of them were women! And so I approached one of the glittery, fairy-winged, half-naked ladies and asked her if she had a tampon. She did, right in her little leather pouch. I had found an elusive magical tampon fairy on my very first try. The Universe clearly was smiling upon me.
But then it came time for step two: insertion. We’d have to walk to the port-a-potties. Still so many distractions. Drum circles! Frisbees! Bubbles! In spite of it all, we were making progress across the field when Kellie suddenly said, “That is the most beautiful man I have ever seen. I need to tell him right now.” And while I squeezed my legs together in a desperate effort to stanch the flow, that sounded . . . like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. So Kiki and I trailed behind as Kell made a beeline to the dreadlocked hippie playing hacky sack by himself.
“You are the most beautiful man I have ever seen,” she said as soon as she got up close to him and realized that he really was not actually good looking. “But I have to go to the bathroom now. So goodbye.”
We continued on our heroic expedition until at last we reached that blue plastic Mecca on the horizon. Hallelujah. Once inside, the swirling, hypnotic blue mesmerized and threatened to derail me, but luckily my two best girlfriends stood outside yelling, “Focus, Mama Gi! Remember what you’re in there for! Put the tampon in! You can do it!”
Tragedy averted.
[/nextpage] [nextpage title=”Page 2″ ]In addition to this, we, uh, got denied entrance into Canada once and met a lot of interesting people. We watched giant puppets act out stories denouncing capitalism. We skinny-dipped and drum-circled and passed the pipe. And passed the pipe. And passed the pipe.
We had the munchies a lot.
It was a fun lifestyle, but for me personally, it was a lifestyle best short lived. I clearly made some regrettable choices, but I’ll never really regret them because they all — good or bad — got me to where I am today, and I love this life I have now.
There are plenty of ways some people would still consider me a bit of a hippie. Maybe even more so now as these days all of my feminine hygiene products are reusable. Every mattress in my house is a homemade cotton futon. I still find plenty available to protest. And though I made a lot of foolish decisions in that time, I learned a lot of lessons to pass on to my kids:
- Remember to pack food when you go camping
- Carry personal hygiene products
- Rely on the kindness of strangers if you forget, and be a kind stranger to others
- It’s okay to stand entirely too close to a row of well-used port-a-potties if your friend is inside tripping her face off and needs a little encouragement
- Grow food
- Be good to the Earth and to one another
- Showers are overrated
- Wear what you want, though second hand is preferable
- Dance. Outside.
- Fuck the patriarchy
- But never, ever fuck a guy who goes by the name of an insect
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About Gina Sampaio
Gina Sampaio challenges the notion of what being a stay at home mom means by not only staying busy with her five kids but also with acting, writing, social activism and rabble rousing in general. Gina blogs about her daily adventures with kids, crafts and cooking, navigating a post-foster care transracial open adoption and the ongoing journey of surviving a sexual assault at www.facebook.com/SisterSerendip (@Sister_Serendip on Twitter).
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