Dirty Hippies

I usually don't go out on school nights. I haven't slept in weeks, so it seems (I am one of those people who needs eight hours to function), I'm poor and I've got television to keep me warm. I make it a point not to go out on Wednesdays, since it's America's Next Top Model night. But Alicia asked me a while ago if I'd like to go with her to see Rusted Root. The tickets were cheap and I didn't know the show was on a Wednesday, so I agreed to go.
Allow me to say this: I love the hippies. They're basically modern-day transcendentalists, subverting the dominant paradigm and whatnot. In high school, I basically was a hippie. I listened to Janis Joplin, the Doors, Fleetwood Mac (a little late to be called "hippie", but still), and the Indigo Girls, which some may consider more "dyke" than "hippie" but I'd argue it counts. I wore the gauzy skirts and knockoff Birkenstocks. I even wore patchouli oil. This was in the late nineties, kids. I love me some hippies.
I never listened to Rusted Root until I moved to Boston. In my first apartment, my roommates had a small boombox in the bathroom, so we'd listen to the tape that was in there, which had several Rusted Root songs on it. Of course, "Send Me on My Way" was on there, which is actually not a bad song to listen to while getting ready for the day. Rusted Root is an abbreviated jam band-- a Grateful Dead for the MTV generation. Some would say that Phish would fit that category, but Phish actually jams. For EVER. Rusted Root is Phish Lite-- for the kids who can't hold their pot.
It was an interesting crowd at the show. I expected to smell a lot of pathchouli and weed, but only the occasion whiff passed by. Behind me was a guy who looked a little older than me, who looked pretty well put-together when the show started, and by the end of the evening had put on his seashell hemp necklace and was hippie-dancing. There were a lot of guys wearing Magic Hat brewery t-shirts and Sox hats. There were girls with gauzy skirts and tiny stud noserings and their square-faced boyfriends who come from a factory in Vermont.
The music was good. The lead singer was stoned off his face and by the end of the show was spinning the microphone around towards the audience so they could sing and he could eat some organic Cheetos or something. But it was a good time. I got to hippie dance (which means flailing the arms, hopping up and down and bopping your head) which I usually only do at Indigo Girls shows. If it weren't for the fact that I decided to be a slave to fashion and wear heeled boots which were like torture strapped to my feet by the end of the show, it would have been really cool. It was an evening spent with the "preppy-hippie" (me), the former frat boys who graduated college in the early '90s and the entire UNH Greens society. All in good fun.