Take A Trip With Me...

It took years and years and years but I know now that there are other wild and progressive people just like me in this world and I'm still beyond thrilled when I get the chance to meet them-- in real life or online. For probably the first 16, 17 years of my life I thought that I was the only odd ball in the universe.

In the first two years of high school, yardsticks measuring our skirt lengths was very normal. It was the mid-sixties and girls wanted to emulate fashion models Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy and Mary Quant was the makeup maven. London was the hip city to look to for style and music and the Brits could do no wrong.

We were teasing our hair up high to the sky or ironing our hair stick straight on the ironing board. Painting on black eyeliner and applying vanilla frost lipstick. And smoking in the bathroom like the cool girls.

Then girls finally got the okay to wear pants to school instead of skirts and dresses. Yes, I'm that damn old. We protested our way into that in 1968, maybe?

I became the odd one out in the straight world when I began searching for my identity during puberty. Everyone around me was super straight and I began pulling away from the herd. I was the teenage hippie chick who drove her sun, moon and stars VW bus and carried her 12-string guitar everywhere she went.

It sounds so normal now but being a hippie was odd enough if you're the only one in your small town doing it. I stopped traffic because of the way I looked. I had long, wild, wavy hair, wore tons of jewelry, leather, fringe, and my boots with a long skirt or patched, embroidered, bell-bottomed jeans (thanks, Mom). This was a look I cultivated at age 16 but I was made fun of a lot.

I was an outcast. A square peg in a round society. I didn't care so much that I didn't fit in, I just wanted acceptance, not ridicule.

Flash forward to a free styling mother of grand who still loves to sing and play guitar and still marching to the beat of her own damn drum. Still a square peg but acceptance be damned. The world needs to fit my mold, not the other way around.

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HITCHKING FOR FUN AND PROFIT

To answer the question, "why?" is because it was a different world back then; and because I was very naivè adventurous.

The first time I hitchhiked I was 18 and ended up traveling all over the southeast for a couple of years. Once my friend and I (we both had cars) were thumbing and decided to "spare change" everyone we got a ride with. Bright idea so we thought except when we got to our destination we were still broke. My friend was keeping the money in her jeans. The ones that had a hole in the back pocket. We got to Nashville late at night. We didn't know one single person, we were broke, cold and hungry and we didn't see any freaks hanging out at 3am to help a fellow traveller out so we ended up going to jail for loitering.

Some areas would arrest you for hitchhiking, but you usually didn't wait long at all so the cops never got a chance to see you. I always thumbed with somebody and never went alone. Phil B and I hitchhiked to the Atlanta Pop festival at Piedmont Park and so were blasted by the time we got there that we missed a lot of the good stuff. If you were traveling in the early 70s,especially to a concert, those highways were full of fellow "travelers" who were stocked with a good supply of weed and music.

I picked up most every roadside hippie (i always hated that word) I saw back then. You could I still mull it over for a nanosecond when I see someone thumbing and my husband still picks up people in distress.

After all he is the original Zig Zag man.

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