Feel Like A Stranger or, Why I Almost Wore a Skirt for the Grateful Dead: Why Matt Goldberg put on a skirt for The Greatful Dead. Intro: >In the beginning, before I'd seen sixty Grateful Dead shows in four countries, before my hair had grown halfway down my back and sported beaded and string-wrapped dreadlocks-before the Grizzly Adams beard, the multiple earrings, the Winnie the Pooh T-shirts and the clown pants , all I knew was that the lifestyle of the authentic Head was the only one for me. So in 1988, when I left home for college, still a clean-cut kid sporting short hair and a pair of Nikes, I set out to imitate the look and style exhibited by the charismatic young Heads who lit up the campus-and the parking lots outside the shows I'd been attending more and more frequently-with their flowing Day Glo garb and their seeming lack of any inhibitions or hang-ups. Taking inspiration from David Crosby's "Almost Cut My Hair," I decided to grow a flying freak flag of my own. Things kind of escalated from there, until one day I found myself standing in front of a full-length mirror, earnestly trying on dresses. Skirts really, since I was testing them out as part of an overall look that didn't call for a shirt. Or shoes for that matter. Just the thin, Batik-drenched, vaguely subcontinental skirts worn by approximately half of the women Heads one might meet on tour. You see, the kind of Heads to whom I initially looked for model behavior—the ones who went on tour four times a year and were always immediately identifiable as hippie types—opt for all the widely-known, politically correct sensitivities as a matter of course. Nonjudgmentalism, or, more accurately, a knee-jerk respect for difference, is a holy precept for Touring Heads. The Gaia-centric worldview, with a firm yet forgiving Earth Mother at its core, has no room for cocksure young bucks prancing about the fairgrounds being, well... cocksure. Which is why Touring Heads, particularly Touring female Heads, hold a special place in their hearts for those men among them who manage to transcend the bourgeois gender roles ingrained during their cookie-cutter suburban upbringings-by wearing skirts. For the chance to get laid more, if for no other reason, it seemed worth a try.<
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posted by johannes,
Monday, July 25, 2005
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