A Be-In

A Be-In

It was a balmy Saturday morning in the spring of 1963 when I woke with the sun hitting my eyes and a strange sound, the gentle strumming of a string instrument, coming from outside the window.

We, girlfriend Donna and I, had stayed the night at a friend’s apartment, the bottom floor of an historic stone structure in downtown Bethlehem, PA.

I got up first, squinting into the sun. Donna was still asleep when I took a first breath and caught a sweet scent, her perfume, gathering in the air next to me. I was not conscious of this but somewhere inside the cells of my body, as I inhaled, there was a sense that my blessings were many. 

We had come in late and the lone bed was, as our friend, told us, a couch that would convert to a cot-like-pallet given the proper rocking and shaking.

“You’ll hear a click,” he assured us, which was the essential –and only - detail of his instruction.  

It took the better part of a half hour, an effort not helped by fits of hysteria that finally ended with the couch miraculously unfolding into its intended flat berth, ostensibly room for two, and us collapsing on top. 

We slept like college kids.

I got up once, pre-dawn, wanting air. I opened a window eye level with the couch (bed) and inches from our heads. Like the college kids we were we had no plans to stir before noon. With the night air on my face and the melodic clanking of steel mills like music to my ears I fell back into a deep Saturday night sleep.

1963 be-in site. Grass lot foreground, and hotel background

As dawn came the dark curtain peeled back and sunlight rose above the two story buildings across Main Street, until at mid-morning it flooded the grass lot outside our window. The lot separated our building from the bustling Hotel Bethlehem which was filled with weekend guests. The guitar plunking sound that I heard was from this lot and as I looked now I saw that there was a crowd of sorts. I tried to think. What was this? What was the intention of this group – maybe twenty – mingling outside, on the grass?

The group had the look of a cocktail party and I immediately marked them as the leftovers from a declared frat-party-all-nighter. “All-nighters” were often announced in those days, just about always proffered at the height of the night’s intoxication with a raised fist and a room shaking shout for all ears – All-Nighter!!!  This brought a loud chorus of approval from every soul in the room – i.e. a bar.

But there was little clamor among this morning-after-gathering. Subdued, might be a more apt description. The age or the crowd was ... well ... ours ... but a middle aged person or two (approaching 30) was also visible. I stepped lightly across the room to the door, careful not to awaken Donna. I slipped on my loafers – otherwise I was already dressed – and ventured outside.

 I drifted through the crowd, aimlessly, trying to appear like I belonged. Despite my anonymity I felt comfortable. I was, after all, an American college kid, and in my mind the owner of a permanent Ameri-pass. I saw myself as universally belonging – welcome everywhere by any and all. This was only fitting for one such as I, age twenty-three and naively - and precariously- perched along with all of my friends, at the very top of the world’s cultural pyramid. I moved fluidly over the lawn, brushing past others like a gentle wind, the dew's cool moisture against my ankles.

Finally I tendered a question.

“What’s going on?” I said to a girl next to me.

I thought the girl's attire was toga-like, or thereabouts, a loose white linen blouse and wheat colored jeans and bare feet. I immediately wondered, was this a toga party? *

Not

“It’s a be-in,” she said.    

I nodded as if this was my one-hundredth be-in this month. I was familiar with the phrase, of course; though, to my knowledge, I had never used it in a sentence.       

I saw here in a brief moment my special status - a man-child, and yes, welcomed everywhere, and now effortlessly stepping through the old culture into the new. And true, be-ins were doubtless old hat in Boston or San Francisco, but here in the eastern end of Pennsylvania, on this bright spring morning they were new, and the fit was perfect.

I drew a be-in-style look of pleasant serenity onto my face as I eased my way among the crowd. People waltzed by. It was then that I looked up and saw Donna, the sun painting her hair, standing in the open doorway of the apartment. 

Had I been more astute I might have seen that I had never been happier than at this moment, nor perhaps, would I be again. Instead I allowed that this – the morning sun on glistening dew, the grinding sound of steel mills, the gentle murmur of people, the melodic string instruments, and the beautiful girlfriend – that this was all a part of life's timeless mosaic for me. I was a blessed child of the universe and I had no reason to think that I was not immortal.

 

 

* Toga parties were at the top of the fantasized sensual merriment scale in 1963. It is worth noting that, despite the existence of Playboy magazine and an occasional news note about loose morals, toga parties, in their dreamed up form, never materialized, at least in my experience. The fantasy was sarong like sheets loosely draped as outer clothing and a male dream of scant undergarments. The reality was sheets over everyday regular clothes. That's if there ever was a toga party, which, honestly, I cannot recall.