Oregon Country Fair...An Experience of Eccenric Beauty
It wasn't just the insanely creative costumes, venders and belly dancing music I churned my hips to at the Oregon Country Fair that made it wonderful; it brought all the best qualities of the Hippy generation with out the bad LSD trips.
In the corner of the woods a boy-man, his lowered head strapped with Rhinoceros horns, wore a loin cloth and walked in the slow high steps of a parade stallion. Three flower child sisters with silver hair, braless in tie dye and velvet, could have been high rolling executives come back to the fair to let their hair down and fly free.
Down the forest trail a group of young Hebrew men, fashion models of dark gazelle limbed perfection, are dressed in black and white feathers preening like ostriches. From every corner of the woods a different style of music plays. As if in the Lord of the Rings, a portly bearded man in his 60's walks through the crowd dressed like a wizard. Alone, he transcends the aura he is truly magical. Small children smile and point.
A man in side burns, long black trench coat, black socks pulled high over bare hairy legs has wing tip business shoes on. What makes him stand out is the huge white goose down wings attached to the back of his trench coat. With arms spread wide he passionately recites poetry on love. Accompanying him, a man that could be your neighborhood butcher plays an accordion dressed in scarlet velvet in rhythm to the trench coat angel's poetry. Jugglers and acrobats are now joining in creative chaos. A parade has begun complete with towering paper macha angels and hearts.
As the evening sky draws near the costumes get even wilder. Soon there are bare breasted women walking casually down the forest trails, whom no one gives much of a seconds glance to. Ahhh yes.....the Hippy movement in all its finery, none of its worse. In the back ground the flute plays, and I am back in the crowd dancing to gyrating drums at the Oregon Country Fair, 2007.