House in Suburbs : Couple’s Life Unlike Dream of Woodstock

Reminiscing about being one of the faces in the crowd at Woodstock 20 years ago, Frank Faragasso had a little trouble identifying his current occupation with a straight face.

Suppressing a chuckle, between swigs of coffee in the dining room of a posh hotel near the White House, he finally managed to get it out: systems analyst.

“Among people my age,” said Faragasso, 46, “having been at Woodstock is like a badge of honor. With our drab lives today, trudging back and forth to the suburbs and working as a systems analyst , it’s sort of like you once were a different person and you once had another dimension, at least.”

Across the table, Peggy O’Brien Faragasso, 44, a housing and real estate development consultant, thought over what her husband was saying.

Altered World Elusive

Together, they were telling a story that could be repeated, with certain details changed, by countless Woodstock veterans. Like the other children of the ‘60s, they have largely grown up to find that the vastly altered world that seemed so close at hand as they stood together as part of what they liked to call “Woodstock Nation” still eludes them.

Both children of immigrants, the Faragassos went to Woodstock together when activist politics was their passion and their vision for themselves was anything but the upper-middle-class house in Alexandria, Va., they now possess.

“We live a very different life than we thought we would,” Peggy Faragasso said. “When we married in 1970, it was clear to me that we would live a totally different life than our parents did.” Pausing, she laughed.

“We are now,” she continued, “in a house in the suburbs, with two children, two jobs. We thought it was going to be radically different.”

Lived in Greenwich Village

In the summer of 1969, in the weeks before Woodstock, Peggy, who had taken a year off from graduate school, was living in a cramped Greenwich Village apartment and working in a city housing agency. Every Friday, Frank, who was teaching at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey before starting a doctoral program in history, would commute to New York for the weekend.

Going to Woodstock had been Peggy’s idea. “I had been out of music for a while,” Peggy recalled, “and, that summer, I was getting back into it. I saw all the groups that were going to be at Woodstock and I said: ‘Here’s a chance to catch up on all the music of the last five years.’ ”

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to this thing,” Frank said. “You know, go up there and hang around in the woods for three days.” Too, at $18 per person for tickets, Woodstock was in the economic stratosphere for them.

But Peggy insisted. She prevailed on Frank to take a day off and, with a couple of friends, off to Woodstock they went.

View From a Hill

Most people who went to Woodstock can recall a particular moment when they realized that it was destined to be far more than simply a great concert. For the Faragassos, that moment was when they got to the top of a hill next to the festival site.

“The hills were covered with colored tents. The radio said the roads were closed and there was a 15-mile traffic jam,” Peggy said. “And we got up on the high ground and you looked at the people and they were still coming in. We said: ‘My God, what is happening?’ ”

For Peggy and Frank, Woodstock became a succession of sometimes conflicting sensations.

“There are several things that stand out in my mind,” Peggy said. “One is that such a huge crowd was basically so friendly. There wasn’t any violence or unpleasantness. I remember positive things. People were passing food around and it was nice to see that.”

But during the performance by Sly & the Family Stone, Peggy and Frank had different perceptions. It happened when Sly Stone sang “I Want to Take You Higher,” a tune widely associated with drug use. As one, the audience rose.

Power of Suggestion

“The thing with Sly was, it was 1 a.m. and it was pitch black,” Frank recalled. “He asked people to light their lighters and he said: ‘We’re going to do this song now and I know there are some people who feel reluctant or have some problems with this.’ ”

As the song developed, the crowd--lighters in hand--began to raise their arms skyward. Even today, the Faragassos recall being frightened by the clear power of suggestion as it quickly swept across such a huge mass of people.

“I had the sense of a Nazi youth festival,” Peggy recalled. She remembers thinking how much the word “higher,” which the crowd repeated, sounded like “heil,” as in “Heil Hitler.” “That was very frightening,” she said.

“We were sort of struck by the fact that the same symbolism and the same sort of crowd effect could occur in a very positive setting as opposed to the very negative setting of Nazi Germany,” Frank said.

“I think we thought it was the beginning of a new era. The age of Aquarius,” Frank said. “Something new in society was beginning.”

Part of Dream Remains

They found out, of course, that in great degree Woodstock’s promise was illusory. But they remain different from many of their contemporaries who didn’t experience Woodstock, they are convinced. Despite the realization that they live far differently than they expected, the Faragassos haven’t yet completely awakened from the Woodstock dream.

“I would say that, outwardly, it doesn’t look as if Woodstock had any lasting influence on our culture, and that’s discouraging,” Peggy said. “But I choose not to believe that’s the case.”

“It’s not over yet,” Frank said. “I still hold out for the possibility that, in the future years, we may go back to doing some of the things we dreamed of then. Perhaps we’ll become more (politically) involved again.

“We have to accept the fact that we’re at a stage where we have to do what we need to do right now. It doesn’t mean we’ll always be doing this.”