Woodstock Cover Girl : Valley Woman Who Symbolized the Era Still Keeps the Faith

She was 22, stoned, and dancing on her knees with a boy named Fantuzzi when the photographer from Life magazine captured a glowing Joan Bryant at Woodstock.

For many, the grainy black-and-white became a symbol, a summary, of all that was pure and all that was impure about the hippie era: free love, cheap dope, wide-eyed kids searching anywhere and everywhere for a way out of 1950s conservatism and the growing horror in Vietnam.

On the 25th anniversary of the seminal hippie celebration, the photo is being replayed on the cover of the Aug. 8 issue of Newsweek. And for Bryant, now a Woodland Hills resident, the past has come rushing back. The cover photo has brought a wave of media types, curious about a 47-year-old grandmother who owns a fashionable Malibu boutique and a French poodle named Pierre and is once again the poster child of a generation.

“The idea that you can change the world with love--we thought that was true,” Bryant said. “I still think that’s true.”

At her shop Wednesday morning, Bryant entertained reporters, answered media calls and conducted phone interviews with radio stations as far away as Scranton, Pa.

Newsweek was due in the afternoon for a 25-years-later photo.

“It’s so surprising that people care what I have to say,” she said. “But I guess it’s part of the nostalgia.”

More than half a million people grooved to Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and avoided the tainted “Orange Sunshine” LSD at Woodstock. But now everyone seems to be looking to her for an answer to the proverbial question: Where are they now?

In Bryant’s case, more than 3,000 miles from Woodstock. Which sometimes seems like an impossible distance, and sometimes just around the corner. As the Grateful Dead would say: What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Twenty-five years ago, Bryant was married, had two children and was studying costume design in college when she and a girlfriend hitched a ride from Bloomington, Ind., to Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Upstate New York. Somewhere in between stops at a vegetarian food stand and through the purple haze, she stumbled on Luiz Fantuzzi, an acquaintance from Bloomington.

“He was a bronze, exotic figure, and he only wore loincloths,” Bryant recalled with a chuckle.

The two got high, and far in the back of the crowd where it was difficult to hear the featured performers, began their sensual dance to the rhythm of an impromptu jam session. Bryant says she was so close to Nirvana she hardly noticed the photographer.

She said goodby to Fantuzzi--not to hear from him again until the Newsweek fanfare began--and rejoined her husband. Fantuzzi called her when he saw the magazine cover.

“She just heard my voice and said ‘Louie?’ I had never even said my name,” said Fantuzzi, who keeps an answering machine in Topanga and is a traveling musician.

Bryant’s first marriage eventually ended and her ex-husband and her hitchhiking girlfriend later married.

“We gave each other a great deal of freedom,” Bryant said. “As I look back, that part failed.”

She came West in 1975 to pursue a career in film costuming and, like so many other Woodstock alumni, settled into a more traditional life.

Now married 17 years to a politically conservative computer consultant, Bryant has traded in her love beads for a 2 1/2-carat diamond wedding ring, and her Cadillac-cum-camper for a Ford Explorer.

“A mommy-mobile--that’s what my kids call it.”

After 25 years and many miles--and no plans to be among the 250,000 expected to attend this weekend’s Woodstock reunion--Bryant says she remains true to many of the Woodstock ideals.

Still a vegetarian and clad this day in a flowing dress printed with ethereal sea creatures, she speaks of angels and cosmic forces, of searching for the human thread of goodness. Her shop, Indiana Joan’s, smells of fresh flowers and sings with Chilean flute music. And in between such celebrity customers as Shirley MacLaine, she crafts jewelry and hat boxes of discarded goods.

“I’m more disciplined and more focused now, and that’s very different than in those early years,” she said.

“But I think in my heart, I’m still a love child.”