Festival Gladness in the Midst of Madness, Part One

“Mom, when can we go to another music festival?”

Overheard on Sunday morning at the Strawberry Music Festival.

It’s Friday, the 23^rd. of May, 2025.

We’ve been at the festival since Wednesday. The days typically pass rather slowly until Friday, when time seems to shift mysteriously and suddenly it’s Sunday, a phenomenon that’s been repeatedly observable over the many years we’ve been attending this festival. In all that time, we’ve never been able to figure out where the Saturdays go!

Being at the festival is an escape from the drudgery of ordinary life, an alternative from the humdrum of the normal routine that drives us all like cattle toward our imagined tomorrows, always focused on some mythical point of perfection that only occurs in our expectations.

But being at Strawberry is not ordinary, nor is it normal, and therein lies the magic that has made this gem of a festival a must-do that has attracted followers—those in-the-know—for generations.

The festival’s roots go back to its founding in 1982 when a handful of friends, one or two of whom had business degrees, decided to take the big leap into music promotion. Little did they know what lay ahead—venue changes, forest fires, Covid, on top of the normal ups and downs of doing business in general. But, like a Phoenix rising from the ashes, the promoters persisted and endured all those challenges to emerge as one of the pre-eminent music festivals in the country today.

Some of the folks staffing the tee shirt booth

In the “old days,” when the festival took place at Camp Mather, the lack of cell phone service added to the sense of isolation from the outside world. These days, notifications mercilessly pop up on my cell phone informing me about the latest outrage—always with the orange aberration at the center, stirring the pot with invective, hyperbole and enough shambolic senselessness to stupefy entire populations with his particular brand of poisonous prerogatives and perfidy.

The counterpoint of wonderful with horrible made for more than a little cognitive dissonance. Trying to balance the two would have been a more reasonable thing to attempt had I possessed the judgment or good sense to have simply turned off my notifications like any sensible person might have done. Alas! Such insights seldom occur to me until after the time for their implementation has long passed.

The trouble is, the task of keeping abreast of the news these days is made all the more difficult by the competing task of maintaining one’s sanity in the midst of so much unhinged craziness. That said, the ability to balance both is only made achievable, for me anyway, by practicing a technique I learned back when I was a Child Protection Services social worker—the art of compartmentalization. The ability to compartmentalize is what saved me while negotiating the ins and outs of that profession—something I did for over sixteen years.

Back to the festival. One of the most memorable moments at this year’s festival was being able to meet a charming six-year-old girl named Scout. Camped next to us with her family, Scout was an arrestingly striking-looking child with big blue eyes that were intoxicating to behold. As if that wasn’t enough, Scout had a personality to match and was quite articulate for her age, which made visiting with her a delightful experience.

Our young neighbor, Scout

Steve Curl’s Sunday watercolor workshop near the Play Stage was a hit with the younger folks.

ET, our trusty sentinel, manned his post admirably atop our Airstream throughout the festival, as usual. I can’t remember when we began bringing him with us to festivals but I do recall vividly the one time we forgot him. The normally affable alien took our malfeasance as an affront, carrying on to such a degree that we swore never to forgot him again.

There were indications of protest peppered about here and there, like the sign posted on the back of a trailer sharing a Ruth Bader Ginsberg quote about duty to country.

Another remark overheard at the festival, this one of a different sort entirely, was “There aren’t words for it!” This was a part of a larger conversation concerning the con-man in chief, the depth of his corruption and the shamelessness of his execution in dismantling everything governmental that made sense in favor of ineptitude, short-sightedness and ill-conceived chaos.

All I can add to that is to say, “I’ve run out of words too.”

That is, except to say that the spirit of joyful conviviality in evidence at the festival was in enormous contrast to the spirit in the country today, the slowly dawning recognition that perhaps things aren’t going to be alright after all, that maybe we really are all headed for some version of a fear-driven dystopian society, barring some unforeseen development capable of providing the power or the leverage needed to break the spell under which too many have fallen today.

The festival was a much-needed distraction from all that, providing an escape route, if only for a little while, a bridge from disturbing to delightful. In one illustration of that transformation, our neighbors across the road erected a bar, the Lizard Lounge, where the libations, all free, poured freely from 4:00 to 5:00 pm daily.

The transformation would have been an even more effective one had I not left my cellphone notifications set to “on,” which meant I was finding my attention diverted from listening to great bluegrass instrumental performances to discovering that the House just passed their terrible and unconscionable budget bill—the one el cheeeto calls the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act,” and the one that decimates Medicaid.

The same piece of legislation, by the way, also contains a paragraph that, according to the Christian Science Monitor, “would strip the power of the courts to hold the executive branch in contempt, at least for current lawsuits against the (t)rump administration.”

Once again fleeing from the onerous responsibilities of keeping informed as a basic duty of citizenship, from bearing witness to the madness and aiming not to become caught up in the overriding sense of despair circling in wait, the festival had its silly side too, as evidenced by such ridiculous discoveries as a faux goose dressed in a tee-shirt stalking hapless passersby.

To Be Continued: