"Have you guys met Mikey, from New Jersey?" asked Steve (from Cleveland) to the person next to him in the crowd. Over the next hour, Steve (from Cleveland) proceeded to introduce me to everyone in the immediate area around him. Preceding this, Steve (from Cleveland) had tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to divulge my life story. "Why not?" he and I were both thinking; we have nothing better to do. Eminem is probably going to go on late, our spot in the sea of people is pretty good, and we've escaped the dust storm for enough time to have a friendly chat.
Steve (from Cleveland) was the embodiment of the Bonnaroo hippie. Bonnaroo's tenth anniversary happened to be his tenth time at the festival, and he could list every setlist from every act he'd seen. He wore tie-die, smoked out of a corn cob pipe, and was a little disheartened when he found out that I was never a member of chess club. Steve (from Cleveland) cared a great deal about Bonnaroo, music, and the new faces around him. Around him were his children and their children. Steve (you get it now) had brought them all to Bonnaroo, some of them for the first time, some for their fifth. When Eminem started, he RAGED. He knew every word to everything. He held up his arms the entire show, and then geared up to head to Bassnectar. This would've been the coolest thing I'd seen all weekend, had it been out of the ordinary.
You see, Steve was a microcosm of Bonnaroo. He wasn't the only one who got to know the people around him, nor the only one completely immersed in the music. People who come to Bonnaroo go out of their way to go to Bonnaroo. If done correctly, the entire journey is a mission with rigorous planning and frantic change of planning. No one went to the festival to sit with their arms folded, seldom bobbing their head to the music they liked. They went out of their way to be "into it." I met people, young and old, willing to share their water, camping equipment, sunblock, and their drugs.
I don't mean to exaggerate when I say this consolidated group of people had become a small family, from the campsites to Centeroo. Never did I worry about anyone taking from our campsite, as our neighbors were always there to watch. When we'd come back from Centeroo at 4 am (some sets ended even later), you could find people roaming the sites indulging in food and hookah.
Weird outfits became less of a cry for attention so much as something to be complimented on. Either when asked for the time, or for a bit of water, the appropriate response was, "Happy Bonnaroo!" a weird form of "thank you," that was almost better than being thanked. Over the weekend, I observed a culture that was completely different than anything I've seen. No less a melting pot than New York City, and no less a family than my own, staff, volunteers, bands, and the crowd melded in one miserable, hot environment to spread a ton of altruism and enthusiasm over four-hundred acres of land for four days.
Yes, the music was amazing. Perhaps, the people even more so.
