Madras Bellbottoms

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0rG2ME4sAc

If you go to 2:45 of this video clip and watch ten seconds you'll see Kevin Dolan, Paul McTiernan, Kevin Ridge and me standing by the roadside minutes after we pulled into Woodstock on the Thursday afternoon before the festival. This was probably the happiest I had ever been to that point. I'm in the madras bellbottoms.

The Graduate

My Dad was insistent that one of his three sons attend Roxbury Latin School in West Roxbury, Mass. Lucky for me, I got to go. I've never been anywhere else in my life that valued creative thinking and the intellect more than my high school. This shot is from 6/9/69, my graduation day.

The Cyclist

This photo would be from the Summer of Love when I was fifteen. Very few images survive of my bike-riding adventures. The first time I ever successfully maintained balance on a bike, I was ten plus. With the Duffey brothers exhorting me, I managed to coast fifty yards down Clement St. until I married the first telephone pole I could find.
I was the last kid I knew to learn how to ride a bike, tie my shoes or light a match. For every geographical, mathematical and historical fact or idea I grasped, I sacrificed some measure of physical dexterity. When I began to do crossword puzzles, I was suddenly no longer able to dance.

The Mountaineer

This picture is incomprehensible to me. When in the name of God have I ever been willingly near a cliff or precipice. My nuts clench and twist when even Wile E. Coyote goes shooting off a mountainside. Since I'm roughly fourteen when this shot was taken, I would have been fifteen before I figured out how to get myself down.