Flowerchild ~ Peace, Love and Happiness

Every Sunday afternoon in the late '60's there was a love-in at East Greynold's Park and whatever big name rock group was in town playing Friday and Saturday nights at Thee Image would perform a free outdoor concert. Usually a couple of local bands would play also. Everybody up to and including The Grateful Dead got up on that big flatbed truck, the parks department supplied electricity, and as long as things stayed mellow (and they always did) the cops seemed content to just ignore the haze of pungent smoke in the air. After all, it might really have just been incense...

Teenagers and twenty-somethings from south of Coral Gables to north of Fort Lauderdale arrived in everything from shiny new Mustangs to flower painted Volkswagons. The dressof the day was Indian water bufallo hide sandles, tie died shirts and dresses, hip hugger bell bottom jeans, and lots of flowers. It was the era of "free love", holding up the index and middle fingers in a "V" meant "peace" ~ the Peace Sign! The war in Viet Nam was already unpopular and getting more so.

The womens' movement was in full spring. They wanted more than just the vote that their grandmothers had demanded. They wanted full equality everyplace from the work place to the bedroom. HIV had yet to appear and pennicillan would cure about anything else, when birth control pills hit the market. There was as huge change in the dynamics of sexuality. Women were at last as free as men, and the womens' magazines were full of articles about how women were actually just repressed; that they really were more sexually motivated than men.

I met Jill at one of those Greynold's Park love-ins and she wanted to get some photos. She was tiny, maybe 4'10" and 90 pounds at most. Over the next 10 or so years I photographed her on numerous occasions, but I think this was the only color shoot we did, mostly because I had some Ektachrome in the camera, an unfinished roll that I'd used on a job and was taking to the lab the next day. I don't remember where the lilly came from. Actually the photo is upside down here. She was lying on the grass and I was shooting from the direction of the top of her head. When most people see the slide they turn it this way, though, so that's why I'm showing it this way.