Who are you?

Those of us who've had the good fortune to see a performance of "Love, Janis", a show based on the book by Janis Joplin's sister, were no doubt wowed by her vocal impersonator and her alter-ego, an introspective, Texas girl. It is a musical joy ride of a tragedy, to be sure, but it is so much more.

Mounted in the psychedelic milieu of Haight-Ashbury circa 1967 to 1970, it's a virtual time capsule, expounding the verisimilitude of those mind-blowing years. Her saga is a brief, yet fitting, preface, skirting over the high-lights, so that the listener might recall where he or she was at, man, way back when. Just a triangulation of the truth to illuminate those tumultuous times.

The essence of that incense boils down to a crystal-clear question: what were you then, and who are you now? Where are the punctuation points in your perspective? Could you have imagined the self of today thirty or more years ago, far-out, man, in every sense of the term, from the fabled future you looked forward to?. When some of us came down from that trip, it was a bummer.

The mantra had been non-conformity to the Nth degree. Big hair, small world. The latest LP and a groovy high. The measure of our worth was the size of our Cuban heels and length of our locks. Looking back, it's tempting to mock, but that's taking the easy way out. If perception is reality, that reality was perceived through the prism of the sixties.

Launched by a race in space and a bullet in Dallas, ending when the firing ceased in Southeast Asia, it was too real to deal, so we ducked and covered into the hiding places of our minds. Even a tenure at college was no guarantee of insulation from the pain of draft boards and demonstrations. An altered state, in which we were all painted with the smear of the same brush, until we emerged from whatever bunker we had hunkered down in, blinking at the dawning realization that we weren't in, or listening to, Kansas anymore.

The decade that descended like some temporal tsunami had deposited us on a strange, new beach-head, staring out into the void of the next. Some of us were on a bridge to nowhere, frantically doubling back before it collapsed. And, like it or not, the prerequisites now for feeding one's head were cold, hard cash and a walk down the grocery aisle.

The grand experiment was over,the outcome handicapped by how one had bet on the roll of those dichotomous dice. And at the twilight of each decade, we may look back at ourselves and ask "What were you then, and who are you now?. The answer always ends in a question mark.

We'll just have to wait a couple of years for the question to that answer.