(Photo by Dion Ogust)
I had totally forgotten all about the car. Luckily when we walked outside the car was there safe and sound. Good old Woodstock.
Ron was convinced that I needed to meet Carlos, not only for the interview. He felt that Carlos should meet me and that there was a connection between all of us, Larry Campbell, Jackson Browne, Carlos and yours truly. I brought one of my CDs that I had planned on giving Carlos and gave it to Ron. “Thanks man. I am going to listen to this. Are you going to the director’s party tonight? I’ll set something up for you and Carlos to get together.”
I stood there for a moment with a blank look on my face, “what party?” — thinking to myself, I’m supposed to see the Adderall Diaries, the one non-doc I really wanted to see. Ron and I exchanged cell phone numbers and information and promised to text each other and meet later on, either at or before or after this party.
Well, I guess I wasn’t going to see The Film.
Fate
There’s an old saying that my Gypsy Grandmother used to say, “we plan and G-d Laughs.” Well, someone was laughing at me and I wasn’t really sure who it was. Nothing was turning out the way I had planned it and I planned everything so well. After all I hadn’t had a real assignment for years and I wanted to do this right. Here I was in Woodstock with about four hours to kill and a pair of tickets to The Adderall Diaries in my pocket. Since I haven’t yet figured out how to be two places at the same time, I figured I might as well give the two tickets away to somebody who could use them. I took care of that promptly.
I had Justin Schein’s card from Thursday night’s showing of Left On Purpose and I called him up. Before I could utter a word he said, “I have about an hour or so free so do you want to meet somewhere we can talk?”
We met at Cucina around 30 minutes later and it was so noisy in there that I couldn’t hear myself think. We reconvened to my car. I told Justin I would put on the heat if he was cold. It was getting damp now, the first chill night of October was upon us. We sat and talked for close to an hour about his making the film and how much he loved Mayer Vishner.
“Vishner was constantly delaying the film, he was afraid, though, that he would lose his will to want to die,” he said. “For Mayer everything was political. You told him that he couldn’t do something and then it became attractive to challenge the system. Mayer had dedicated himself to the movement and just felt that he didn’t have a place anymore in it.”
I wished him the best of luck and said that I hoped his film would get picked up by a major distributor. As he was getting out of the car something fell out of his pocket and he reached in to grab it. It was a purple button that had a psychedelic design on it and said “Yippie!” on it. “Here, this is for you,” he smiled as he handed me the button and left to meet his wife for dinner at Cucina.
I had been texting Ron about where to meet and not knowing where exactly the party, and Carlos were, except that it was Kingston somewhere. I started to head there. He phoned me, “The party is at Ole Savannah in Kingston, do you know where it is?” he asked me. I hadn’t a clue but I would find out. I drove to the Ole Savannah and waited in my car for a call from Ron so we could set up a meet. It was to be at 10 p.m., the same time as the film I had wanted to see, but now I couldn’t care less about it. I was finally going to meet Carlos Varela.
