Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read Free

see,” he pointed at her camera, “Alice is going to have of all these people jump out of that tiny car just like clowns in a circus.” He seemed to think I would be entertained by this, though the truth was that clowns—along with puppets, forest fire commercials, and badly drawn coloring books—scared the shit out of me. Hippies, so far, weren’t faring much better.
    “This scene is called ‘Ode to Joy,’” added Alice, not looking up from her viewfinder.
    I had no idea what an “ode” was, but trying to stuff twenty-seven grown-ups into a VW bug didn’t look like joy to me at all. It looked like wishful thinking.
    I watched my friend Abigail’s father, a compact man with giant purple daisies painted on his nipples, crawl under the dashboard in a fetal position, while the Fleming twins wedged in behind the stick shift. “Number Six!” Alice shouted. That was Larry Levy, my friend Lori’s dad. He was six foot two and had hot pink and yellow flowers painted up the trunks of his legs and a peace sign on each cheek. Watching him bend down and try to contort himself into the trunk of the VW was beyond painful; it was practically traumatic. Yet my father was grinning. “Give it up, Levy!” he shouted. “You can’t do it!” Larry turned around, smiled broadly, and gave my father the finger. Then he jumped down into the trunk and pulled the hatch closed behind him with a flourish, and everyone hooted and applauded. My dad put both fingers in his mouth and whistled. It seemed to me like every dog across New York state heard him and promptly commenced yowling.
    “Okay!” shouted Alice, “start cuing the music.” A portable plastic record player had been set up under a tree with the help of half a dozen extension cords, and I watched Alice’s teenaged son, Clifford, slide a copy of Jefferson Airplane’s
Surrealistic Pillow
out of its sleeve and place it on the turntable.
    A queasiness started to come over me, similar to the one I’d felt each morning before nursery school. I stood there with my father and tried to pretend that all of this was okay—that this was how any other kid from my nursery school would be spending their summer vacation.
    No one paid the least bit of attention to me.
    “Okay, people,” shouted Alice. “It’s 84 degrees out and I don’t want anybody suffocating to death. Once my camera starts rolling, haul your ass out of that car as fast as possible!” Then she shouted, “Clifford! Music!” and the reverberating, psychedelic, maraca-laced opening of the Jefferson Airplane song “She Has Funny Cars” boomed across the lake.
    “Roll ’em!” Alice shouted. The original idea, apparently, had been to have the car “drive” up into the clearing and then have all the hippies emerge, but once everyone was crammed inside, steering the car became physically impossible. “Just get out when I call your number!” yelled Alice. “One!”
    Slowly, the car door opened and Adele Birnbaum, who’d smushed herself in just a minute earlier, emerged. A lightning bolt painted on her stomach hadn’t fully dried; it bled into the purple “1” above her belly button, creating a Rorschachy mess, but Adele just grinned and wiggled and danced right into the camera while the crowd hooted and cheered. “Two!” Alice yelled, and Sidney Birnbaum emerged, dancing the funky chicken with an American flag wrapped around his waist.
    It all went smoothly until Alice got to hippie Number Six. It seems Larry Levy had pulled his back out leaping into the trunk of the VW. Alice had to stop filming while my father and Sidney Birnbaum carefully extracted him from the back of the car and whisked him off to the emergency room in Brewster. Nobody thought to remove Larry’s body paint beforehand, and I wondered what the nurses would make of it. Oddly, it comforted me to think that Larry’s kids might be even more embarrassed by all this than I was.
    By the time Alice got to filming her thirteenth flower