Seniors get special rates at new Woodstock museum

By Steve James

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - By the time we got to Woodstock ... they'd built a museum.

The Museum at Bethel Woods brings the Age of Aquarius into the age of the Internet for $13 a ticket. Seniors over 65 -- which would account for many of those who attended the August 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair -- pay $11.

Four decades after hippies, yippies, flower children and freaks camped out on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y., future generations can now learn what the three days of music, peace, love and mud were all about.

"In 1969, one of the seminal events in our nation's history occurred right in our backyard, and today ... thousands of people still come from all over the world to visit the site of the Woodstock festival," said cable TV entrepreneur Alan Gerry.

His Gerry Foundation developed the museum and the nonprofit Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.

The museum is "an immersive and captivating multimedia experience that combines film and interactive displays, text panels and artifacts to explore the unique experience of the Woodstock festival .." according to the Web site www.bethelwoodscenter.org.

"WE ARE STARDUST, WE ARE GOLDEN"

There are lots of exhibits, including a full-size psychedelic hippie bus, and films and photographs taken by some of those who went there "to lose the smog" as Joni Mitchell wrote in her song "Woodstock."