Counting the movie version, this was my fifth time to see the play. Forty-two years after that first performance, with my college-bound granddaughter romping around on the stage in a mini-skirt and go-go boots, I sat in the dark auditorium and reflected on events, both current and those lost in the mists of time.

Anyway who was halfway aware in 1968 will remember the turmoil that rocked the country and the world then. The United States had been involved in the Vietnam Conflict, the war that wasn't a war, since the 1950s. By 1968, battles, death, and destruction led every nightly news show and the body count, both Vietnamese and American, was rising by the day. The JFK assassination in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy both gone in 1968, the riotous Chicago Democratic convention, protests and riots on college campuses, that eventually led to student deaths -- these events and others made many of us wonder if the world would ever right itself again.

Then as suddenly as it started, it all came to quiet halt. The only remnant of that era was a book written in 1980 by Marilyn Ferguson, titled The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time. It's been years since I read Ferguson's book, but the blurb on the back cover announces, "A leaderless but powerful network is working to bring about radical change in the United States. Its members have broken with certain key elements of Western thought, and they may even have broken continuity with history...."

Hmmm. What to make of such optimism? I don't know where the members of that Aquarian network are hiding nowadays, but I do know the world is still in a state of chaos, maybe even worse than it was when the brilliant explosion that was Hair hit the Broadway stage. We are now sending young men and women to fight, this time in two wars, both of which seem unwinnable and unending, despite the promises of troop draw-downs. Already having experienced one attack on its soil in the 21st century, America is more vulnerable than ever to the attacks of religious fanatics of all stripes, foreign and domestic, as well as malcontents who want to rewrite the U.S. Constitution and the Holy Bible to suit their peculiar understanding of what both say. Americans are at the mercy of foreign oil and domestic oil spills that pollute the environment, kill animals, and ruin industries dependent on clean water for their survival. Despite efforts by the EPA, the land is filled with toxins, the air is more and more polluted, and the oceans are filled with garbage.

Pete Seeger, the folk singer, is now in his 80s. During a recent Talk of the Nation interview on NPR, he opined that people probably won't be on the planet a hundred years from now. TOTN host Neal Conan stuttered as he tried to avoid appearing rude when he disagreed with Seeger. I don't know if Seeger is correct. Who can say? I do know when I was pregnant with my first child, my husband and I sat on the bank of the Current River in Missouri as he explained the half-life of nuclear waste to me. I asked myself then how I could bring a child into such a world where milk was loaded with Strontium 90 and where untrustworthy politicians had their fingers on the nuclear button. However, that child came into the world kicking and screaming, two others joined him later, and they all are now grown and raising families of their own, the sign of hope for the future.

Before Hair opened in Lawrence, community members met at the Lawrence Arts Center to participate in discussions of issues that the play raised, issues such as war and peace and civil rights, among others. Cast members had to attend these discussions, and even though many of them had already covered these issues in their high school classes, it was probably helpful for them to hear adults talking about their own experiences in the peace movement or the civil rights movement. These young people can pass this lore down to their children.

Hair is not an optimistic work. At the end, the Tribe carries the body of Claude, the reluctant draftee, around the stage and sings "The Flesh Failures," a song that morphs into "Let the Sun Shine In." Maybe that's the only message we can take from the play and from the reality of life. Optimism isn't the be-all and end-all of life; the be-all and end-all of life is.... I will let the poet Galway Kinnell express this virtually inexpressible concept in his poem "Flower of Five Blossoms":

Everyone knows
everything sings and dies.
But it could be, too, everything dies and sings,
and a life is the interlude
when, still humming, we can look up, gawk about, imagine whatever,
say it,
topple back into singing.
Oh first our voice be done, and then, before and afterwards and all
around it, that singing.

--from "Flower of Five Blossoms" by Galway Kinnell