I Worked at Woodstock ‘99
On crisis intervention and memory
Warning: the following essay contains excerpts from graphic accounts of sexual assault and other forms of violence.
“Sometimes, bad behavior is a contagion.” — Woodstock ’99 and the Rise of Toxic Masculinity, A. Petrusich, The New Yorker, 7/30/2021
Since I don’t remember her name, I’m going to call her Jessica. Chances are strong she was a Jessica, or a Jess, or a Jessi/ie/y. She was a few years into college, which would’ve placed her year of birth sometime between 1977 and 1979, peak Jessica years for white baby girl nomenclature. Jessica was slightly orange (fake-baked) and (bottle) blonde. Jessica was older than me. Jessica was weeping.
We were at Woodstock ’99, the music festival in Rome, New York mainly attended by middle- and upper-class white people in their twenties. I was a CPR-certified, First Aid-trained teenager from rural New Jersey, and I had signed on to volunteer for the crisis intervention team in exchange for festival admission, three meals a day, plenty of water, and an air mattress in former barracks at Griffiss Air Force Base.
Griffiss was a 3,552-acre complex that began operations in 1943 under the Air Combat Command and ceased active operations in the 1990s, a move that eliminated a staggering number of jobs. According…
