F.I.B hangs out with East Village Hippies.

A friend of mine, who is an East Village resident of 20 plus years invited me the Corn Roasting Harvest Festival at the Avenue B and 6th Street Garden today. You know the place, with that crazy tall wooden sculpture that looks like a psychotic concentration camp security tower except it has stuffed animals and whatnot hanging all over it? I've heard that it is in the beginning segment of one of those NYC cop shows I never watch. Anyway, my friend CalmX has a gardening plot there. The event was old school East Village all the way and I’m not talking No Wave or punk. I’m talking hippies who have lived in the East Village for over 40 years. It was cool. You couldn’t get further away from the luxury condo crowd than you could with this bunch. I ate and ate for the entire day, they just kept throwing the corn and the sweet potatoes on the BBQ. People kept showing up with more food. They had a fundraising lottery with the weirdest prize ever being a gift certificate for $250.00 worth of psychotherapy. Me, I won the box of aromatic herbs from the garden but it also included many hippy like things that came from their hippy hearts with all sincerity, things like a purple kaleidoscope, a totally groovy Avenue B garden T-shirt that looked like it was designed in 1967 and a seedling for me to plant called the “Love in a Vine”. Anyway it was nice to be back in the East Village, a place I rarely go to anymore but have lots of non hippy memories of. My first apartment was a sublet at the age of 19 on St. Mark’s Place and 2nd Avenue and get this I paid $114.00 for my room A MONTH (rent stabilized and sublet to me honestly!) I could have had the whole place for $228.00 a month but when you are working at Orhbach’s on 34th Street for 50 cents above the minimum wage that is waaaaaaaay too expensive….