I didn’t really feel like going; I dislike crowds. I tend to be a melancholy stay-at-home recluse (see my earlier blog on melancholy). But the friends who invited me are always good company, and I knew it would do me good to get out (the refrain of many a recluse), to stop brooding about everything that is going wrong with my life (the refrain of many a melancholic).

On the flank of Mt. Tamalpais, the lovely mountain in whose shadow I have lived for nearly the last twenty years, there is an outdoor amphitheatre where every summer devoted theatre troupes put on musicals on bright weekend afternoons. It is a sort of local tradition, where people go early to stake out a good spot with a view or shade; they take picnics, the Sunday paper, the kids. Sort of a baseball game without hotdog vendors and teams. Predictably, the event is known as Mountain Play, and on Sunday morning the local parking lots fill up early as school buses shuttle people up the long drive. The bus ride itself is a memory trip: only instead of screaming children there are shouting adults. The road winds in and out of fog and view, until you arrive in streaming sunshine and the picturesque heat trap that is the amphitheatre. Finding my friends was a bit like finding Waldo. And don’t count on cell phones on flanks of magical mountains.

I wasn’t sure about the musical, either. I don’t like musicals (hardly the usual fare of reclusive melancholics who are usually into Mahler’s Songs for Dead Children or Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead), but I would make a concession for this one, because of nostalgia, and my age. I tend to feel a certain baby-boomer smugness about the whole era: even though each successive era has carried on certain musical preferences or lifestyles, to be able to say you really are a “child of the sixties” gives you a certain cachet. You know all the words to all the songs; you saw the Stones live in 1966; saw Bob Dylan with Joan Baez in 1967; Simon and Garfunkel in a tiny open-air playing field before they were even famous. You remember Woodstock and your father grumbling in his soup that all those hippies ought to be thrown into jail (even though he was the one who gave you your first Beatles album six long years earlier). So in a way, the word “Hair” sums it all up. Even though it was never my favorite music, it was emblematic: I had the album, and knew the songs inside out. Like most of us. Please, don’t go any further than When the moon or I shall scream.

A friend was visiting who’d had her return flight postponed so we found her a ticket too, and she was an even more exotic baby-boomer than I was. Imagine, in 1970 a girl from communist Bulgaria saw “Hair” in Sydney Australia (Why not Manchester England England)?! What was she tripping on, man!! But it’s true, and she told us how the actors were naked on stage and at the end everyone got up there and danced. Well, forget the nudity on Mount Tamalpais for a start, this is a family event. Anyway, the website warned us there would be no nudity. (So what is the opposite of Rated R? N-N?) My other friends were younger, but like everyone, knew the music. When they were little, “Hair” was probably, already, an embarrassingly outdated representation of hippie excess and bad taste…but if the music was good, by now it would be a classic. This is where my doubts lay as we waited in the hot sun for the show to begin: would we cringe, sing along, or feel something else altogether?

Some will say the Summer of Love never ended in San Francisco, bla bla; all you need to do is go over to Haight Ashbury and you’ll find a few relics. I disagree. The only authentic relics you’ll get are the faint whiffs in the homes of other baby boomers who might refer to the era or have some ur-relics of their own. But to sit and watch “Hair” on that hillside was an eerie experience of time travel. Never mind that music is well known for its ability to transport the listener emotionally, and therefore chronologically, through memory; this Mountain Play production of “Hair” was convincingly authentic. Not all the costumes, however; some still looked like Anthropologie on a bad day; but the long hair (a-hah!) on the men, and women; the bell-bottoms, the behavior, the language, above all the guitarist with his sunglasses and headband, twanging a time-warp sound that took you right there, to that time before mp3 and iPods and the dreadful stuff that calls itself pop music these days. (I suspect Anthropologie and much of today’s youth fashion has some nostalgia for that more carefree era…and it’s easier to mass produce bell-bottoms than hoop skirts. But that’s off the subject.)

More to the point, “Hair” has not been this relevant since 1975. The opening scene: the churning of helicopter blades and a soldier; the closing scenes, the death in Vietnam of one of the main characters. Scattered throughout the play, the barbed comments about the war, about the smug Establishment; the references to draft-dodging. The draft is white people sending black people to make war on yellow people to defend the land they stole from the red people. There was applause, there were cheers; from time to time a hoot of reaction. And clearly in everyone’s minds except the very youngest a depressing sense of déjà-vu. Only the soldiers’ uniforms have changed.

But ultimately, despite the exuberance of the music, the sun, the cheerful Sunday-picnic crowd, I felt melancholy (yes, again!). Melancholy with nostalgia for my own youth, but also with a kind of slow-burn despair that the world really has become a very very different place, and I don’t mean just global warming and the Internet and cell phones and the shrinking of the planet. I mean its soul.

At the end, we all got up on the stage and danced. Several times my Bulgarian friend recalled her experience in Sydney; another friend, a few days later, told me he had done the same in New York in 1972. What was wrong with Marin County that no one got up and danced in 2007?

“Aging hippies who’ve exchanged pot for wine,” said my friend. “They’re all into their food and wine, they’re consuming. This is just entertainment.”

Say what you like about the sixties and seventies: there was no apathy. This was an apathetic audience, in an apathetic, over-fed, over-drugged, over-indulged society. Okay, maybe I’m being brutally, simplistically unfair, maybe it was just too hot and people had been sitting there too long to get up and dance.

But then, the whole back story that gave birth to “Hair” in 1967 is missing. Iraq is not Vietnam, young people now are not like young people then. And drinking wine in the sun is a very bad idea.

Still, I’m glad I went. Very glad. It reminded me of a good time in my life, and gave me an odd sort of pride. It does me good to get out, and maybe next time, there will be dancing, and a few cheers, even. Apparently, we are still just in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. So if you’re still around in 2062, check out the Mountain Play that summer. I doubt I’ll make it till then, but you never know.