Summer Days: Adventures in Woodstock

A few years back, around the Fin de siècle, we had rented a place upstate in Bearsville, near Woodstock for the summer. Very quiet with a creek running behind the house that you could wade in (like up to your waist)…It was a quiet place, tree shaded, with a nice yard out on 212. Not far at all from Striebel Road, where Bob Dylan had his legendary motorcycle accident. And a short drive from the Big Pink house, which my son and I discovered one day, still standing and then still pink, where Dylan and the Band produced the memorable Basement Tapes.

On one occasion, we took the kids to the local Woodstock library, a little place just outside of town with magnificent second hand book sales. A guy came into the Library with two little kids, he was unshaven, needed a shower, ripped t-shirt and jeans -- it was Ethan Hawke – and we were hanging in the kiddie section with our younger girls who were around 4-5 yrs and my son who was 9-10…..Ethan started doing a puppet show for his kids and our kids…it was funny, about a princess and a pony and the pony wouldn’t give her a ride or something, all done in this falsetto voice...then this young woman, wearing big framed tortoiseshell glasses and a casual summer dress – Uma of course – comes in and says hi, but says “Ethan, we’ve got to go, my parents are waiting” or something like that. We said hello, chatted for a minute, told them that we were from Brooklyn but up there for the summer, that was about it. I don’t think my wife recognized them at the time but I did and I was “star struck”, of course, bordering on speechless....my son, who was young and not the cineaste and auteur he is now, is always disappointed that I never asked for an autograph…after they left, the librarian said “your kids just had a very famous playmate.” That was a great summer in Ulster county. We went up for a couple of weeks straight and then a lot of long weekends. Dinners at the Gypsy Wolf cantina (opens at 5:30, great Tex-Mex cuisine). The great 4th of July parade in town, volunteer firemen throwing candy to the kids, sparkling fireworks.

Anyway, so that is how I "met" Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke. Our kids were younger and life seemed simpler, and I like to imagine that was also the situation for them: A young NYC family, kicking back for an idyllic summer upstate...

--Brooklyn Beat