Swimsuit. I love it. Alas, girls didn’t didn’t wear these when I was young. We even had the right psychedelic drugs to stare at them with. But no, all we got were bikinis or not even. Totally bummed our trips. This, though, it looks like a summer Love-In at Golden Gate Park. I’m having a flashback right now, in fact, it’s just that nobody can tell.

Of course, that Love In was in 1967. I was ten years old and in Anaheim that summer. Oh well.

No it wasn’t Anaheim, it was New Jersey, across from Philly. I spent the Summer of Love in a decaying suburb in New Jersey not far from a reeking Delaware River. We had the best water pollution when I was a kid. Rivers had big foamy heads like a perfectly poured beer. All the houses in our neighborhood were old, ancient by California standards. Our place had been built sometime in the late 1800s, with a big porch in the front, a cellar, three floors and an attic, a basement, and a root cellar out back. Doubtless George Washington slept if not in our house built long after he died or the abandoned boat in the backyard we played in, then in one of the neighbors’ even more ancient houses, he slept everywhere in New Jersey, apparently. Dude got around. We had begun 1967 in Maine, though, snow thick on the ground and falling fast. Finished it in a motel in Anaheim, after a few months outside Boston. At some point during the waning days of the Summer of Love we were living in an 18th Century three story place in the Charlestown part of Boston. All the houses looked like the Addams Family. One time we wandered over to Cambridge and strolled around Harvard. A movie theater in the neighborhood was showing Fantasia, and long haired bearded dudes and willowy young things were lined up around the block to get in. My parents thought it was so cute, all the hippies going to see a Disney cartoon. I suddenly remembered this decades later while stoned out of my mind watching Fantasia. Oh.

And then one look at this psychedelic bathing suit and I flashed back. Though actually I flashed back to Goldie Hawn and Judy Carne in bikinis and body paint gyrating on Laugh In. They looked just like this bathing suit, but in black and white, because that’s what our set still was, and I was a ten year old experiencing the psychedelic revolution in flickering shades of grey.