How does it feel to be filmed without you knowing?

To find yourself up on the screen "glowing" in the dark, as it were, along with countless thousands of other "freaks" (as Arlo Guthrie so lovingly put it...)?

This happened to yours truly, Jesse Slokum, busker4freedom. I was filmed responding to Richie Havens encouraging us all to "Clap Your Hands" in the middle of his ever-stirring FREEDOM Medley. It was his "umpteenth" encore at the end of a heroic opening set on Friday, August 15, 1969. In the movie of the festival, it is his second song. He's the first performer on the stage. Since the movie is a documentary, the set doesn't occur until about 32 minutes into the Director's Cut version I have.

I stood up a moment before he sang those 3 words that would change my life forever. I like to "take in the 360" when I'm at a big public event. So, after joining the folks you see around me, it was natural I'd turn around to look at faces as far as you could see on a hillside. It hadn't yet rained, and everybody was in a "LET'S GET TOGETHER" mood (like in the Dino Valenti song of the same name).

So, when Richie invited our participation in his ad-lib performance, all I had to do was to begin clapping my hands as I turned around. A camera guy on stage used my back for a zoom up focus, then panned wide as people stood up along with me. By the time I'm facing the stage, I'm simply one fellow clapping that funky groove along with what seemed like the whole world at that time.

I love the way this audience footage was edited so deftly into the footage of Richie making his FREEDOM Medley up. When the film cuts back to Havens on stage, he sings a fragment of an old hymn he learned as a child in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood:

"I got a telephone in my bosom...I can call Him up when I need him" (...it's a hymn, he's singing about what I refer to as I tell the story in person by pointing a thumb up towards the sky...)

"I can call up my brother, my sister, my mother, my father."

AND so he still does, as he continues to sing this SHOW-STOPPER of all showstoppers in concert.

When the movie came out in late March, 1970, strangers began to stop me on the street where I lived at that time, in Bloomington, Indiana. What continues to amaze me completely is that the first fellow who did that was able to connect the way I was strolling down Kirkwood Avenue with those few seconds he saw in a movie.

Talk about being "IN THE EYE!"

It took until January 26, 1991 to cross paths with Mister Havens. We were at the FIRST Persian Gulf "war" demo on the Ellipse in Washington, DC, when I finally got to tell the man that I was that guy in the film. Richie got me in a humongous bear hug after saying, "YOU'RE THE GUY THAT POPS UP IN THE AUDIENCE!"

You can see the one picture of us that exists by going to http://www.myspace.com/diogenesdelarue

A full account of this story can be found at http://www.jesseslokum.com/woodstock69