Took my kids to see Hair this weekend –the Broadway revival of the sixties musical, not the stuff in the trap of my daughter’s shower, though I’ve showed her plenty of that. The last musical I had seen was South Pacific, back in the spring, and that had set me to thinking about my parents’ youth: my father served in the Solomon Islands, my mother met him in the Marines not long after. Hair was a different sort of flashback of someone’s youth — though not exactly mine. 

“So were you like that, Dad?” my daughter whispered during the first act as the Tribe gamboled across the stage. 

I looked like that, I guess, though I never really felt like part of the tribe. Maybe it was my age, the timing of being at the tail end of the baby boom. I remember going to see Hair at the Curran Theater in San Francisco in 1969 with other members of my high school drama club. Before the show I ducked into a head shop at the foot of Haight Street with Nancy Lardner. We were admiring the drug paraphernalia beneath the counter when she became aware of the weekend hippie ogling her in the doorway. 

“Far out,” said the guy. He wore a turtle neck and a pendant and had his two extra inches of hair combed down over his forehead. “I can dig it.” He was practically licking his lips looking at Nancy. 

“That guy is giving me the creeps,” she said as we left, and if we had ventured up into the Haight-Ashbury we would have seen more signs of the dying scene: hard drugs were replacing the free acid, teenage runaways were the prey of chicken hawks. 

Some of us already thought the musical was kind of square then, with the cardboard cutouts of parents the kids used for target practice and the kind of boring trip scene that makes up most of the second act. But then, as now, there were moments like sparks, especially the finale when the doomed Claude, headed for Vietnam, sings the opening lines of the big finale, “The Flesh Failures (Let the Sunshine In).” It’s chilling still and the revival manages to cut through ages of irony and get back to the heart of youth’s eternal questioning. 

I was struck by another irony: my parents willing sacrifice to a greater cause, a just war, and our generation’s sense of being sacrificed for an unjust war. But there wasn’t time to explain that to my kids. My son left at intermission to go to a party, and my daughter fell asleep. Outside the theater they were selling official Hair bandanas, fifteen bucks a pop. You could use one to wipe your eyes.