THE NARRATIVE ARC
We Were The Wild(ish) Generation
‘Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99’ felt familiar
Watching the Netflix documentary Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99, it felt very familiar. Not that I was there. I live in New Zealand, and have never been to a 3-day festival, but I know ‘90s teenagers. I was one of them. And the anarchy at Woodstock was just a more exaggerated version of what life was like for me in the 90s.
I was a good little Christian girl and even I was stealing wine from my mum at 16, getting drunk, and making out with strangers. It’s surprising I didn’t get hurt that night. A few years later, drinking with friends, I wasn’t so lucky. That night ended badly, and the repercussions echoed through my life in ways I didn’t recognise until years later.
We were wild(ish) and 1999 gave us permission to be.
Every week was a party in my teens and early 20s. I was not a party-girl by any means, it’s just how everyone spent time with their friends and met new people. We certainly weren’t living the free-love psychedelic days of our parents – they defined wild – but we had our own flavor of limitlessness.
We were social en masse, not online. Our house parties piled up with sweaty bodies, and flowed out onto the street, a live band blasting from the lounge…
