Alisha GrausoVerified account

By the time we made it to the back of the crowd, everything was on fire. Guys were hanging from sound towers as people built pyres underneath. Guys were rioting, looting the shops. Setting cars on fire. The medics and peace patrol fled. FLED. The medic tents were empty.

I remember that was the moment shit got realer than real in my head and crystallized. My mom was a nurse. That medics, medical professionals, were so concerned for their safety they turned and fled their duty drove it home for me how we genuinely might be hurt or worse.

We made it to our tent somehow, packed our shit up as fast as possible, and ran a quarter of a mile to the car. We only got out because people had broken down part of the fence and we drove through that gap. We didn't say a word for the first hour of the road trip home.

I came home filthy, sunburned, on the edge of heat stoke & with a bruise in the shape of a boot print on my face. I was a happy, optimistic kid who thrived in most situations. When my mom asked if I'd ever do it again, I said, "I...don't know. Yes? Maybe."

Did I have fun at Woodstock 99? I'd be lying if I said I didn't mostly have a blast. But under the happy there was a really troubled undercurrent. I recognize it now as a naive kid working through the really dark shit she saw without being able to articulate it consciously.

I knew what rape was. What I didn't know was how to process all the other kinds of sexual assault that fall just below it. And it was EVERYWHERE. Casual sexual assault everywhere you looked. My brain didn't know how to define that or articulate why I was so uneasy seeing it.

Understand: Conversations we have now about consent & sexual assault didn't really exist in the 90s. I literally did not have the tools to process how I instinctively knew I was seeing something awful or articulate why. It was constantly at the back of my mind at Woodstock 99.

And the drugs. I had never seen and will never see so many drugs in my life. I remember sitting on a hillside the first night, when it was still chill, and looking around me and seeing five different kinds of drugs nearby.