Sixties-Something

Odyssey has caught 1960s fever. Bart Rathbone, hoping to drum up business for his shop's guitars and amplifiers, has organized a Remember the 60s parade and a big rock concert for Saturday, and the whole town is playing along. Whit wants nothing to do with it. As he stocks the freezer at Whit's End, he tells Connie he thought the bell bottoms and paisley shirts looked silly back then and they look silly now - and he suspects the whole celebration is just another of Bart's schemes to make money. Bart himself breezes in wearing a full hippie outfit he found in an old trunk, sprinkling his talk with groovy and peace and love, and later tries to talk Whit into renaming his lime sherbet and running an ice cream stand at the concert. Whit politely refuses.

Connie, though, is genuinely curious. The sixties happened before she was born, and everyone talks about the decade as if it were something mysterious and wonderful. At the library she is handed a book called Through the Prism of Change by Josh Guthrie, a local writer whose poems and essays once inspired everyone who read them. Connie is swept away by his words about peace, love, sharing, and changing the world. When she defends those ideals to Whit, he agrees the hopes were not bad ones - but he explains that the young people of that time were building on the wrong foundation, believing human beings could create a perfect world of peace and love without Jesus Christ. He also mentions that Guthrie may still live near Connellsville and once had something to do with the New Start House, a clinic that helps people get off drugs.

Connie goes to the clinic and meets its director, Jim Reeves. He admits Guthrie is still around but insists the man wants to be left alone after years of strangers pounding on his door. Connie argues that kids her age need to hear what Guthrie had to say, and as she leaves she lets him know she has guessed the truth - she is sure she has been talking to Josh Guthrie all along.

Meanwhile, Bart meets his big concert act, a sixties band called the Gyroscopes. To his surprise, Mark, Grace, and the others look nothing like hippies; the wigs, bell bottoms, and headbands are costumes they keep in their luggage, and they smirk at Bart's flower-painted station wagon and his talk of love and sharing.

Jim Reeves appears at Whit's End and explains that he never lied - Josh Guthrie was only his pen name. He has decided Connie is right about her generation deserving the truth, and he wants to start with her. He drives her back to the New Start House and tells her his story. He was not always the director; he began there as a patient, so wrecked by drugs that he spent years fighting his way back. Everyone in the sixties talked about getting high and expanding your mind, he says, but nobody mentioned the cost. The ideas sounded beautiful and made for nice poetry, but they did not work, and he believes the fallout is still hurting young people today - he points out a patient Connie's own age battling addiction. Jim does not blame the decade; he blames himself, and running the clinic is the only way he knows to say he is sorry. He asks Connie to remember this side of the sixties while the town celebrates, and she promises she will.

Bart's celebration collapses on its own. In the middle of the night the hotel manager summons him: the Gyroscopes have spent the evening drinking, brawling with the bellboys, and wrecking their rooms, and they have been hauled off by the police - leaving Bart holding an enormous bill for the damage. Then, on concert day, rain begins to fall, and the band walks out, pointing to a clause in their contract that cancels outdoor shows in bad weather.

Connie skips what is left of the festivities. She has decided she cannot enjoy the music without thinking of the casualties that came with it, and she is heading back to the clinic to help out. Jim is a good man, she tells Whit, but a sad one, still searching for something - so she plans to tell him about Jesus, and she asks Whit to pray for her.