20 STORIES FOR 20 YEARS

Denise Frangipane and Bethel Woods' Next Generation

Denise Frangipane was part of the research and development team that helped launch Bethel Woods, and she later worked on developing the Museum at Bethel Woods. Today, she is the CEO of Sullivan 180.

I grew up in Bethel, and every year around the anniversary of Woodstock, there would be a buzz, and an energy would begin to build. Some of it locally was a fear of, ‘Oh my goodness, it's gonna happen again,’ [and] there was always a migration of people that would come.

We were in Vassmer's store in Kauneonga Lake and a news team stopped in to interview Mr. Vassmer when I was 8 or 9, right around the 10th Woodstock anniversary. I was in my Girl Scout uniform and they were interviewing people and they asked, ‘Would you like to see another Woodstock?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I love rock music!’ and that was one of my big moments.

Throughout my whole life, people would stop in front of our house and say, ‘Can you tell us how to get to the Woodstock site?’ It happened every weekend, and eventually I got to the point of saying ‘You know what, that is a state of mind. You can't get there from here, but if you want to get to the ground where the concert was held, it's up that way.’

No one knew how to handle the history, and at Woodstock anniversary time whether or not to embrace it or to park snowplows on the road, which they did, or spread chicken manure to keep people away.

I performed “The Rose”, by Bette Midler at 19, at the 1989 Lunar Woodstock. My friends and I got up and performed...They built a stage and they had a sign up sheet and everyone got to get up there and there were like over 10,000 people in the field. Events like that would happen very organically, almost every year, people would just come there and it would be a pop-up event.

So when I had the opportunity to work for the Gerry Foundation, it felt like destiny. Our work was under the Gerry foundation, who funded Bethel Woods primarily, and it was myself and two others. Our job was to find comparable venues. We stuck with the Northeast, so we spent an entire summer traveling, and going to venues to see how they did it, before we even put a shovel on the ground. So we would spend the day meeting with the administration and the leadership. And then we would go to meet with the operations folks, and we would get a tour. I think I was up on the catwalk at one point. We saw things from all different perspectives, and then we would come back in the evening to a show to see how it all came together. And so all of that due diligence was what we brought into the conversation when we were researching what to do in Bethel. It was just incredible from a local perspective and when Bethel Woods was being built, the community was so excited and supportive. The groundbreaking, topping off, ribbon cutting, and opening night, were incredible from a local perspective. The community couldn’t wait, like you could feel it for the years leading up, that everyone was waiting, that finally there would be something at the Woodstock site, but something that we could call our own. It really is, although we draw people from all over. It’s everything we hoped.

We did whatever we needed to get done leading up to opening night: visiting hotels to check rooms for lodging, labeling box seats, assembling programs. Everyone who was on the team at the time was committed to a successful opening night. And it was really important to us all that we welcome to the community with the best hospitality at the time, kind of like saying ‘Thank you for your patience. Welcome in…we are so glad you’re here.’

On opening night with the Philharmonic, I remember the sound of the peepers, because there were frogs in the pond, and the Philharmonic is supposed to have those moments of quiet... You could hear the chorus of frogs off in the pond, and we joked, ‘Oh, we forgot to turn them off.’

When the Eagles were there in 2013, it was my son's first concert. He was just a year old, so that was memorable. And Mountain Jam; I loved that festival feel and my son was 5 or 6, and we just had such a great time together, exploring... I appreciate still seeing this place, because when I was younger, we used to ride horses through those fields.

Now, we come to almost every show. I’m there all the time. I rarely go anywhere else. It's so much about when you go on opening night every season you see people you haven't seen since last year and it's really fun to see that. We have a group of friends--some we only see at concerts, and we have our space on the lawn. I’m nicknamed path dancer. We love the lawn because you can dance. We go to the same space, we set up our little area. We make enough room for a lot of other people to join us and then we go down to the Members Lounge or we go up to the festival plaza and get some food.

Part of our ritual is we all set up our space and then the kids (now 13 and 14) go up to the hammocks, and we feel safe. They know where to go, and we feel that we can trust them being on the grounds, a little free range on the field. And we stay till the bitter end. We never leave when the band is still on stage. We don't leave until the lights are on. We always pick up our lawn chairs. And we always bring them back to the lawn chair rental or we encourage others to really stack them. If you don't want to carry, at least fold and stack.