Ah yes, it was the mid-90s at Burning Man and no one had thought to lay out streets just yet. (Was that the year a speeding vehicle hit a tent w/ people in it in the middle of the night?) I remember a super hot day w/ thick brown air because it was absolutely calm and many vehicles were just driving around randomly. What misery. I remember a make-your-own-molotov-cocktail camp on the playa (a little dish soap is the key; we threw them at a Ronald McDonald figure). Between that and the "drive-by shooting range" (pickups and shotguns and Barney dolls) from the year before, I had to blink in wonder some years later when my sister told me that the impression she'd gotten of BM was of a very new-agey place. She was right, though, things change.
Weirdest memory I have from that time, though, was meeting a guy in Seattle who seemed pretty straight-laced but who told me he'd been to see the Man sometime around '93 or so - maybe 1,000-2,000 people. This was a bit odd because even by the mid-90s BM was still pretty much a Bay area event and not something talked about in Seattle. He'd read about it in an airline magazine (I'm still processing that) on a flight from somewhere and decided to go as a lark. He'd had fun but wasn't interested in going again.
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