Hippie RocK.(The Talk of the Town)

James Rado has been spending a lot of time in Central Park lately, discovering that certain trees and the smell of hot dogs can be as evocative as an acid flashback. In 1967, Rado and his friend Gerome Ragni, both actors, wrote a musical, with the composer Galt MacDermot, about the kinds of people they saw on the street--the freaks, the draft dodgers, the dropouts--and took it to the Public Theatre. The next year, "Hair" moved to Broadway, with Rado playing Claude, the leader of a peacenik tribe. (Ragni died in 1991.) This week, a revival opens at the Delacorte, and Rado has found himself back in the Park, where protesters have been replaced by sunbathers and bridesmaids.

There is little in Rado's appearance--stringy blond locks, metallic-pink shades, indigo socks--to suggest his seventy-six years. When he arrived at the Delacorte the other Friday, to conduct a tour of the Park's hippie landscape, he was breathing into a red handkerchief, as if he'd just been teargassed. "I got poisoned in the bathroom," he said. "They were spraying the toilets with Clorox." Once recovered, he started walking south. Before the revival, he'd consulted an astrologer: "She said, 'You know, the chart for opening night is almost identical to the chart of Barack Obama.' "

Soon Rado arrived at the Sheep Meadow--"the place where the sixties happened," he said. He stopped at the edge of a footpath, furrowed his brow, and said, "If we concentrate real hard, we'll be able to walk through this fence." Then he strolled through an open gate.

Two stories: First, it's 1961. Rado lies down on a rock with his shirt off. "Suddenly, I felt a club hit my foot," he said. "I opened my eyes and there was a policeman standing over me saying, 'Put your shirt back on.' " Skip to 1967: Ten thousand people are in the Sheep Meadow for a Be-In. Suddenly, there's a commotion. "Gerry and I come over here--right here, to the highest point--and we see two guys who had taken their clothes off. They were just standing there, completely naked, with ...