Every time they want to talk about the '60s, they show the same damn file footage. Always (ok almost always) involving that blonde chick in a dark jacket…spinning in circles. They just showed it again on the Daily Show for a thing about Berkely.
Who the hell is that girl? Does anybody know? Does she know she’s this '60 icon? How did this particular bit of footage get to be the footage of the '60s?
Anybody? Anybody?
Probably some generic hippie (who would know be in her late 50s or early 60s BTW) and the footage is likely in the public domain or available really, really, really cheap
It’s quite possible that she has never been identified. The couple in a famous photograph who are kissing in Times Square on V-J day (at the end of World War II) have never definitively identified. That sker falling down the hill on the Wide World of Sports opening as the announcer says “the agony of defeat” didn’t learn of how famous he was for about a decade.
Are you talking about the iconic blonde girl in go-go boots, a tapestry Nehru jacket, a headband, with (IIRC) flowers painted on her face who is spinning and blowing bubbles in a free-love-and-good-pot induced hippy haze?
Not Marsha Brady shurely? 
I can usually recognize most hippy footage as being from Woodstock coverage.
A little is from Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, shot in the Gold Gate Park panhandle. As you recognize, there is limited footage making the rounds.
Wendell, I believe your second sentence is in error, though it was only a few years ago that the identification was in fact confirmed. But I don’t have facts to back that up. Anybody have the SD on this, one way or the other? (FWIW and IIRC, the photo was originally by a Life photographer.)
The photographer was Alfred Eisenstaedt . The nurse was identified by name in some “Where are they now?” article 15-20 years ago (Hey, some stuff isn’t archived on the web!). I don’t recall her name, but she did have a second stab at fame as the inventor of novelty gardening gloves with a print pattern of newspaper type.
Can’t help with the dancing hippie girl, though.
Life is trying to sort out the V-J Day mess on its site here.
Perhaps the best representation of a hippy,flower-power chic is Andea Cagan
from the Movie “Captain Milkshake”
Check it out at…www.captainmilkshake.com
Adding to the “unknown and probably unknowable,” another mystery is Dorothea Lange’s famous Depression era photograph (actually, this is one of several that she took). She didn’t bother to get the name, so it’s lost to history.
Actually, see this Smithsonian magazine article.
Cool! Thanks!
There is always tank man , too.
