Sometimes in life, you make mistakes. You reach out for a press pass on a whim to see Lana Del Rey, and you’re approved a week before the show. You max out your credit card (“we’ll get it in post,” I’ve been saying to myself lately whenever I amass debt I’ll later have to beg the IRS to excuse) flying to and getting accommodations in San Francisco for less than 48 hours. You attend a music festival alone in a Nuuly-rented dress entirely inappropriate for the city’s 55 degrees. Better yet, you also miss your deadline for the story that got you the press pass in the first place and focus on just the weed activation instead.
This week on High Design, my dear subscribers have benefitted from this flub: I’m celebrating the end of festival season (though it’s still 92 degrees in the Valley today) with the lost story of Inside Outside Lands.
Inside Outside Lands
The last two music festivals I went to no longer exist. Most recently, it was the short-lived Panorama festival, put on by the same organizers as Coachella (a massive draw for East Coasters at the time) and featuring arguably the best Frank Ocean performance of all time, wherein I peed in a bottle in the middle of the crowd to avoid missing a second.
Before that was six years ago at the Firefly Festival at the Dover Motor Speedway, the last installment of a three year run from my sophomore year to the summer after graduation, pretending to understand the appeal of Disclosure and seeing my classmates get taken into emergency medical care. Notably, I never attended above the legal drinking age: something I learned was absolutely crucial to my enjoyment. Accompanied by my best friend’s older sister and later by my (inappropriately) much older boyfriend, the few sips of light beer and Fireball I had made me feel like the Delaware forest was one of the most magical places in the world.
Now, here I was: 26, alone, and waiting in line at the Don Julio pop-up bar for an $8 cucumber margarita in a frigid San Francisco August.
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