Meet Woodstock's 'hugging couple' in Westchester

They’re the embracing couple, wrapped in a filthy, mud-stained comforter, who appear on the cover of the official soundtrack of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, as well as countless T-shirts, posters and other merchandise. And this weekend, during the 46th anniversary of the festival, you have a chance to meet them.

Bobbi and Nick Ercoline, now married, will be at the Winery at St. George Aug. 15 and 16 as part of Woodstock at the Winery, an indoor/outdoor two-day celebration of peace and music being held in conjunction with the original festival’s anniversary, which took place Aug. 15-18, 1969.

“We weren’t hippies — we were just normal, hard-working kids from small towns,” Bobbi Ercoline recently wrote for theguardian.com as part of a retrospective. “I’d been working in a bank for three years, and Nick had a construction job and was a bartender.”

Living near Bethel, where the festival took place, and having a front-row seat to all the fanfare surrounding it, Ercoline and a few friends decided to they needed to check it out themselves.

“The air was damp and smelled of campfires and pot. I’d not seen anything like it before. We didn’t sleep that night,” she wrote.

Months later, when the festival’s three-album record was released, the Ercolines gathered at a friend’s house, when someone recognized the distinctive yellow butterfly staff seen to the left of the picture.

“(It) belonged to this guy Herbie we’d been looking after, as he was tripping pretty heavily and had lost his friends,” she wrote. And that’s when they realized that it was their picture on the soundtrack to one of the most significant events in the annals of music history.  

The Ercolines will meet fans and sign autographs from 12 to 3 p.m. on both days of Woodstock at the Winery. 

The outdoor festivals are free to attend and will begin at 11 a.m. Vendors will sell, crafts, handmade items and art, as well food, beverages, wine and beer. There will also be concerts at 2 p.m. each day, featuring Trifecta Aug. 15 and Harmonic Aggression Aug. 16.

A Woodstock-themed Painting and Pinot event will take place 1-3 p.m. both days. Twenty-five dollars gets you into the class, plus a glass of pinot grigio, pinot noir, beer or soda.