Mystery visitors to a hippie town

Continuing the "hippie" theme of the last few days, I happened to overhear an intriguing conversation in a little Northern California town on Saturday called Freestone. It's the sort of place that the real existing hippies of the late 1960s and 1970s would have like to have moved to so that they could get back to the land, and meditate, or smoke peace pipes or whatever they did.

The little town has a spa where people go for massages and for taking hot sawdust enzyme baths. (Hey, don't knock it until you've tried it, okay?) A lot the town itself looks not totally unlike some of the less prosperous little towns you might see in the Deep South: barns with paint peeling off, dilapidated porches, picket fences starting to sag, etc.

But they have several galleries and an organic bakery. I walked through one of the galleries which had a fairly large though not terribly well-tended garden where they sold plants and little statues of Buddha and St. Francis and the Virgin of Guadalupe. There were also some bird cages, one with a rooster and another with a parrot or something. There was a sign from the owner that said that the bird cages weren't his and he had no control over them. Probably an interesting tale behind that somewhere.

As I was leaving, he was talking to someone on the phone about visitors' reactions to a display he'd had up about the international AIDS awareness day. He was saying that most people complimented him for putting something up. But he said some ladies from Texas came by and asked why he had that up. One of them said, "We thought that problems was solved."

He said, "What do you mean, you thought the problem was solved?"

She said, "Well, we thought that AIDS was a liberal disease and that the problem had been solved."

I was tempted to stay around and eavesdrop a bit more to see if there was an explanation for this peculiar insight. But then I thought, well, maybe it's better not to know.

I had not encountered that one before. What could they have been thinking? I mean, I know Texas has a lot of conservative folks with sometimes some very eccentric ideas. But it's not like Texas is behind the moon or something.

Then I thought, maybe they were from Texas in another dimension. It's entirely possible that in some hippie haven in the northern California backwoods that a wormhole to another dimension's Texas would appear.

Sure, it's unlikely. But can you think of a more plausible explanation?