I’m not sure how many episodes into our latest binge watch we were when we first spotted it. 

There, on the screen, walking through a Los Angeles police station, was a main character from The Rookie’s ensemble cast wearing a t-shirt that made me sit up straighter on my couch: Woodstock, Bethel, NY.

It wasn’t a surprise, exactly. Of all of our tiny Sullivan County towns, its place in music history makes Bethel the most likely to show up emblazoned on the chest of a fictional LA detective.

Still, I figured it was a fluke, a random wardrobe choice made by a costume designer who’d stumbled across a vintage tee while combing the racks at a thrift store. The unpredictable nature of thrifting is often what makes it so satisfying (she writes while wondering where she put those $250 jeans she scored for $6 at the Salvation Army a while back). 

But then the shirt showed up onscreen again.

And again. 

So I did what any self-respecting binge-watcher does when something catches their eye. I fell down a Google rabbit hole.

Was there a local connection? Maybe the actress had family in the area. Maybe a costumer spent a summer working at Bethel Woods, or her parents had been at the original festival in ‘69, or there was some complicated backstory that would explain why this character kept wearing a shirt with the name of a tiny, backwater town located in the middle of nowhere. 

But no. Nothing. No connection at all.

It seems like it’s just a stylistic choice fitting Angela Lopez’s character. The costume designers frequently dress the fictional cop in vintage band t-shirts and music venue shirts (like Blondie, Whiskey A Go Go) to establish her character’s personality and style. The simple black tee with the white letter is probably just a random vintage t-shirt sourced from LA-based vintage suppliers without any connection to our area at all. 

And yet … it’s now all over the internet. 

Fan sites catalog her outfits. People screenshot her wardrobe. And while you cannot buy this particular shirt at Bethel Woods, you CAN buy a version of the character’s Woodstock, Bethel, NY shirt from approximately 1,653 online retailers. They’re all selling it not as a connection to the Aquarian Exposition but as a way to dress like your favorite TV character. 

Part of me wants to believe the costume designer knew exactly what they were doing. That they picked out the Bethel t-shirt specifically. That somewhere in a wardrobe department in California, someone said, “This one. This is the shirt.”

But the more likely truth is that it was random, a vintage find that looked good on camera, a shirt that evoked a certain era, a certain vibe, without anyone thinking twice about the actual town printed on it.

As for the people who click “add to cart,” I can’t help but wonder: Is it just a piece of TV memorabilia to them?