> 16 years old driving around america in a beater? yes. america was riding a wave of prosperity in the 1990s. plus there was an entire scene built by hippies for kids like her. the grateful dead were a band for 30 years, and by the 1980s they essentially had a full time cadre of hippies who would follow them from concert to concert all year long. they sold food, t-shirts, water bottles, drugs, etc in the parking lots before and after shows to fund their travels and tickets. for some of these people, especially those selling homemade merchandise or drugs, they actually turned into legit businesses. lots of clothing brands and restaurant ideas got started in concert parking lots. regardless, when the grateful dead ended in 1995, all these hippies, now without a band and fan base to make money off of, migrated to phish and that's largely why their career as a band exploded from the mid to late 90s.  we don't know if she's driving around in her own car. it's entirely possible she's 16 with a 20 year old boyfriend and they have 2 or 3 other friends who are traveling with them and splitting gas and lodging costs. if you have 4 people in a car that gets at least 20mpg highway with 1990s gas prices averaging barely $1/gallon, you really don't need to make very much money at each tour stop to get enough gas and food to get to the next stop. if each member of your crew can sell 20 grilled cheese sandwiches (at concerts that were 15k-30k people), then your crew would've profited like 65 or 70 bucks easily which is more than enough for a campsite and gas to drive 150 miles or whatever to the next show.  keep in mind this hippie chick was really just along for the party. she had been to every single phish concert on this 1996 tour up to the point of the mtv interview, but had not gone inside to a single concert, she just hung out in the parking lot with other hippies. so in her case she wasn't even paying for tickets. very cheap and easy
United States