I didnt attend this 1972 show, which I hear was great although someone planted dynamite under the Stones' equipment truck before the performance. Didnt seem to bother them, though.
I had moved out of my family home and back to the old neighborhood near McGill and was living in a Women's Centre a few doors up from the address where my parents first met in 1943, when my dad was in the Air Force. The area was now a student ghetto overrun with hippies and draft dodgers but the buildings retained their faded bourgeois charm. I dated a Robert Plant lookalike who had dropped out of high school to found and manage DrugAid, a clinic for kids who liked to get high and needed help getting down.
I had started writing poetry after the shock of my first heartbreak: an older man whose father had been in the British Army Medical Corps and who told me I was "schizophrenic" after I dreamed of him in black robes at a scene of cult rape.
My parents were in the process of selling their house and moving to their cottage on the Ottawa River in Ontario and I was carving out a life for myself a few blocks from the Allan Memorial where my father had gone through depatterning ten years earlier- no wonder they were worried.
Looking back I now realize my first three boyfriends - with whom I was preoccupied for much of 1969 through 1971 - had military backgrounds and were likely assigned to me because of my father. One by one, they entered my life as dashing but deceptive figures and exited just as abruptly, their lies exposed and dangling. I was too young to understand any of this but found it romantic to be drawn into radical causes and events -- the Computer Center riot at Sir George Williams was the first. I appeared in the Gazette dressed as a witch at an abortion demonstration.
The theatrics of polarization seemed to animate me but I was restless and searching. It never occurred to me to start a family - I only wanted to observe life in and around me and write about it.
When people asked if I planned to settle down with someone I laughed and said the only person I would ever marry was Mick Jagger. A lot of young women must have said that then but I passed through a phase of going to movies that had Mick in them - Performance, Ned Kelly, Ladies and Gentlemen: the Rolling Stones. Usually I was disappointed by the mask whereas I felt I knew the person wearing it better than most people knew themselves.
This phase passed and I forgot about it. Then in 1977 I met my fourth and last handler, Leonard Cohen, in pretty much the same way I met the first three: he phoned me one night and invited me over. By then I was used to this approach and didn't hesitate.
I was never, by the way, to my conscious knowledge involved in prostitution - but it appears I may have been groomed at some point, probably in childhood, to enter that world in connection with some sort of 'espionage' --
I saw myself as 'on call' - receiving signals from the universe. I also had psychic abilities which I consider to be only partially developed.
Basically I was like a lot of people in the subculture I had joined or been guided into. Hovering around the edges of that world were the psychiatrists who had known me as a child. Their children were becoming the editors and other gatekeepers I would end up dealing with as I cleared the hurdles and gradually started having a career in writing and the arts.
My twin brother Sandy went to that concert and years later he still raved about it.
I was busy that summer getting arrested and going on trial with the Milton-Park citizens committee. I had no time to camp out to buy Stones tickets, or go to concerts with people on drugs. Paths had diverged. I drifted Left.
I was busy that summer getting arrested and going on trial with the Milton-Park citizens committee. I had no time to camp out to buy Stones tickets, or go to concerts with people on drugs. Paths had diverged. I drifted Left.
 |
| May 1972 The day we all got arrested |
I had moved out of my family home and back to the old neighborhood near McGill and was living in a Women's Centre a few doors up from the address where my parents first met in 1943, when my dad was in the Air Force. The area was now a student ghetto overrun with hippies and draft dodgers but the buildings retained their faded bourgeois charm. I dated a Robert Plant lookalike who had dropped out of high school to found and manage DrugAid, a clinic for kids who liked to get high and needed help getting down.
I had started writing poetry after the shock of my first heartbreak: an older man whose father had been in the British Army Medical Corps and who told me I was "schizophrenic" after I dreamed of him in black robes at a scene of cult rape.
My parents were in the process of selling their house and moving to their cottage on the Ottawa River in Ontario and I was carving out a life for myself a few blocks from the Allan Memorial where my father had gone through depatterning ten years earlier- no wonder they were worried.
Looking back I now realize my first three boyfriends - with whom I was preoccupied for much of 1969 through 1971 - had military backgrounds and were likely assigned to me because of my father. One by one, they entered my life as dashing but deceptive figures and exited just as abruptly, their lies exposed and dangling. I was too young to understand any of this but found it romantic to be drawn into radical causes and events -- the Computer Center riot at Sir George Williams was the first. I appeared in the Gazette dressed as a witch at an abortion demonstration.
I thought my exploits were well hidden because I never spoke to them to my parents, but it turned out they kept clippings from the newspapers of the causes I was part of.
The theatrics of polarization seemed to animate me but I was restless and searching. It never occurred to me to start a family - I only wanted to observe life in and around me and write about it.
When people asked if I planned to settle down with someone I laughed and said the only person I would ever marry was Mick Jagger. A lot of young women must have said that then but I passed through a phase of going to movies that had Mick in them - Performance, Ned Kelly, Ladies and Gentlemen: the Rolling Stones. Usually I was disappointed by the mask whereas I felt I knew the person wearing it better than most people knew themselves.
This phase passed and I forgot about it. Then in 1977 I met my fourth and last handler, Leonard Cohen, in pretty much the same way I met the first three: he phoned me one night and invited me over. By then I was used to this approach and didn't hesitate.
I was never, by the way, to my conscious knowledge involved in prostitution - but it appears I may have been groomed at some point, probably in childhood, to enter that world in connection with some sort of 'espionage' --
I saw myself as 'on call' - receiving signals from the universe. I also had psychic abilities which I consider to be only partially developed.
Basically I was like a lot of people in the subculture I had joined or been guided into. Hovering around the edges of that world were the psychiatrists who had known me as a child. Their children were becoming the editors and other gatekeepers I would end up dealing with as I cleared the hurdles and gradually started having a career in writing and the arts.
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