NYC, Bobby D, Suze and me

A Birthday to Remember

Last fall I mentioned to my family that an item on my bucket list was attending a national dog

show. My daughter-in-law searched the internet and quickly shared, “There’s one in NYC the

weekend of your birthday.” I looked at my husband and said, “Let’s go!”

His half-hearted enthusiasm at traveling to NYC for a dog show told me, “No thank you.” My

daughter-in-law said she would go with me and that inspired an idea for me to celebrate my

daughter and three daughters-in-law for being the most incredible women, and me for my

birthday. Hence, a girls’ trip to NYC was born.

Unbeknownst at the time of that conversation, when it came time to take the trip the following

February, I had become obsessed with Bob Dylan, NYC, and the history and power of women.

It was the end of December when two friends suggested the movie, A Complete Unknown, the

story of Bob Dylan. My husband and I, for something to do on a date-night whim, went to see it.

We were mostly alone in the theater, and weren’t Dylanologists, and yet, all I can say is that I

caught a spark that night.



It was a phenomenal movie, the acting, casting, writing, directing, music, all of it… spot on!

When it was over, my interest focused on his girlfriend, what happened to her, what made her cry

at his concerts, and not wanting to be with him when the whole world wanted to be with him,

and be him? I read about and discovered her real name was the only one Bob Dylan did not give

permission to use in the movie out of respect for her. She had passed away and Dylan wouldn’t

let her real name be used. I found that so sweet and respectful. I also found out that she wrote a

book about their relationship in 2008. I bought it immediately.

Her story is fascinating. Briefly, she and her family were political outcasts; she was only seventeen

when she was living on her own and met Dylan. She was an activist for human and civil rights,

an artist, an independent woman without understanding how to embrace that role.

This movie and her life came to me at a time when I was newly absorbed in women’s history and

women in business books, and civil rights.

The movie is set in the small timeframe of 513-315-2288, and the culture, counterculture, politics,

human rights, assassinations, annihilation from nuclear war, fear, and freedom all collided and

created some of the most poetic and profound music of all time. I came into the world while all of

this was happening.

So much history! And I am just now discovering all that I was not taught, including women’s

history, black history, indigenous, immigrant history, all of it hidden or poorly recorded. I want to

give it light and healing. The people who stood up in the sixties inspired me today to show up and

stand up to the equally horrendous (why can’t we evolve) politics and civil rights! Every word of

the folk singers, songwriters, and Dylan are as true today and needed as much now as then.

I am now reading the book in which the movie was based, Dylan Goes Electric, where it speaks

of music and political culture almost as one of the characters in the story.

The timing of this is what really leaves me speechless, and at the same time unable to stop talking

about it. The movie and its subject happened in NYC. When I made the comment out loud

about going to a dog show, and then discovering one in NYC over my birthday was incredible

enough. And the fact that it blossomed into a girl’s trip to honor them and then a few months

later being fully absorbed in celebrating the power of the feminine, NYC, and the desire to

change the world is nothing short of divine providence.

If all of that wasn’t enough serendipity for one to comprehend, a few weeks ago while updating

my head shots and photos for this website the photographer asked me to sit on the couch and put

my head in my hands. I smiled from the depth of my soul. Why? Because that is the exact pose

that Bob Dylan’s girlfriend did when they took photographs for his second album. The album she

inspired, the very one that thrust him into stardom, and the photo where they look so young, in

love, and fully committed to one another.



The photographer also asked if I wanted to play music while we took photos, of course I said yes

and turned on Bob Dylan. At the very moment when we took the shot of me posing like his

girlfriend the song was playing from the scene in the movie where she recites, “… the line it is

drawn, the curse it is cast, the slow one now, will later be fast, as the present now…” then he rips

the paper from her hand before she finishes. Then she tells him, “Your first album was all other

people’s music.” She turns and leaves him pondering those inspiring words. It was she who

inspired and encouraged him to be himself and trust in his talent. I love that scene, that song, and

their relationship. I am in a time and place in my life where “the times they are a changin’.”