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’.”
