joan on joan

"Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not be. The roles assigned to her are various, but variations on a single theme. She is the Madonna of the disaffected. She is the pawn of the protest movement. She is the unhappy analysand. She is the singer who would not train her voice, the rebel who drives the Jaguar too fast, the Rima who hides with the birds and the deer. Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez rarely leaves the Carmel Valley."

-Joan Didion, "Where the Kissing Never Stops", Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968

When thumbing a dog-eared copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I re-read one of my favorite essays, "Where the Kissing Never Stops", a little treatise on Joan Baez. Imagine: two of my favorite Joans, lounging in the kitchen, eating hot dogs while the slow California sun looms at lunch. A perfect trinity: Joan, Joan and Joan's sister, the loveliest lady to grace the planet, Mimi Baez Farina. Knockout.