Reckless
When I was a girl, I worked in a dress shop.
It was a place for rich, young women, my own age. We were expected to serve them as a Victorian lady’s maid would serve her charge. I found this distasteful but the money was good and my discount was very deep.
We had a record player in the shop and most of the time I was alone there with it. Joni Mitchell as Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter kept me company as I did what I was expected to do, hour by hour, straightening dresses, trying them on, feeling the fabric, understanding the cut, the fit, the hand.
We were expected to dress the part, to be the perfect exemplars of fashion in clothes we would not have thought to buy if we had to pay the prices our customers paid. We were adornments, walking advertising when we were not at work and seamlessly polite serving girls when we were. This was the life of the Gibson Girl; given a decent day’s pay, lunch at an elegant restaurant and quiet afternoons spent in a box like a reliquary, set into the very center, like a push pin on a map, of Victoria’s downtown.
I wore a cashmere overcoat, my shoes cost a month’s rent. I often saw my dresses on actresses in the romantic comedies I went to see on weekends. Belle France, Escada, Albert Nipon, Perry Ellis, Rodier, Fendi — these were the names in my closet. The carpet of that little box was thick and soft, it muffled every step, and the walls covered in row after row of soft, colorful fabric waiting to be brought to life by a hungry woman’s soft frame. Like living in a velvet jewel casket.
Joni on the record player, was astonishing, wild and strong. She employed a band, Jaco Pastorius was in her thrall. I loved everything about it. I would play it, and listen to the perfection of her stories and yearn for my freedom. When people were with me, I would play it because it frightened them, harmonies barely skating above the atonal, they understood it was something complex, sophisticated, beyond them and they would be too embarrassed to complain.
When I was alone, I played it loud, sometimes singing, along. I loved it because it was difficult, complex and required time to appreciate. I carried that music with me, with its images and its chords, inside my heart, like a seed, hard to crack and slow to sprout.
There is a line, just one repeated line in one chorus on that album that poisons the entire project — the album will be tainted forever because of it. “They come for fun and sun, while Muslims stick up Washington”
Joni is referring to the political crisis of the day, her day. Jimmy Carter’s downfall. The Iranian Hostage crisis, which put Ronald Reagan into office and altered the course of human history.
She wasn’t wrong, she just wasn’t filtered. She was too blunt for a woman and spoke in the language of her time, forgetting that she is eternal and her words endure forever.
As for me? After a few life-altering stumbles, an unplanned pregnancy, the loss of a child, cancelation of my plans to emigrate to England, I continued to fall up the social ladder for a while. Eventually, in my mid-twenties, I lived as a common-law wife, to a well-bred young man in the old money crowd. I thought I was suitably humbled by the path my life had taken. I thought I could remind myself of the benefits of fitting in and filling out the role laid out for me. I thought I was old enough to be sensible. But inside, that small, hard seed of rebellion began to crack and sprout of its own volition. Too late to stop it.
Like Joni, I sometimes spoke out of turn. It wasn’t an accident. I wanted to be difficult. I wanted to be hard to take. I knew how it felt to live inside the jewel box and I knew I didn’t want it to last.
In due time, like the “tequila anaconda” Joni sang about in one of the songs on that album, the sprout from the seed that album helped to plant snaked its way to the surface and took me away from Victoria.
But that’s a long story, and this is a short page.
