\nSweet well water and pickling jars \u2013
\nWe\u2019ll lend you the car, we always do
\nYes, we always do\u201d<\/em>
\nJoni Mitchell<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve spent the last hour trying to remember the title of this song.\u00a0 It was on Joni Mitchell\u2019s first album, \u201cClouds\u201d, which, like many of her LPs, had a self-painted self-portrait on the jacket cover. We were all Joni Mitchell fans then, with our long hair parted down the middle.\u00a0 But we were more than fans.\u00a0 We were <\/em>Joni Mitchell. We were also Judy Collins and Joan Baez and Buffy St. Marie.\u00a0 Darcy and I would sit in our USC dorm room, pretty and privileged, playing guitar, wearing black brimmed hats and smoking Tareytons and talking about the war and Ezra Pound and abortion.\u00a0 We were art and film majors.\u00a0 We wore wide, ripped bellbottoms and nothing but dirt from the 32nd Street Market on our bare feet. We were smart and lucky and only a few of us had ever faced any real heartache.\u00a0 We slept with black men, Indians, Dutch, Germans and Jews, but not each other.\u00a0 That wasn\u2019t as cool then as it is now. We dated Japanese painters and law students who were rabbi\u2019s sons.\u00a0 “Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning<\/em>\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Joni Mitchell came to Bovard Auditorium and stood on the stage alone with her guitar.\u00a0 Her honey-colored fringed leather shirt was tucked into a matching long leather skirt.\u00a0 I was there with Wim (as in ‘vim and vigor’) who hailed from the Netherlands and looked a little like Art Garfunkel.\u00a0 He was an engineering grad student. I liked him because he was European with that great accent and because he lived in a rambling old Victorian nicknamed \u201cEllis Island\u201d.\u00a0 The house was full of students from around the world, most of whom did not wear shirt protectors for their pens. Wim was a kindly snore. But he took me to see Joni Mitchell and didn\u2019t openly expect me to have sex with him afterward.\u00a0 The sign of either a true gentleman or a gentle bore.<\/p>\n “MICHAEL FROM MOUNTAINS” \u201cUp over the stars, Sweet well water and pickling jars \u2013 We\u2019ll lend you the car, we always do Yes, we always do\u201d Joni Mitchell I\u2019ve spent the last hour trying to remember the title of this song.\u00a0 It was on Joni Mitchell\u2019s first album, \u201cClouds\u201d, which, like many of her LPs, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,43],"tags":[32,37],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","category-michael-from-the-mountains","tag-barbara-sweeney","tag-essay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102,"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions\/102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"b-at-20\"](\"http:\/\/basweeney.com\/writings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/b-at-20-300x237.jpg\" "\\"b-at-20\\"")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"