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Chapter 3: Before Boyd
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Before Boyd The business oj America is business. -CALVIN COOLIDGE 29th president ot the United States Spotlights are the farthest social extension of the interrogator's bare bulb and two of them are trained on the platform that awaits Joan Baez. Behind it is an exit that leads to the dressing rooms under the stands, but those arc not outfitted with birdcage lights and many mirrors, for the acts this hall sees are usually booked not by agents, but by livestockers and tractor dealers ; this is Harrisburg's Farm Show Arena, and that name is not the camp nomenclature of a Manhattan discotheque. B aez is the queen of the Movement's usa adjunct, and she is here to give a benefit concert for the Defense Committee. The packed dirt of the arena floor is as dark and dried as chewing tobacco and it is covered with a complete blot of people. Their faces are familiar as a picture dimly remembered; then comes the shock of recognition : adolescents. Eclipsed for a decade, they have returned intact from the far side of hype. Clots of boys staring at girls who are joined by the Siamese code of a rural night out. They travel in pairs as nuns used to and the FBI ( when making house calls ) still does. There is no haze of 76 BEFORE BOYD marijuana floating over the crowd like a cartoon character's blue funk cloud. We are far from the city. Near eight thousand have come from area high schools and neighboring colleges. The boys, like Lieutenant Calley, still roll up the bottoms of their jeans. A bra is no longer the emblem of a pubescent girl's emergence into womanhood. It is after eight and there begins the whine of impatient crowds : handclapping. The spotlights play back and forth, their operators continually knighting and re knighting the shoulders of the microphones. They wait to dub Baez, whose first act of Resistance, the Defense Committee's bio supplies, was her boycott of the Hootenanny TV show, after they blacklisted Pete Seeger. The Hootenanny show! Time warps ripple across the Farm Show Arena. Nothing ages as quickly as the cover art of record jackets, but Baez's voice is perennial; hers is everyone's sister in each inner ear. Baez arrives on stage, dressed in a Pucci mini, looking like an attractive thirtyish photographic-researcher for Time-Life. "I've made a deal with the TV people; they can take pictures during the first two songs, then they have to pack up and go home." Applause. Film crews as new lepers, driven out with stony looks. "This song isn't much good, so I'm going to dedicate it to the attorney general." Applause. The lights of the TV cameras move in like white-heat locusts. Throughout the performance she makcs only two references to the Harrisburg Seven. Baez announces, "It takes a lot to break out of the Catholic Church and do something brave," and later, before singing her "calypso version of the Lord's Prayer," some thing she hadn't "sung in eight years," she says, "It's a good one for Harrisburg." She is here to raise cash; and no one is going to drive out the moneychangers. "I'm here," she says, "not to lecture, but to have fun." She sings, "Oh, Happy Day," and during it her voice rises to a terrifying screech : black passion turning into white neurosis. Afterwards she mimicked girls who would come up to her and ask, leeringly, "What are you thinking when you sing about Jesus?" The laughter is the solution to a riddle. This led to a song of her own, about " Snuggics," a word for someone, she explained, 77 [54.205.179.155] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:45 GMT) BEFORE BOYD that you can spend an enjoyable two or three days with, but not much longer. She said that the word snuggies originated on the Coast like a perfume dealer who points to the import tag. The lyric was titled "Love Song to a Stranger." She is lovely; a hedonis tic mirage to the parched and chaste Catholic Leftists; singing of cares for which they are not free. On the Farm Show Arena floor are the young of a species, part of an animal kingdom. Bidding from the bleachers for the best reproducers could commence. They loved it; a night free of politics and "other sad dreams." The Defense Committee didn't raise many...