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photographer Robert Mapplethorpe would draw from those same visual energies to shoot the jacket photograph for Patti’s debut LP.
    Patti saw Edie in the flesh for the first time in the fall of 1965, when Andy Warhol and his entourage, Edie at the helm, descended upon Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art for Warhol’s first-ever retrospective. “Edie was coming down this long staircase,” she told Jean Stein. “I think she had ermine wrapped around her; her hair was white and her eyebrows black. She had on this real little dress [and] two big white afghan hounds on black leashes with diamond collars, but that could be fantasy…. She had so much life in her. Her movement was fluid, and she was like little queenie…. I wasn’t into girls or anything, but I had a real crush on her.”
    Patti encountered her again on a rare visit to New York City; the city was like Oz to her then, a beckoning presence at the end of the bus ride, far enough away to be fabulous, close enough not to be out of reach, and magic enough that she refused to despoil it by visiting it all the time. Neither would she try to gain entrance to the palaces where her idols congregated. It was enough to make her way to places like Arthur’s, or the Scene, stand outside on the sidewalk, and just watch the comings and goings.
    One night, however, knowing Sedgwick was in the building, Patti cajoled the doorman to let her run inside for a moment; “I think I said I had to use the bathroom.” She was, she thought, looking pretty hot that night, in a green woolen miniskirt that would have blown the doors off any South Jersey nightclub. “I didn’t look so hot there.” But she watched Edie and her friends as they danced, and that “was the big moment of my life”—even though she wasn’t especially impressed by the way in which they danced.
    They looked like weird chickens, she thought, all angles and elbows and long, dangling earrings. Nobody danced like that in South Jersey; nobody would have even dreamed of dancing like that in South Jersey. Patti knew there and then that she didn’t ever want to be like the people she so admired. “I just liked that they existed, so I could look at them.”
    Back in Philadelphia, the Museum of Art continued to exercise her imagination, and daydreams of her own future in the art world further clouded her work at Glassboro. Her dreams of becoming the power behind an artistic throne, of winning the heart of a struggling genius, coaxing and inspiring him to attain his potential, became an even more vivid lure.
    Spinning out fantasies of Edie’s relationship with Warhol—for few then would have asserted that his best work was created with her by his side—she dreamed of discovering a Dylan or a Jackson Pollock, or even a Harry Houdini (for what is escapology if not an art form in action that stands in for words), of standing alongside him as he worked for acceptance, and molding his talent to meet it. She had yet to meet that special person, of course. But she floated through life, through her studies, with the growing conviction that someday soon she would.
    And then her dreams were shattered, not once but twice.
    Patti has never been good at keeping her stories straight. “I was holding a temporary minimum-wage job in a textbook factory in Philadelphia,” she recalled in her memoir Just Kids. At other times, she described herself as laboring at a baby buggy factory, turning out pushchairs for the glowing moms of the day. Other biographers have named her employer as the Dennis Mitchell Toy Factory in Woodbury, where her duties apparently included assembling the boxes into which baby mattresses were packed.
    Whatever and wherever it was, her summer job was poorly paid and shoddily maintained, and filled with women for whom life could and would offer nothing better—or, at least, nothing that they could be bothered to aspire toward.
    Patti hated it and was hated in return. Working too fast for her