Everybody who went to the Met Ball should have taken a page from that consumate punk, Edith Massey. Here she sings “Punks Get off the Grass!” at a club on the Sunset Strip, circa 1979. That’s Gina Schock on the drums, btw, shortly before she joined the Go-Gos. TRUE STORY: When I was 15, I wrote the only fan letter I’ve ever written to Edith Massey. I told her I was planning to run away, that nobody understood me, and could I come stay with her and work at her thrift shop in Baltimore? SWEAR TO GOD, she wrote me back, and in her barely decipherable little chicken scrawl she wrote: “Dear James – Stay in school, love your momma, and maybe when you graduate you can come visit me in Baltimore, your friend Edith.” That letter sustained me all through high school. Wish I still had it, but it got washed away in the Great Apartment Flood of ’87.
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