New York is the thing that seduced me.

We went our separate ways, but within walking distance of one another.

I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.

People called me the godmother of punk, but I never name myself anything.

My mission is to communicate, to wake people up, to give them my energy and accept theirs. We're all in it together, and I respond emotionally as a worker, a mother, an artist, and a human being with a voice. We all have a voice. We have the responsibility to exercise it, to use it.

All I've ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.

My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. This process was especially magnified within the fevers of influenza, measles, chickenpox, and mumps. I got them all and with each I was privileged with a new level of awareness. Lying deep within myself, the symmetry of a snowflake spinning above me, intensifying through my lids, I seized a most worthy souvenir, a shard of heaven’s kaleidoscope.