March 18, 2003:

Sidewalk, New York City, Fall. Peach-colored woman with permed blonde hair stands biting her fingernails, gnawed nearly to the knuckles. Beside her fidgets a tall boy with messy black hair and a permanent smile that may or may not express happiness. Concert posters line the plywood barricade protecting a construction site: Lou Reed at an uptown club, two nights only.

"I want to see The Man!", she says, in her characteristic childlike sing-song that rises and falls a full octave, modulating up and down like her roller-coaster emotions, as if to say, "Everybody in the world's eating desert but me."