Janis joplin rio8/25/2023 In between, there was drug-dealing, financial ruin, jail, harrowing street violence, and finally more than a decade spent caring for her failing mother - all of it chronicled in her memoir in a wry, funny voice that couldn’t stand in sharper contrast to the Penthouse Forum approach of Going Down With Janis. Forty-five years after the publication of her book Going Down With Janis (“A Raw and Scathing Portrait of Janis Joplin by Her Female Lover” proclaimed the hardcover jacket), the 77-year-old Caserta still gets the occasional “Are you THAT Peggy Caserta?” She is, although she lives a very different life now: semi-retired in Louisiana, 24 years sober after a long on-and-off relationship with heroin. If you know your Joplin lore, the name - Peggy Caserta, not Ruby, which never took hold - should sound familiar. We laughed and laughed that morning, two young, silly, southern girls …” We’re sitting there, and Janis is reading the New York Times, and all of a sudden she just busted up and screamed, ‘You won’t believe this!’ There was an ad in the paper that went, ‘Ruby said to Pearl, Pearl, why don’t you be a stenographer?’ Not only did it have both of our new names, but Janis’s parents had wanted her to be a stenographer. “Still stoned, she wanted a hot-fudge chocolate sundae, junkie food, so we went to Serendipity for breakfast. “One morning, we got up at the Chelsea after a night of debauching,” Caserta tells me. “I never liked the name Peggy, and wanted to be more floozy, you know? Somewhere along the line, Janis started talking about changing her name to Pearl. “I’d wanted to start calling myself Ruby,” says Caserta, whose second memoir, I Ran Into Some Trouble, was published yesterday by Wyatt-MacKenzie. Peggy Caserta remembers the moment when Janis Joplin became Pearl. Photo: Herb Greene/Courtesy of Peggy Caserta Peggy Caserta at Mnasidika, her shop in Haight-Ashbury, with in-store leathersmith Bobby Boles.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |