essay
by PATTI SMITH
When I was a child, still decked in Wranglers and coonskin cap, I conducted a routine search through Sunday’s trash heap. My family lived in a small apartment within a whitewashed row of temporary housing for veterans and their families after World War II. People were moving on, and often the spoils of their move became treasure for kids like myself. On this particular afternoon, I found two stacks of Vogue magazines from 1950–1952 tied with red string. I stuffed the string in my back pocket, and the Vogues were designated for future use — scissoring clothes and accessories for my paper dolls.
Opening these strange magazines was a revelation. Even at seven years old, I could see that these were no Sears catalogs, which were the usual source for paper doll mining. As I looked through the pages, I was fascinated by another…