Soul SiStories
Soul SiStories was born out of a mutual desire to bring forward hope and healing through sharing our lived experiences. Hope is embracing life despite adversity. Hope is our reason.
Soul SiStories
She Said Yes to Life and Grew to Meet Her Challenges: Linda Wolf
What does it mean to live an authentic life? Meet Linda Wolf, a woman who has fearlessly navigated cultural revolutions, personal struggles, and social upheaval since the 1960s, never losing sight of her core values along the way.
Linda's journey began in Los Angeles, where her feminist mother instilled principles of compassion, honesty, and boldness that would guide her remarkable path. At 19, she broke barriers as one of the first female rock and roll photographers, capturing iconic moments with Joe Cocker's tour before living and studying in France. But her lens captured more than celebrities—it revealed humanity in all its complexity, documenting both joy and injustice across cultural boundaries.
Throughout our conversation, Linda shares the pivotal moments that transformed her: from sneaking backstage to meet Mick Jagger at 14, to her revolutionary realization in her forties that "nobody was going to love me till the day I died but me." This profound insight fueled her work founding Teen Talking Circles and the Daughters Sisters Project, organizations that have created safe spaces for authentic expression and compassionate listening for countless young women.
What distinguishes Linda from many of her counterculture contemporaries is her unwavering commitment to social justice across five decades. While others abandoned the ideals of those early "love-ins and be-ins," Linda continued evolving, connecting dots between racism, environmental challenges, and gender inequality. Her philosophy of "saying yes, then growing to meet that yes" reveals how embracing opportunities—even when uncertain—can lead to extraordinary growth.
Today at 75, Linda finds joy in community dinners on Bainbridge Island, her growing family, and continuing creative expression. Her perspective on our current cultural moment offers wisdom for navigating turbulent times: focus locally, maintain connections, and choose optimism over mere hope. "It's not about wrapping your head around everything happening," she advises, "but about doing what you can, where you are."
Listen now to this compelling conversation that weaves together art, activism, and authentic living. Then ask yourself: What might happen if you began saying "yes" to life's invitations, trusting that you'll grow to meet them?
Linda Wolf Photography Linda Wolf
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Welcome to Soul Sisteries.
Speaker 2:You are here with Soul Sisteries and we have just finished the most amazing interview with Linda Wolf and I am so excited to share her with everybody Her story of kind of hope through acceptance and diversity and her life experience as a photographer and a humanitarian and all of the amazing work she has been doing really since the 60s.
Speaker 1:Right, I mean, and just she's story after story after story and I feel like we only scratch the surface and it's just replete with so much that's amazing. But through it all, I loved that idea of yes, just saying yes, and then growing to meet that yes, it's everybody. Wait till you hear all about that. It is incredibly inspiring and authentic, lived true. Really, really good stuff. Enjoy.
Speaker 2:We are here today with Linda Wolf, who was born in Los Angeles in 1950, smack dab in time for the 1960s cultural revolution. At 19, she became one of the first female rock and roll photographers. After traveling on tour with Joe Cocker, mad Dog and Englishman, linda left the US to live and study in France. Returning five years later, she began a series of public art murals sponsored by Kodak.
Speaker 2:Linda is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, a humanistic photographer, author, musician, feminist activist, memoirist and devoted daughter, mother, grandmother, wife and friend. She was the founder, executive director of two nonprofit organizations for girls, a workshop leader, fundraiser and advocate. What unites all this is her deep love of life, nature, people and a lifelong commitment to social justice. Over her 50 years as an artist, linda Wolfe has moved seamlessly between rock and roll, photojournalism, fine art, public art, street, documentary and portrait photography. Her work is part of numerous documentary movies, books and art collections. Linda co-founded Women in Photography International, along with Carrie Mae Weems, the Daughters Sisters Project and Teen Talking Circles. She's authored seven published books, fundraised hundreds of thousands of dollars for humanitarian projects, taught and traveled widely as an artist and produced and facilitated women's empowerment retreats. Her latest book, tribute Cocker Power, distributed by Simon Schuster was released in 2020. And we are very excited to introduce everybody to Linda Woolf.
Speaker 1:Welcome, linda. Thank you, so excited and grateful to have you here and, my goodness, the life you've lived. You really have been in the throes of things, but what I'm struck with so profoundly is this the true, humanistic, authentic staying in the heart and the truth of who you are and how you want to connect in the world. Throughout all of this. That's so apparent in everything written about you, everything I've read about you, looking at your own materials, the documentaries, all of this. I'm just so moved by your truth to center and speak to that a little, if you would, if you could, and how it is that you come by, holding so closely and fully to your authentic self and leading this life so purposefully in that way. Am I making sense? I feel like I'm talking around something that is so essential and so beautiful.
Speaker 3:No, you did a great job of making sense. You're asking me how it is that I kept my humanity and stayed true to myself. Yeah, I have to say that my mom and my dad, but particularly my mother, barbara Wolf, who is no longer on planet Earth she brought me up to be a feminist, an artist, caring, compassionate, honest and bold. My mother was an English teacher, english literature teacher. She was also a high fashion model when I was, before I was born. She was on the track to becoming a Hollywood starlet, but her life she was on the track to becoming a Hollywood starlet, but her her life. She was married at 17 to my father, who was also. He was an amazing man. He had been a stunt man for Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan, so my dad was like he was part of, he was the center for the USC Trojans.
Speaker 3:So I come from a family. Also my grandmother worked, lost the ownership of the Apollo of the West, which was called the Lincoln Theater, which was a Negro vaudeville theater and music theater in Los Angeles. He did end up managing it for quite a while. My dad worked the candy counter when he was a teenager. So our family is Jewish, although my mom which is interesting was the love of my grandmother and her lover, rather than my grandmother and my grandfather, both of whom died before she was five years old. And I come from a deeply book learning family. My mother was agnostic, so it was not a religious family. I didn't grow up with a religion. In specific, I gained my deepest sense of spirituality and religion or I wouldn't call it religion, I would call it spirituality. The deepest that I went was when I was 16. And I was part of the counterculture movement was when I was 16 and I was part of the counterculture movement which I pretty much joined with my mom, even younger than 16.
Speaker 3:But the first time I took LSD was when I saw the light, so to speak. I saw life from a vantage point. You spoke to a reverend. I listened to that conversation. He went up on a hill to get an overview and I got an overview. The first time I took LSD, I got an overview of it all and I felt deeply embedded in life and I.
Speaker 3:But then you know, so that was a very potent part of my, my, my beginning. But also so was my time in middle school, grammar school, high school, where I didn't feel like I fit in. I wasn't Christian, I wasn't. I didn't fit the status quo. And that was a wonderful time to not fit the status quo, because we had a whole group of us who banded together outside of the popular kids and started finding our own way as flower children and then hippies and peace freaks, and a whole tribe of us grew together to understand a different way of living and I honestly thought, during those love-ins and be-ins that we were all part of in the 1960s, that we were truly changing the world, that all these guys that we now see, who have come back like virulent I don't even think there's an insect that deserves the name to call these people that have come out from underneath the rocks.
Speaker 1:And how did that happen?
Speaker 3:yeah, yeah, and that we would have changed the world by by now to one piece and, um, no war. And you know there was just. So back then I say there was a tremendous amount of hope. Yeah, I would say there was like we lived in not just hope, but we saw it in front of us because we were surrounded by it and that also brought in diversity. That also brought in diversity. It brought in social justice, but it also brought in new consciousness about is this freedom, just privilege that we have as hippies and flower children and peace freaks and such?
Speaker 3:Even though there was diversity in our midst, we still weren't looking at the inner city, we weren't really acknowledging, we weren't really looking at anti-racism work in that same way. That was all coming in on a different track and while there was some overlap, it wasn't till you know, it just wasn't till later that social justice and the idea, you know, the idea of racism and white privilege and all of that, and womanism not just white women started to really then evolve from the good that we were involved in back then. And also we saw taking it to the extreme and how dangerous that was for our health. So there's like a whole multidimensional aspect to how I became a woman.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And all of that is tied in to the education, the feminist education that I was having, the women I was meeting at the women's building in Los Angeles, the Judy Chicago group of artists who, you know, judy Chicago, did the project of vagina plates, you know, and great artwork. Well, I mean, you know, suddenly we were looking at Woman House, where they had taken over a house in Los Angeles and started to show what the state of life was for females with, you know, sexism and violence, you know, the financial aspects started coming in as well as, you know, the jobs and not being respected for the work that women do. And it just that my life was constantly surrounded, because I put myself into those spaces, with growth and with truth and with circles of truth and with listening.
Speaker 1:So I want to ask you a question in the midst of this. This is thank you for sharing all of this, but something you said along the way that I think is so significant, and I want to dig deeper into what is it about you, though? What it is about you that you stayed this course and you've lived this life of activism, of humanitarianism, of creativity, of art, of fellowship, of support of woman is all of this, and yet you just spoke a moment ago about the numbers from that very same time who were also sharing communally and experiencing all of this, who have chosen a very different path and have gone really in opposition. Yet you didn't. You have stayed this course, and what is it about? What is that fire in you, what is that awareness in you, what is it in you that is held so truly and profoundly to this course?
Speaker 3:and profoundly to this course. Well, you know, I mean, a question like that would have me pondering for a while, and really so that I could come up with a deeper, drilled down answer to that. But you know, just my first, I'll just riff off what comes to me. You know, I'll just riff off what comes to me from my heart, which is, I know the experience of being oppressed, I know the experience of feeling less than I know the experience of the history of annihilation of peoples, not just the Jewish people in Germany, but peoples in general, the indigenous cultures. I feel it, I feel it inside. I happen to have been born allowed to feel.
Speaker 3:My upbringing was one where I was allowed to express my feelings. I was allowed to understand what feelings feel like and how to express them and how to learn to express them better and better and better. I was angry, I was angry and the anger was on top of a lot of grief, and the grief is what you know the grief, the anger, as well as the music that I was with the musicians I was with, where, you know, you don't you've got art and music that within it is such a pure, a pure sense of self-expression and a pure merging together of human beings, regardless of whether you know like there were issues outside of the music that when people came together to play the music, the joy and the glory and the grace of that to be in that was so profound and so free. And the lovins and the be-ins were free. And also I had the privilege the white privilege plus the financial privilege of being able to go into spaces, multicultural spaces, and I'll give you an example of how simple that was for me, where I was given the freedom to be no holes barred. I was free, I was accepted, I was welcomed and I was free. And you have that kind of a situation combined with the heart of you know, the heart of knowing what it feels like and then being able to connect the dots of how it must feel like or does feel like for others. I don't know. You know it just was like fuel. It was fuel for me and I was successful. My voice was successful. I made, I got in trouble, I got punished, I got banished, but I was successful too.
Speaker 3:And one of the ways in which I can just give an example of the kind of space that accepted me and let me be who I was was when I would visit my father who worked in downtown LA for a large transportation company. The majority of people working for the company were people of color Latino, black. They were. You know, it was hundreds of staff in his company but he was the vice president who could never be president because he was Jewish. That was real. They'd never make him president, but he could be vice president all his time at the company and knew it, which was tough, yeah, but when they would have, and I was his daughter, his little daughter, you know the girl, and I remember going to the picnics the company picnics or walking through when I got my driver's license, going to visit him from Sherman Oaks to downtown LA, which by then was not what it is today.
Speaker 3:It was the other side of the tracks and when I would come in, everybody in my father was so beloved, everybody would go there's Joe Joe's daughter, there's Joe Wolf's daughter, and they I could go. I could be off on my own through the company picnics, walking from blanket to blanket and getting to know people, and they welcomed me because my dad, they knew with my father that he knew also what they were going through. Having worked the candy counter at a Negro I put that in quotes theater. He was told you do not ever, ever be rude, never to our clientele. You never be rude, you always treat everyone with respect. So he learned that back in the 40s. Plus he was on a team, so he had that connection, and plus he was a stuntman, so he had that connection with many different kinds of people.
Speaker 3:So my father had a huge heart and these people knew they could trust my father, understood where they were coming from and would stand up for them. So it was like you know, if I had any answer at this point to that, it's that everything colluded in my life to give me more and more and more courage to raise my voice, and my mom really instilled that in me, oh yeah, you know, having been married at 17 and not ever having found herself then finding herself in the 1960s in the women's blasted movement, where you learn your sexuality the entire time. She was married and then discovered it with a lover, like my grandmother, her mother had with a lover. So you know, we were, and we still are, a family, apart from the majority of people, and some people are afraid of us because it's threatening.
Speaker 1:I want you to adopt me as well.
Speaker 3:And other than that, this house we live in, it's filled with people a lot of the time who just hang out young, old, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I have to say, just listening to everything you've shared, there's so many pieces that I want to talk about and you know, I did do some research before we got together today and I am just well, I'm fascinated with everything you said said like I'd love to be adopted, to be raised around a woman who has a voice and has experienced so much and is willing to share that not only through words, but through your art, through your photography.
Speaker 2:Just amazing, and I could imagine. I know you have at least a daughter. I know you have at least a daughter and I can imagine what that would be like, kind of knowing be-ins. I was born in the late 60s but what I've heard about it just seems like a phenomenal time. But I'm wondering, how do you, I guess, wrap your head around, I'm gonna say, all that crap that you witnessed and experienced and thinking? The answers were there, there was love and there was hope and there was joy and there was end of war and there was acceptance. And how do you wrap your head around what's happening today?
Speaker 3:Well, first of all, I can't wrap my head around it.
Speaker 1:First of all, I can't wrap my head around it, yeah.
Speaker 3:There's no way to wrap your head around it.
Speaker 3:It's like I don't think even the best thinkers in the world can do much but create some form of an analysis that goes back to okay, this started in a long time ago. I mean, I just spent two days in a undoing racism workshop and we were given the history that I don't think I ever put together. It was like pieces of it I knew, but not like the fact that white, you know, we talk about race being a construct, a very painful reality, but a construct, and that the white race was actually constructed from our European, from who we were as Europeans. We weren't white in Europe, we were Europeans and we have paid a tremendous cost to import races, to import to, to create racism and import racism. And and we basically to create racism and import racism.
Speaker 3:And basically it feels as though 400 years of racism back to Jonestown, when Pocahontas was a child, stolen in order to gain a foothold by the English in land and to start exploiting and try to, you know, wipe Native Americans out of the United States, which wasn't even the United States, it was colonies then. I mean, it just goes back so far, this power over by necessity that other people consider necessity, workers, money, land and to create these separations between us, and it's basically that is what is still happening. I mean, I think a tremendous amount of this is about racism.
Speaker 3:Yeah still happening. I mean, I think a tremendous amount of this is about racism. Yeah, and how I, how I live with that, because we've only been living with this for about two or three weeks now, as bad as it is.
Speaker 3:So I think all of us are just going, wow, how am I going to walk? How am I going to pick up my grandson today and not just want to sob? How am I going to hold myself? What am I going to do? And so you know, it comes to me and my friends and my family, and especially one of my daughters who's pregnant, who cannot tolerate going into all of the conversations that I would go in with her oh, did you hear this? And oh, have you heard that? And what about this? They're right now happening so fast and furiously. The only thing I can come to at this stage of the game, three weeks in, is I have to do what I can, locally, with the people I love Stand up, continue to stand up and speak out wherever I feel it and am safe enough to do it. Consider that I must be with my friends. I cannot listen to the play by play throughout the day. I can't do it. I would. There's no way we can hold this in our minds, in our hearts it's like it's in there can hold this in our minds, in our hearts. It's like it's in there, but it's going to.
Speaker 3:What gives me hope and I know hope is a difficult word. I would say I'm optimistic. Hope, it's kind of a hopeless word for me on the on the level of the word try. Hopeless word for me on the level of the word try trying. I used to teach my daughters try to pick up that glass of water, try to pick it up. And they'd reach for it and pick it up. I'd say no, just try to pick it up. You never quite reach it when you're trying. And hope is the you know, as I had been educated to understand was the greatest evil in Pandora's box, the heaviest that never got out of the box Because it was so heavy. Because hope, living in hope, is almost to me like trying, whereas living with optimism is something I can wholeheartedly embrace. I can be optimistic, and I am optimistic even in the face of fires and horrors that we live with right now, even knowing that eventually the sun's going to burn it all out. We're all going, the planet's going, you know. So I can still live with optimism every single day and find it all over.
Speaker 3:But I don't know. I mean, I hope things work out, but to me it's more of a I don't know, it's more of a word. That is kind of like prayer. It's kind of like a prayer and since I don't believe in a religion, the prayer that I see and I do pray is that, wow, I know that seed I'm going to plant in my garden is going to sprout beets and we're going to eat them. I know it's going to be there. I know that it may be worse in summer than it's always been before. Because of fires and smoke we might not be able to get out of the house, but I know that it's. I know that this is this, this is going to those. That tree outside is going to, it's going to leaf out. Now, that gives me hope, or it gives me hope, um, that when my grandson comes over, I will be able to put on a different movie than the crap that he might see somewhere else yeah I mean, it gives me hope to see him smile and laugh.
Speaker 3:What doesn't give me hope? Well, what gives me hope is hope is that he's in a family and a group of people and a city that represents what we stand for and that we can teach him. That gives me hope.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it was said to me today. I was speaking with somebody else earlier today. I was speaking with somebody else earlier today and she just said that when the macro view is so heavy and so hard, we do have hope or joy or whatever the word is that we want to put there, but that thing which sustains and excuse me and allows us to keep moving forward. And I thought, well, yes, and so your grandson clearly is part of that for you Like how, what can we? How can we shift perspective in any moment and bring forward really the richness that makes this life right now livable? Because, to your earlier point, if we're just in that space of the nightmares, then what are we even doing? Why are we even doing this?
Speaker 3:Well, we're crippled by that If we stay there. We're crippled I've used that word is. I'm now friends with a woman who they make well, they live on Bainbridge and she's been doing community dinners at a local church. She's Jewish, it's a church, it doesn't matter, but we do local community dinners the second Tuesday of every month and so my husband and I go to help cook the community dinner, and it's organic vegetables from a local farm friend. It's Helpline, which is what we have here for people who don't have enough money to buy food or they are in need, which I've even used myself from time to time, and you can pay whatever you want, and we cook together, we talk together and people come and we eat together, and that's really where we're creating community.
Speaker 3:I told you I want you guys to interview Heather yeah, because you will hear more. She stands on my shoulders For her. It's all about creating community folk, uh, folk community and people community and nature community and healing communities. So I mean, that's where I get through this, this is where I get through this. This is where I get through this and then gosh, you know, being able to have a family that has done the work of the teen talking circles that I created back when they were little, to have a family who actually do compassionate listening with each other so that we can have healthy, loving relationships where we're not running away from our issues. I mean that in itself is just like, oh my gosh, that keeps me going To not have all these horrible arguments or divorces. I mean my ex-husband I call him my husband to be able to continue hearing each other. That's a tremendous gift.
Speaker 2:I will just say, linda, by training I am a licensed marriage and family therapist, so I love to hear that being able to raise your children with that compassionate listening and speaking is huge. And I want to go looking at your history. I was looking at your, that brief, your, your brief portfolio.
Speaker 2:I guess you know and reading about the caravan that you were part of and how very cool that your friend called you and said get here and take some pictures. But I was drawn just looking at all of your pictures and again thinking about where we are today and seeing the same things going on. And then my memory of Bainbridge Island, which I just adore. I know Donna shared that we've spent some time in Bainbridge Island. The last time I was there, just a couple of years ago, I finally went to the Japanese American internment memorial. That's there. I finally my aunt took me and I got to experience that and I couldn't help but just kind of put all these pieces together of you and your breathe. Oh, go ahead, I'm listening. Okay, I'm back. Yeah, the breathe, california and Idaho and elsewhere.
Speaker 2:And then today, what's going on today? And you're talking about how you hold out this piece of hope, even kind of, in this chaos, when all of this stuff is going on. And I guess I'm just I kind of want to see how it all threads together for you your humanitarian work, your efforts with the caravan in Mexico, the nonprofits you started, the mother-daughter group and the teen talking circle, which I'm totally drawn to. You know I want to like bring to my students who are counselors out in the, you know, all around the country right now, and I just kind of want to hear you talk about how you've, I guess, gone from one to the next and how you weave it all together and just yeah, because I'm just floored by what you do kind of humanitarily. Well, thank, you.
Speaker 3:I'm going to take you to my other room because I have a beautiful, supportive, glorious husband who is in need of lunch, and I'm going to. I'm going to get out of the dining room and go into our, my bedroom, so I can actually and if I lose you I'll call you back, but I think this should work. Enjoy your lunch, eric. Thank you. Eric, but I don't want to keep him from from.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:In that room, so I didn't even realize what time it was. So he's probably starving. Anyway, if you ever do this as a video, you'll have two rooms now. So the question was how did I weave all these things?
Speaker 2:together, like it seems. Somebody could look at you and say, oh, she has this career as a photographer, that's one piece of it. But oh my gosh, she's got this career as this humanitarian and she's got this career in the kind of nonprofit world of really raising up daughters, and it's like somebody who had three different lifetimes. But you've woven them all together and I guess I would love to just hear how you do all of that.
Speaker 3:Wow, desperation, I don't know. I mean it's kind of like my, I suppose. I mean I was going to give you a ridiculous answer. Like my, the kitchen chairs and at our dining table are all different and before my husband came, every plate was different and I don't like being in the same place a lot. I don't like eating the same thing for breakfast every day. I don't know, I mean.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I mean because of all of the ways in which they all interact. You know they're all interwoven, it's all interrelated. There isn't a way to separate them out. Each one affects the other authentically, in, in in the truth of who you are, that you are compelled to to do where, where it is that you're led and where you feel you can, you can make a difference, or that it can exactly the right thing to do. That.
Speaker 3:I hear that and what you're sharing they're all interconnected, right, it's a systemic interconnection that we have learned about in quantum physics and in every aspect. If we took it and looked at it and mapped it out, they're all integrated, they're all interrelated. It's just like with racism. You take the barrio, you take the reservation, you take the ghetto, you take those communities and then around those communities you've got insurance, you've got environmental racism, you've got schools that are education, you've got all of the, every aspect of life. It's all integrated. You cannot really separate one out from the other. So I just don't, I just go okay, what's up now? Yeah, what's hurting? Where is it? I need to learn.
Speaker 3:When Neva Welton and I did the book Global Uprising, which you know, about confronting the tyrannies of the 21st century, stories of a new generation of activists for teenagers the book is for, we didn't know a lot of these. We were part of the WTO planning committee, but that was because I had a boyfriend at the time who was part of the WTO planning committee and he was turning us on to all of this stuff. Noam Chomsky to, you know all of them. We went to them and said, look, we're doing this for teenagers. Silence about this in you know, our own world. We knew we're doing it for us Know what it is, so could you just tell it like you would to an eighth grader, because that's who we are.
Speaker 3:We're the eighth grader we don't know about what you know, what do I know about sweatshop labor, you know, etc. So, um, yeah, you know, it's all about what? I guess my growing edge, where is my growing edge? And then also, at some points there's, I know, I want to, I know, I want to contradict, saying that it's all racists. I mean, it's all, uh, um, gang members and criminals in these caravans. And and then, lucky me, my sister-in-law has lived in Mexico City for 30 years and is the head of an organization she founded for women and families in migration. So through her I knew more than I would have ever known if I didn't know her. And she said look, you know, if you want to show that it isn't criminals, come now and you know all the other things that I've been involved in.
Speaker 1:I would say Anyway, I guess I've said enough. I feel like we're just touching the surface and that I could talk to you for hours and hours. I'm so appreciating everything you're sharing and I want to hear more, and there are so many untouched threads. Part of what I'm hearing and I'd love you to speak on a little bit is I want to honor your time also is what I'm trying to say and I know that we only have so much time but from the earliest days like again listening to your documentary, reading about you, reading information about you what I'm struck with.
Speaker 1:Take, for example, your time with Fanny and going on and doing the photography and living with and you just, so easily, it seems, said yes to each of these opportunities that came your way. You just said yes and then figured it out. You spoke to it a little bit earlier, based on that foundation you had with your mother in particular, but also your father. But can I ask you just that question to speak on that a little bit more? What is it that drives you or enables you to say the yes? How does that happen? And is it as simple as just say yes and figure it out later? And is it as?
Speaker 3:simple as just say yes and figure it out later yeah, it is, it is, and actually Heather was saying that recently in terms of her writing and performing. She's opening for a really fabulous act in July and she only just in the last 10 years devoted herself to music. So here's a 40-year year old woman who keeps saying yes. So basically what she's saying is yes, but now she has to grow to meet the yes, yes, yes, and it's somehow. There's a self confidence and, believe me, I have struggled for my self-confidence. I have struggled for my self-confidence. I'm 70. I'm 75 this year. That's the reward for decades of struggling with self-confidence. Because how could one not? I'm a woman, I was a girl. Yeah, I mean, we got it from every angle.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And still are.
Speaker 3:Yes, I mean we got it from every angle and still are. So I think I've had enough successes and I've had enough support, financial, as well as family and friends and colleagues. Um, family and friends and colleagues and I was in the right place at the right time in los angeles, especially with fanny and joe cocker, whereby I got a free ride to some extent, or a free pass or an all-access pass. Because of that, yeah, because people doors open for people who, yeah, it really does make a difference.
Speaker 3:If I tell people, even at the I mean literally no matter where I go, no matter what I've done, the thing usually that stands out the most is oh, you were one of the first female rock and roll photographers.
Speaker 3:Wow, it's cool, it's cool. And I think one of the reasons that it is cool is not just because of the fame aspect or the money aspect, but is, I mean, the excitement of being involved on large stages, with big music, with music is something that all of us, it's like air, it's water, it's one of the elements that is just our bodies, our souls, our minds, everything. And having had that privilege, really, and having those friends and knowing somehow, I mean to think that the seed of my entry into everything that I've become started with music. It started with the drifters up on the roof expressing my loneliness. It started with Bob Dylan and his first album, maggie's farm, understanding a little bit about racism. It started with king b with the rolling stones and finding my sexuality just like pop up. Whoa, I'm hot. I meant to to meet Mick Jagger at 14 because I snuck backstage to meet my idol.
Speaker 3:I just said yes and fall against his chest and look up at him like, oh my God, it's you. Well, from that point on, who was going to keep me away from being backstage?
Speaker 1:Amen to that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, amen to that. Yeah, you know, it's just. I just was in some ways the right time, right right time, right place, and I just kept saying, okay, I'm, I'm going to keep on keeping on. Yeah, yeah, and you kept through the doors. I mean it was like, oh, there's that, sure, let me go on keeping on.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you kept through the doors. I mean it was like, oh, there's that, sure, let me go. There's that, yep, I'm going to jump on the plane and get there. I mean I don't know what it was that had you go to France for those five years. But, like amazing, you're a young woman and you're like, yep, I'm going to leave the country. You know, that's just that's what I want for my own daughter, who's 20 right now. That's how I want her to greet the world. You know, that's what I'm hoping to pass on to her.
Speaker 1:And what's your modeling?
Speaker 3:I'm trying, I'm trying. It sounds like it and this is one way you know, just like with my books. This is how I educated my daughters.
Speaker 2:I don't know how old your daughter is. How old is she?
Speaker 3:She's 20 now. My daughter is 20 now. Yeah Well, this is how I educated them is just to keep bringing them into the spaces where people are talking like this or where they're going to get this kind of information.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's important, very important to me.
Speaker 1:Bringing them into the conversation. I love that. That's so worth reiterating. And I also want to reiterate a thing you said a moment ago, which was grow to meet the. Yes, I think you know Kirk, producer Kirk, as we put this information out there, that's a tag that we for sure are including grow to meet the. Yes, I think that's such an important one. All right, so this beautiful life lived, and so much more to come. You've taken advantage of so much. So let's go back to when you're like before that 14 year old, let's say 12, 13. That girl, that girl, if she were talking to you right now, what would, what would she have to say? What would she think about this and where you are and who you are? What would be her words to you? Do you think? Oh, wow.
Speaker 3:The 12-year-old would have said oh yeah, makes sense. The 13-year-old would have the 13-year-old would have Might not have ever believed it might not have ever believed it.
Speaker 3:The 12-year-old oh yeah, you know the 10-year-old. The 11-year-old just free and beautiful and just beginning to sense that she wasn't blonde, straight-haired and thin. And a 13-year-old would have been unable to throw up or be bulimic or anorexic, just continue to eat until she was so sick to her stomach. She would cry, then cry until she was done and be so lost, absolutely lost. The 13-year-old I don't know if she would have ever believed that I could be who I am today.
Speaker 1:And yet she's the one who then took the next step and got you here. She did, she found it Well, she became the 14-year-old and the 15 year old, and so on so you see, as I told you, I know what it feels like yeah to feel um suicidal without being suicidal I understand that I do.
Speaker 3:And that the pain is so profound and so shameful that the shame is so shameful, yeah, so horrible you don't want to have youriter overeater. And I got more and more angry. A lot of that also was because my mom was blonde, straight-haired, thin and beautiful and when and compared to her at 13 not at 12, but at 13 I was not any of those things and therefore I couldn't pass. I couldn't pass, yeah, and that was really important to me, and it was also she, also my mom, bless her heart and all the love that she and all the support she's given me. She knew it, you could see it.
Speaker 3:It wasn't as though it could be hidden at home and she was an earth mother, making me feel, you know, having some other way to deal with it. It was. It was all too obvious in Hollywood, in Los Angeles, that I didn't have what she had. So that was awful, that was painful and it lasted. That went on all our lives together. She was always apologetic about it. She was always apologetic about it. Even her psychiatrist told her. You know your daughter's going to be angry with you through no fault of your own. And we had a really tough relationship because I was angry about that, that I couldn't be her. I couldn't go through life that easily. But that's what made me who I am, is that I couldn't go through life that easily. But that's what made me who I am, is that I couldn't go through life that easily. Yeah, I had to find another way to go through life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and your story is so inspirational. When things just come easy, it's like, oh, that's really kind of cool. But even hearing more of the struggle you had before you got to, kind of the stuff that we knew about, you know from reading on your website and the books and that sort of thing, I don't know it's even more inspirational to me. So I think there is. I'm excited to share your story with my daughter and with other young women, I know, because I think, especially with the events of the world, it needs to be heard. But I guess I want to ask you then, because I think Donna and I are both probably very inspired by you and we're looking at you as this 75-year-old woman who's like, oh my God, yeah, I want to accomplish that, I want to meet the. Yes, I have to figure out how to meet that. Yes, who, I guess? Who do you get inspired by?
Speaker 3:Oh, wow, so many people. It can be so many different kinds of people in terms of public, people who I mean? Geez, oh my gosh. You know I want to bridge 13, 14, 15, 16. I want to go back to there because people that inspired me Back then. None of these people were famous, none of them had cut record deals.
Speaker 3:We were all living in LA and at 14, after I met, after I found a friend who, if it would have been the punk era, we both would have been punks together, but we were both the freaks. The freaks were after the, the freaks were before the hippies, Flower children, then freaks, then hippies, then peace freaks. I mean, it goes, it's. There's a whole, like you know, a whole life of it. Anyway, trina Lopresti was her name and she had long black hair like this and she was very thin and she was very gaunt and she and I would eat lunch together in. It was in high school, I guess the first year of high school we met and it must have been earlier than that. It must have been middle school, because I was 14 when we went to the Tammy show and we snuck backstage, so it was middle school, but she was my hope, if there was such a thing, because the two of us together I wasn't alone anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And we both loved the Rolling Stones. We both loved the counterculture that was just starting to burgeon. We both wanted out of our families. We both were bad girls together. It led me to Hollywood where I would hitchhike your daughter might find a better way to do this, but I would. Back then it was pretty safe to hitchhike from the San Fernando Valley into Hollywood passes, to the Hollywood Bowl, to meeting a boyfriend at 16 who lived in a big commune where Jackson Browne lived, and I know you're familiar with Jackson Browne's music.
Speaker 3:Jackson was not a famous person at the time, he was only 17 and a half, and I had quite an event with my first love, which I don't need to go into. But that night I spent on the end of Jackson's bed as he played all night long practicing his music through Jackson and through my boyfriend at the time and another boyfriend. I just kept navigating through a world of beautiful people playing music, but I didn't have anything that was mine and it wasn't a point where I'd met Fanny or thought that I could. I could play the music or sing or do something myself which your daughter can do now you know much more easily than I met who inspired me to meeting June Millington and then living with Fanny, and then my world just was opened to everything, because I met a group of girls who were each one devoted, devoted and committed and disciplined. Yeah, and that was when my whole world changed and I thought, well, if Jackson can do it because now he's getting his record deal, and if I mean because he was just a guy I knew, and if Fanny can do it, I can do it. And that was a very pivotal, pivotal moment for me. There, that moment was was one of the most pivotal moments for me.
Speaker 3:And then, as an adult, one of the most pivotal moments for me that changed my life was back when I was in my forties and I looked. I was going through a horrible divorce um, not in the sense that we didn't love each other anymore, but just that we didn't love each other and want to be together and the betrayal of a man. And I finally realized that nobody was going to love me till the day I died but me, couldn't count on anyone to be there for me until the day I die except for me. And if that was true, that I'm the only one that can be there for me till the day I die, I have to be my own beloved, because if I'm not my own beloved, what am I doing? And then that was a pivotal moment that also changed my life. So the change when I realized if they can do it, I can do it. Yeah, so those are two moments that were like my come to jesus moments, you know, and changed my life. Thank, you.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, gorgeous. Every, every word of that, thank you. That's beautiful. That was worth everything right there, just profound, all right. So I know that we're up against the hour and I know that you have another commitment and we don't want to, we don't want to overstay our welcome, are you okay? If we do our, we jump into what we call our rapid fire. They're not really that rapid fire, but just a little series of questions that are fun and we just come whatever comes first to your and we'll just go through those, is that?
Speaker 3:all right with you. I'm I'm so honored that that you're doing this with me and I just appreciate it so much. I appreciate being invited, I just love it. So thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you. I mean, the honor is ours and we're just so, so grateful that you've taken this time, and I've loved every moment of this, truly truly. I'm going to weep. This is just so gorgeous to connect with you and hear all that you have to share. I'm taking it all in straight to my heart. Thank you so much. All right, sis, I'm emotional. You go ahead, start the questions. Start the questions.
Speaker 3:Good, I love that. Yeah, get emotional.
Speaker 2:Kind of like you know, when the politician walks onto the stage and they have their walk-in song, what is your walk-in song?
Speaker 3:Oh boy, jeez. Oh my God song. Oh boy, um geez. Oh my walk-in song, oh my god. The one that comes to my mind is probably one that I would never have come to my mind. These boots were made for walking and that's just what they'll do but I wouldn't one of these days. These boots are gonna fall over your, the shitty thing you're doing, all right, what book changed? You uh catcher in the rye.
Speaker 1:Good one.
Speaker 2:What movie lives rent free in your brain?
Speaker 3:Well of the graduate, but I'd have to say right now, the Perfect Days, Perfect Days.
Speaker 2:Oh excellent.
Speaker 3:That's a recent one, but I'd say the graduate graduate, oh cool, um.
Speaker 1:What did you love doing as a kid that you love doing to this day? Playing piano.
Speaker 2:Oh, you're a pianist as well that's a big word for what I do if you can make a tune on the piano, you are a pianist in my eyes, so I have a player piano, so it just does it for me. But what in your world is lighting you up right now?
Speaker 3:um, well geez, my grandson, probably the most, and my daughters and my husband. But I have a daughter who's now pregnant again and I know how I was singing love songs on my way for the last baby after he was born. But I have an extraordinarily beautiful grandson with hair down to the middle of his back and he is just just mwah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, lots of light, that's gorgeous, all right. Well, maybe we can substitute the word optimism rather than hope here. What color is optimism?
Speaker 3:Ooh, it'd be rainbow.
Speaker 1:Ah, love it.
Speaker 2:And so we usually start with like you know hope through, you know how do you gain hope. So your hope is through, so your optimism is through what People like you. Oh, thank you.
Speaker 1:I'm taking that deep in my heart right now. I promise you, oh, thank you. I'm taking that deep in my heart right now. I promise you, yeah, okay, the meaning of life is.
Speaker 3:The meaning of life, death.
Speaker 1:Wow, yeah, wow, we could talk an hour on that one. Wow, go ahead. No, no, bring it on home sis.
Speaker 2:Our last question. And we say hope, Hope is what? And if you want to substitute optimism, we can do that. So hope is.
Speaker 3:Hope is a faith that something we're longing for can happen. Yeah, yeah. It's more than a faith. It's a prayer. Hope is a prayer that something that we're longing for will happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like that and that is. I am very hopeful right now as I long for some certain things to happen coming up here and I will continue hope and I love that you have been willing to share this time with us and I'm probably going to do a deeper dive into some of your work and I want to get up to Bainbridge Island again. I will find you on the island somewhere, the small island.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I bet you you're running across our auntie up there all the time, actually, because it is a small. It's a small community up there and you would love her. She's a lovely person.
Speaker 3:It's your auntie.
Speaker 1:Her name is Sue, she has a little well, she had a shop in Pike market for years and years and years where she hand painted children's clothing and it was just lovely. And now she's doing her artwork. She calls it. My Second Life is Now and she and her husband basically like built their little, like rebuilt their home themselves their own two little hands. She makes textures. She's anyway, she's just a lovely, lovely woman of of your era also, and just one of the best people I know, just a good, good person in the world. She and her husband alike are just beautiful.
Speaker 3:I look forward to you coming to Bainbridge and and having a meal with us.
Speaker 2:Oh, my goodness, yes.
Speaker 1:Exceptionally grand. Linda, thank you so much. We look forward to talking with your daughter. Perhaps we'll have more conversations. There's so much richness to talk about here and your openness. We're so grateful for that. Thank you for being with us and our soul histories.
Speaker 3:Thank you and do please know. What I've done with my life is not who I am. Yes, I hear that who I am is you, we. You know we are being what we have to be in order to get through this period of time.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:So all of us are doing good work. We're doing the work we do yes, so much.
Speaker 1:Beautiful you, Linda, take good care. We send you off with so much love and light and look forward to future conversations.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Take care-bye.
Speaker 2:Thanks for joining us today on Soul Sisteries.
Speaker 1:And thanks for sharing stories with us. We'd love to hear your stories as well and keep the conversation going, absolutely keeping the hope going. So we're really hopeful that you'll connect with our guests as well, who have great stories to share. Go ahead and follow them in various social media platforms or live venues, wherever it is that they're performing and sharing what they do.
Speaker 2:We would love to have you follow us on all of our social media platforms, subscribe and rate, as that will help us get our message of hope out to others. Thanks for listening to Soul Sisteries.
