Recalling Jackie Curtis’s Femme Fatale play at La MaMa, Jayne County said Patti Smith “played a mafia dyke with a mustache and a really ridiculous Italian accent, like ‘Heeeeeey, wassa matta, you fuck-a-wid me, I blow-a ya fuckin’ brains out!’ She had a big phallus hanging between her legs and she was always picking it up and waving it at people.” The ambiguously gendered Smith also shot-gunned lines like “He could take her or leave her. And he took her and then he left her.” At the end of Femme Fatale, the cast crucified Curtis’s character by stapling her to a giant IBM computer punch-card as one character said, “Christ, you’re hung!” While Curtis put on an unforgettable act, it was Smith who struck audience member Lenny Kaye as one of the show’s breakout performers. “It was pretty sweet,” the future Patti Smith Group guitarist recalled. “I immediately thought she was one of the most engaging persons I’d ever seen, and I didn’t even get to meet her that time. I just remember seeing her from afar. She was with Robert Mapplethorpe, and was a gloriously charismatic person with a lot of style.”

From Chapter 21 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore