Dear Patty

 Going on intuition that you might find this interesting

I am of your generation (a few years younger) and remember you well from the days when all my friends were raving Beatles fans. George was my favourite Beatle and Ioved "My Sweet Lord" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Later "Layla" was my favorite song, one that sent me into an ecstatic trance whenever I heard it.

I grew up in Montreal, Canada and lived near Leonard Cohen in his funky downtown neighborhood in the 1970s to mid nineties. I worked as a freelance journalist and also taught creative writing while writing poetry and fiction.

In 1992 my life changed when I traveled to the Caribbean and *almost* met Mick Jagger on his island in the Grenadines.  Afterwards I began hearing from him through the internet and also  some songs in the Voodoo Lounge album that came out in 1994. I can say with relative certainty that "Love is Strong" was inspired by my visit to the "seedy bar" he partly owned on Mustique where I attracted more attention than I had bargained on. I was there to deliver a message but two years later I appeared as a costumed, animated "Miss Diamond" on the CD-Rom that accompanied the Voodoo Lounge CD.

This was strange and shocking to me at the time but also of course exciting. I thought I was on the verge of something- I couldn't be sure what - but when I spoke to friends or humorously tried to describe my experience of "stalking" Mick and actually finding him on his island, I was seen as a fantasist or worse- and actually ended up getting blacklisted in the world of journalism- I didn't mind at the time as it was becoming increasingly difficult to survive as a freelancer due to censorship and the stentorian new contracts. And we all know what became of journalism after the mid-90s.

As a single woman living by my wits I was somewhat buoyed by my new-found connection to Mick which brought tidal feelings of friendship and mutual attraction even though all my attempts to connect with him later failed. It seemed to be a spiritual or psychic relationship, creatively intense but worlds apart. That's an up-and-down story in itself, but by 2003 I had started a new life in Greece and was finally in a stable relationship at age 52 with a Greek man my own age.

I also had begun remembering, researching and writing about my childhood in Montreal where I grew up inside a family that were victims of a secretive  program known as MKULTRA.

Meanwhile that same year (2003) Mick was publicly involved with L'Wren Scott whom I saw as a good match for him. Oddly when my Greek boyfriend asked me if I had ever been deeply involved with anyone before, I reassured him by saying "just Mick Jagger." 

In my 50s I was finally ready to abandon the rock star who admittedly had been a mild fixation since I first saw him on Ed Sullivan in 1964 at age 13, and (like many other girls of my generation) never really got over him. At 19 I had dreamed that I was meant to marry him and I would go to films like Performance or Ned Kelly in an attempt to get a close look and find out who he was. In my twenties I would turn down suitors by saying "You're really nice but you're not Mick Jagger,"  a quirky response that meant I was still looking for Mr Right.

In 1977, after Mick divorced Bianca but was not yet living with Jerry, two friends of mine (one of whom was making a film called Times Square for which he was in negotiations with Robert Stigwood) took me to New York for my 26th birthday.  I have "missing time" for that strange weekend which they told me would change my life - and a flashback to being on a bed with a very stoned, fully-clad Jagger who made me laugh so hard I couldn't breathe and rolled off the bed and onto the floor. I instantly forgot the whole encounter, and most of that weekend, but remember his long hair and head to toe leather exactly matched photos of him in the late 70s when I was not a fan or even paying attention to the Stones in their decadent phase.

That's the thing: I was not a Stones fan and hadn't thought about Mick in years until 1987 when he started blasting into my dreams, very talkative and animated, sometimes together with the recently deceased Tibetan guru Chogyam Trungpa who laughed as he joined us in cosmic matrimony and encouraged me to go look for Jagger, which I eventually did in 1992 - in real life.

This same farfetched "marriage" had also surfaced  in 1979 on the Greek island of Hydra when a psychically gufted German woman suddenly arrived and kidnapped me from Leonard Cohen's house then spent a week initiating me into the mysteries of her Indian guru (Baba Ji of Hadakhan, who appears on the cover of the Sergeant Pepper album) and ended her teaching by telling me I was destined to wed Shiva in Mick Jagger form.

Discombobulating and also laughable, I had a history, involving Mick, that needless to say I couldn't talk about. And for the most part I've been careful not to break that unwritten rule as it has never brought me anything but ridicule on the rare occasions when I've raised the subject with friends.

However a few years ago as i entered my sixties everything changed again when I remembered Mick coming to my house in 1965 and proposing marriage to me.

Or did he?

It seems he did, when I was 14, in my first year of high school. My mother had arranged the visit and he showed up in a corduroy jean jacket  his hair neatly trimmed ahead of the Stones' second North American tour which started in Montreal.

He was polite, soft spoken, confident. He said "I've come to ask for your hand in marriage."

Not believing this could be happening, I laughed.
I turned him down. He left our house and never came back. My mother was devastated and from what I can tell, they sent me to the hospital downtown where the same psychiatrists who had brainwashed Nazi defector Rudolf Hess at his 1945 Nuremberg trial, wiped my memory.

At school the following Monday I listened to my classmate describe the Rolling Stones show on Friday night but I had no memory of Mick Jagger coming to my house before the concert.

My mother's health slid into rapid decline as she struggled with depression. My father, a retired high school music teacher, was already a casualty of the brainwashing experiments being carried out at the downtown hospital connected to McGill University. Our family were victims of a classified program funded by the CIA and Canadian government.

Their only daughter, who was secretly engaged to Mick Jagger, was now a zombie albeit a high performing one with a 158 IQ and a history of straight A's  despite not remembering I had once been engaged to Mick Jagger. The next year they sent me to another high school in a sedate suburb where I could not get into trouble or have any social life.

My thick Psychiatry file surfaced in 2007 but has since disappeared. To my conscious knowledge i have no psychiatric history - but apparently parts of my memory remain missing, along with my file and the files of many children who were in the secret experiments. I believe the missing contents would shed some light on my early life when Mick was a young teenager and I was a little girl chosen for the program.



It's not surprising that I didn't recognize him given that he looked very different from the boy I first met in 1956 and 1959.


I see you come from an Air Force background like Andrew Loog Oldham, whom I *almost* met in 2020 when he gave a 13-week course called "ROCK DREAMS" in Kamloops, British Columbia where I used to be writer in residence...

So some of this background may be familiar to you. Much of it is new to me, the result of a lot of research and reflection over the last twenty years.

Mick has tried to contact me and for a while we were communicating but I think he sees me as a volatile creature who has hurt him in the past.  Several times he has mentioned my "rudeness"  -- I think this is mainly due to the strange circumstances in which I once knew him. The problem being, he remembers me whereas until recently I had no clue that I had ever laid eyes on him before April 15, 1992 when I landed on Mustique and he was waiting near the beach.

All through my life, I have been mystified by these near-encounters and missed cues. Only in retrospect, and only recently, have I been able to make some sense of this history, as much of it was erased soon after it happened. Some of it only surfaces as flashbacks or recovered memories-- for example, his 1965 visit to my parents' bungalow in a Montreal suburb surfaced in 2012. For several years I dismissed it as totally implausible until 2019 when I heard a similar story from a woman I met online - she had been courted in 1980 at age 13 by another rock star, the lead singer from Black Sabbath, in much the same way - he turned up at her door one day and said "I've come to ask your hand in marriage." This reminded me of my dream, and made me decide to do some research. That's when I found a 1965 photo of Mick leaving Montreal wearing the same corduroy jacket and neat haircut I remembered - 

Another recovered memory came to me last year in which I woke up in London on a hot day in June 1963 - age 12. I was in someone's filthy flat with nowhere to bathe or do laundry and it was 25C. I was wearing a track suit so someone (probably Andrew Oldham) took me shopping and bought me a baby doll outfit - I think this must have been at Mary Quant's which was walking distance from Edith Grove. I ended up bringing this dress with me back to Canada and wearing it as pajamas. Then Mick showed up and we walked all the way to LSE to attend the last class of the semester. This was so vivid, and I was able to pinpoint the date by finding the two hottest days in London that June were the 7th and 8th - coinciding with the launch of the Stones' first single "Come On" which Andrew produced. In early June my elementary school used to bus us to track and field events at distant locations, therefore it appears I was taken from the field and flown to London, probably courtesy of the Air Force. My dad had been an RCAF intelligence officer and troop entertainer in WW2.

I can only guess what happened as all this came back to me only in 2021 - but probably Mick realized I was a lot younger than advertised and I was sent home with no memory of where I had been. However I remember being depressed that summer and telling my mother I felt as if my heart was made of stone. "Heart of Stone" came out a year later in summer of 1964 but I never heard of the Rolling Stones until I saw them on Ed Sullivan in October.

I remember telling my girlfriends the next day at school that I had the strangest feeling i recognized the singer from somewhere but I just couldn't place him.

I now believe our mothers knew each other and planned our meeting six months later, two weeks after my 14th birthday. I think my mother assumed I remembered young Mike from our several previous encounters, and that this arrangement was cooked up through her Jesuit connections and involved her pure Norman bloodline. My mother had been a great beauty in her youth, and in one photo she looked like a cross between Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, which probably helped.

I was never told anything of this, which was why I went onto shock when Mick Jagger showed up at my door proposing marriage.

****

Needless to say (?) I didn't attend the Stones concert that night at the arena. The set list was all about optimism and the excitement of young love: Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Everybody Needs Someone to Love.

As the Stones continued their tour, with three more shows in Canada then south to NYC and another appearance on Ed Sullivan which I remember watching and discussing the next day with the other girls at school. One of them said "Mick Jagger is OBSCENE". We were new to the blues and "Little Red Rooster" was a bit beyond our teenybopper world.

Two months later I turned on the kitchen radio and heard the opening riff to "Satisfaction" for the first time.  It's funny how that moment remained fixed in my mind all these years -- my hand on the dial, my ear to the radio, thinking where did all this anger come from?

A year later I listened to all the songs on AFTERMATH, devouring them one by one as if they belonged to me, in the basement rec room where Mick had stood with his back to the metal door. Asking me to marry him. But I had totally forgotten that traumatic scene which I guess my mother had planned to be my Cinderella debut, my fairy tale come true. Instead it was a major downturn and must have affected my whole family. It certainly altered the course of my life.

From then on they started grooming me for career in the UN - which never materialized. I gravitated to journalism and radical politics, remained a spinster, joined the women's movement and ended up in Leonard Cohen's charmed kitchen in November 1977.

The Stones never looked back. I can't say for sure that I inspired any songs but I think some of their darkness might be mine. It's just possible that I broke Mick's heart and "forgot" because I was under Monarch mind control, designed in England and exported along with the British invasion.

I don't like to think about it, but I also see my mother in "Have you Seen Your Mother, Baby (Standing in the.Shadows)", "19th Nervous Breakdown" and the 1967 video "Child of the Moon" (with me as a little girl playing at the crossroads). I see details of my Canadian summers in the obscure "Summer Romance" video. I may be the dead girl whose funeral procession passes in "Paint It Black" ...

There's an undeniable string of references that i can link to the aftermath of that proposal in our basement in 1965. There's a parallel narrative that the songs appear to illustrate, and it's mostly tragic.

"I Am Waiting" for the next installment of this Bitter Sweet Symphony- the Stones are recording a new album and I just felt inspired today to try to tell you a story I've been working on for a while.

I'm not looking for advice, or anything- just an imaginary listener which I imagine is what George and Eric found in you. Maybe that's why I able to get through this whole thing in one sitting- your imaginary presence caused it to come together today for the first time. That's quite a gift you have! Or maybe we have something in common.

I can't think of anything more (or less) important at this stage of my life than telling my story. Even if nobody but me needs to hear it.