Letters to the Editor
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An Old Friend's Mom Adores Him
My friend's mother is about 75 years old. She used to work as a secretary in the recording industry in the 1970s and 1980s. She was an old-fashioned Gal Friday who did everything from booking châteaux for rocker vacations to making coffee and picking up the dry cleaning. She occasionally drove rock stars to and from the airport or delivered record-company things to them when they were in town, a chore she did not relish. Except for one rock star --- Keith Richards. She absolutely loved him, said he was one of the nicest people she'd ever met. You should have heard her rave about him, you would think he was the quintessential Boy Next Door. Unfailingly polite, gracious, thoughtful, intelligent, a good conversationalist.
True, she was used to moronically arrogant 1970s leotard-and-lion's-mane rockers who thought throwing a micropone up in the air and catching it made them far-fucking-out, man. The kind of dopes who made endless lists of backstage demands and wound up in bankruptcy court by 1992. Still, she swore Keith Richards was one of the nicest, funniest, finest "young men" she'd ever met on the job or off. She sometimes sighed and said to her daughter "Why can't you find someone as nice as Keith Richards, only without the heroin?"
That has to say something about him.