Lucy melts easily into a crowd just outside the Rialto Theatre on the corner of 42nd street. She holds onto her small rose-colored hat her fingers snagging in the chaplets ribbons as the cold breeze whips through the milling group. She is alone surrounded by laughing happy people talking in anticipation of the first showing of a film in Technicolor.  It was “The Toll of the Sea”.  The phenomena of the color feature may have been lost on some of the movie goers but Lucy found herself both fascinated and wary. She was so very tired. She could hear a man describing the use of special projectors for the color films and the complexities of the work. And how this was the first time a commercial projector could be used to show a film.

The crowd surges forward into the dimly lit theatre foyer. How she came to be here is still quite a mystery but the woman with whom she was renting a room from had insisted she go. She wearily trudges forward all the while her mind somewhere else. She had been in New York for a little over six months. And her eyes still carried the grey hollowed look of someone who has known suffering and despair. In April she had heard that Lenin had appointed Joseph Stalin as General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party. The news had not surprised her truly and it almost felt foreign. She felt so isolated in her memories and fear. No one. Not one person knew her. She does not even know herself.

Soon after that announcement, in May Lenin suffered his first stroke. The hopes that had swelled in their hearts as her country strode toward progress were beaten and scarred. The blessed freedoms promised all an illusion. Her family in ruins, herself an exile.  And how she ever made it out of Moscow alive nips at her heels and dogs her sleep. Her terrible relentless wakefulness makes shadows on the walls and in her eyes. 

Next Chapter: Rose, Monterey Pop, 1967