Seventeen Or Thereabouts

She learned the truth at seventeen that love was meant for bloody beauty queens—high school lasses with clear-skinned smiles, who married young and then retired—whilst those like her with ravaged faces, lacking in the social graces, desperately remained at home, inventing lovers on the blower. ‘Twasn’t all it seemed “At Seventeen,” when dreams were all they gave for free to ugly duckling lasses like she. Alas, today marks the honourary deathday (October 4, 1970) of that quintessential teen ode's author—the pock-marked Portuguese songbird, Janis Ian Joplin. The future Mrs. Bobby McGee and her band of hirsute, hippy dope blowers—the Mothers of Intervention™—would enjoy some success stirring the passions of the mud-caked fornicators at the Woodstock Aquarian Exposition®, but ‘twas her melancholy, autobiographical radio tale for which she is best remembered. Happy Anni-hearse-ary™ to Citizen Seventeenager Janis Ian Joplin. Stood up, sadly—dateless for all eternity—at that festooned bobby sock hop in the sky.