ZEPPELIN GIRL
Sweet, sweet Adele—John Lennon glasses, unwashed hair, half-told stories of heroin and quiet despair. She took me to my first concert—Led Zeppelin at Knebworth Park, August 11, 1979. We sat on the grass, leaned into each other as we listened to bands with obscure names. When the New Barbarians came on stage, I jumped up and down. I was a Stones girl. Not Adele. She was all Zeppelin.
When her Jimmy appeared on stage, she screamed, on tiptoes, arms raised, waved so Jimmy could see her. A strange sound—haaaaaaaaaa—came out, strained, then crawled back inside her throat. The sky was dark. We would be full of that night for a long time.
I clutched my Zeppelin scarf as we staggered to the exit, drowned in the crowd and the smell of beer and sweat and weed. It was almost dawn when the train pulled into Victoria Station.
We were Italian kids who didn’t want Mediterranean beaches, piazzas, pizza, gelato. We wanted pubs, beer, fish and chips, rock music, Selling England by the Pound. My parents would have paid for the bed and breakfast where I had stayed a year earlier, when I was nineteen and had loved Corn Flakes, Madam Tussaud’s, and a Spanish boy from the school for foreigners on Piccadilly where I received a certificate in “Intermediate English.” I had shown my mother my tourist snapshots arranged on the sticky pages of a red leather album she had given me as a welcome home present.
But that summer of Zeppelin, I didn’t send postcards, buy souvenirs, pose in front of Buckingham Palace, or take day trips to Oxford and Cambridge. I was wild for concerts and kids I met on the street. We didn’t know where we’d sleep most nights, but we had each other. Yet I was not like Adele: she had survived many lives, and I didn’t know how to inhale.
After we returned home—Rome for her, Sicily for me—I slid my pictures into a flimsy blue album and hid it from my parents.
I stopped combing my hair. When my mother asked me to greet visitors in the rococo salotto, I wore my father’s old torn shirt and a Sex Pistols pin. In my room, I played the tapes of the music Adele and I had loved together.
For a few months, we wrote to each other, pulled by the summer’s momentum—then, I forgot her.
Years later, I shopped in Rome’s fashionable center for new eyeglasses. I had tucked away my Led Zeppelin scarf, discarded the flea market clothes. Now I wore a neatly lined bright blue flowered skirt with a sash and matching button-top with puffy sleeves. To get a good price on the outfit, my mother had told the saleswoman, “We are good customers, you know.” I had not rolled my eyes as I used to. Now I knew where I would sleep at night. Soon I’d get married in a Cinderella dress with glitter in my hair.
I was spinning a fancy stand with designer frames in the optometrist’s glitzy store when I heard Adele’s voice—alert, cheerful, less lost, still that familiar strain. I tried on a frame and peered into the display mirror. Behind me, I could see that she had not changed much, though her dirty blond hair was combed and fell smoothly down her shoulders. Her plain shirt and skirt looked clean and neat. A price tag fluttered before my eyes: I couldn’t see her face. I tried to find her in my peripheral vision—but it was empty.
For a while, I stared into the mirror. My sweaty palms swiped the bright blue skirt.
I sneaked out of the store without new glasses. Never waved, never said, “Hey, remember me?”
Decades later, when my children were older than we had been that summer in England, I watched a rare footage of Zeppelin fans at Knebworth Park on YouTube. For a moment, I thought I found us in the crowd, right behind a waving Union Jack. I remembered her voice, the way it came out muffled, and the strange shame I had felt the last time I had seen her in the optometrist’s display mirror.
Hey lady, I sang sotto voce at the grainy, faded image, do you remember me?
Edvige Giunta is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American
Women Authors and co editor of six anthologies, including Talking to the Girls: Intimate
and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, recipient of the 2023 Susan
Koppelman Award for Best Anthology in Feminist Studies in American and Popular
Culture, to be published in Italian by Iacobelli. She is Professor of English at New Jersey
City University.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 