DID YOU KNOW? The chemicals used to produce commercial cocaine are kerosene, ammonia, lime, sodium carbonate, sulfuric acid, potassium permanganate, ethyl ether, and hydrochloric acid.

Quotation above excerpted from Tony Halmos’s limited-run League of Legendary Ladies trading card series for Sheroes, which have been a regular IRL presence at our monthly art party series at venues like NACO Gallery (RIP) and The Beaver.

Mama Backbone was the wail you heard in the First Lady of the Canyon’s “Dreamland”. Alas, the Black Panther teen from the Southside Chi-town multi-tracked too — the only back-up that ever came close was Whitney. (Her fondest memory of Houston? “Getting high together.”)

But Mama was the Garage House Vocal Mix. She’d turn you up along the swift key change and snare roll. In the time since Sheroes #2: Chaka Khan, she has swiftly played her comeback card with vegan weight loss & the threat of a whole new wardrobe.

Yet what’s wrong with outrageousness and the spectre of hot mess taste? Surely, Mama can get a comeback and overdue recognition without any compromise.

“Sure, songs are like tattoos; but you victims of typewriters need to drive deeper: into the reckless road that Joni paved through the next fifteen years. Follow the white lines on the freeway, unfettered and alive, under the hexagrams of heaven and across the hissing summer lawns awash in shadows and light.”

Quotation above excerpted from Tony Halmos’s limited-run League of Legendary Ladies trading card series for Sheroes, which have been a regular IRL presence at our monthly art party series at venues like NACO Gallery (RIP) and The Beaver.

Sheroes #1: Joni Mitchell began with “Dreamland”. It was July 2011, and hot enough for a Dorothy L’Amour sarong. The numerical existed even then, as did the “naming”. Joni wasn’t Joni, but the First Lady of the Canyon. She was the prairie Hejira in blackface named “Art Nouveau” whose “token white” Yoda status was only realized in later years.