Photo: Wenn
Patti Smith had a tearful reunion with a bag of stolen goods during a poetry reading as one woman dropped a bag of clothes and equipment from 1979 on the stage.
According to Consequence of Sound, Smith was reading from her latest memoir, M Train, at Dominican University in Illinois when she was approached by Doreen Bender.
A messageboard post detail the event, saying: "Last night, however, a woman stood up and told Patti that she had a bag of clothes that belonged to her 40 years ago and would like to return it. Smith (and everybody) looked totally confused, but asked the person to come up to the stage and hand her the bag. Patti looked inside and just froze."
The post continues: "Turns out that 40 years ago the band's truck was stolen in Chicago, all their equipment/clothes/personal things, basically everything they owned. These clothes among them. So Patti pulls out these items of clothing and talks about them (the shirt she wore on the Rolling Stone cover, the Keith Richards T-Shirt you've seen her wear in a hundred photos) and then gets to the bottom of the bag. Here was a bandana that her beloved late brother had worn and then given to her, and she starts to weep. Before long, half the audience was crying with her."
Listen to Patti Smith's 'Gloria' in celebration below
Speaking to The Chicago Tribune, a friend of Bender had discovered the items "decades ago through a male friend of her Chicago roommate,” who had once been a U-Haul employee. It’s unclear exactly how the belongings ended up where they did, but Bender added, “I just thought, Oh my god, these are her clothes and they still have her sweat on them."
In other Patti news, there have been reports that suggest that Smith's Just Kids memoir is to be made into a TV series by Penny Dreadful's John Logan.
