Man, I thought, that girl must have made her mom sick! With a glass of milk! And made her bleed! She had to be real trouble, that girl, because how else do you get your photo on the front page of the newspaper?

On the TV news that night, she was crossed out just the same, this time sitting on a couch in a beaded necklace. Walter Cronkite said her name was Samantha and her mother was a photographer, Lillian Preston. The pictures in the paper and on TV were from eight photographs that he called “The Samantha Series.” They had been on display in a photography show until the gallery got shut down because Samantha was mostly naked in the pictures, not to mention that the photo from the morning paper, which was actually called Mommy is sick, had to do with abortion. I didn’t know what abortion was, except that it was against the law and some kind of a sin, but that was enough. I grabbed the Daily News from the trash bin and stashed it under my bed, and that was how Samantha Preston became a dark goddess to me. Whenever the world went gray, I would pull out Mommy is sick and stare at a girl who was ten times worse trouble than I ever was, until I’d start to feel better.

I was twenty before I saw the photo again. I had been in the city a few years, working lousy jobs and going to shows, and my friend Brian and I decided to start a band. As I was looking through one of his crazy scrapbooks, there it was: same picture, same headline. The song came to me right away, like I’d been writing it in my head all that time. When we put out “Mommy Is Sick” as a single, we used a repro of the newspaper clipping for the record sleeve because there was no one to tell us not to. Then we got signed and they told us we had to ask permission for that kind of thing, but it had been ten years and no one we asked even knew who Lillian Preston was, so for the album cover we made our own version: Brian in bed with ketchup between his legs and me in my underwear holding out the milk glass, black grease paint over my eyes and black electrical tape over my B-cups. By the time we were asked to play Saturday Night Live, I was performing in that getup only for special occasions, but national live TV is as special as it comes, which is why America saw just half of “Mommy Is Sick” before I ripped off my dress and the network cut to a commercial.

A few days later the phone rang. I picked up and a voice asked, “Are you Frances Pell?”

“Who’s this?” I said.

“This is Samantha,” said the voice on the phone.

“Samantha who?”