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RONALD SUKENICK (1987):
Wendy Serkin was a teen-ager from Far Rockaway at the time with granny glasses, Grecian sandals wound up the calf, and long hair parted in the middle down to her waist. She'll tell you she started going to the Village when she was thirteen. That's a long ride on the subway. Later in high school she had a Mercedes. "My father bought it for me. I was a Jewish American Princess." With red leather seats.

She had a knack for meeting interesting people. She would meet them in the street, or in Washington Square. She hung out in the coffee houses, the Fat Black Pussycat, and the folk music places, the Folklore Center and Blind Lemon Jefferson's, in musicians' pads and rich apartments in the West Village. She met her first boyfriend at a weekend hootenanny in Washington Square, painter Larry Rivers 's son, when she was still in junior high school. He would take her to Slug's. A girlfriend from Far Rockaway High got to know Bob Dylan.

"Bob Dylan loved her ass, and one day, it was snowing and I'll never forget this, the two of them were standing on MacDougal Street, and I was like just gettin' into the city and oh there they were, and I went up to him and Berta and I said, 'Introduce me to your famous friend' -- I think his first record had just come out. And he looked at me and he said, "This is Berta.'"

She talked Andy Warhol into inviting her to a Park Avenue party for the Rolling Stones at Faye Dunaway and fashion photographer Jerry Schatzberg's place. There she danced with Mick Jagger and the girlfriend she went with "actually scored Brian Jones and had a long affair with him."

When Ed Sanders sat down next to her in the audience at a Fugs performance, she told him she could sing better than their female singer and ended up singing with the Fugs for a summer.

"As soon as I walked onto the stage the second time, Ed Sanders like picked me up and, I don't know how the hell he did it, threw me over, and he had my legs like upside down in the air. And then they would all start going into this, like, gobble, gobble, gobble" -- she bursts into laughter, shaking her very black hair, now frosted here and there with gray. "The turkey gobble dance. Which, you know, to me was like really nice. I didn't understand at the time what that meant. So we were all just having fun."

Ronald Sukenick, Down and In, Collier Books, 1987, New York, NY, pp. 170-171.