Girl On Fire
Edie Sedgwick, the fashion icon with her ermine colored hair was a casualty of the silver sixties excess. She is not someone I know. I first read about her in Teen Vogue magazine and her image is what essentially drew me in. She was an underground film star and the muse to Andy Warhol. I was curious to learn more about her, so I read her biography. She was so strikingly beautiful and charismatic. Edie was the doomed debutante, the true heroine of Bob Dylan’s masterpiece Blonde on Blonde. She was queen of the scene in 1965; part of a phantasmagoric night world of lost runaways, freaks, and hipster kids. Edie shimmered and shone, as the brightest star in Manhattan. I feel a kinship with Edie. We are both artists, and shared a love for opaque colored tights and long earrings. We also rode horses when we were young and had hands that always seemed to be stained with paint or ink She was the personification of the poor little rich girl who seemed to have everything, but never had love. Edie was born from madness and due to her self - indulgent parents and vulnerability; she descended into madness. I believe she was never of this earth. She seemed to be born yesterday; with her childlike face and huge brown eyes the color of frozen Hershey bars, which were said to be like teacups. Edie’s dazzling outer shield and inner radiance seem to have been created to mask her damaged interior. She always wanted to test fate with her reckless behavior, she was a condemned soul off on the road to perdition. Edie Sedgwick died long before I was born in 1971 from an overdose of barbiturates. She was only twenty- eight years old. She had it all. A voice that made me want to sound like her, a look that made everyone look at her. She had a life that made me want to know her and be her friend. She was the girl on fire, always dancing and laughing. She had a certain presence and was so full of energy, as if she was about to take off in a flight with her enchanted stallion that she sketched on the wall of her small apartment trailing behind her. Edie’s problems are what made me relate to her and humanized her to all her fans. Nevertheless, it was her heartrending end that made me sad for her. She was someone who had all the potential in the world to be great and it was cut short.
