About a year ago my husband returned from CBGB's, where he'd had one of those "nights out with the boys" of song and legend. The music was OK, he said, being no great lover of punk rockers. I noticed he had a piece of cloth, gray and polka-dotted, in his pocket. He put it on the table by the bed. It smelled of perfume. Not mine. "Eh, what's all this?" "Oh, that's part of Blondie's shirt. She ripped it off, threw it on the stage, and we picked up the pieces." "Oh, terrific. You can really smell that perfume. Right. Blondie. Uh-huh."

Thus went my first encounter with Debbie Harry, a/k/a the blond-ie from the group of the same name. Who was this individual that promised to break all the rules about being a rock 'n' roll woman and making it only on music? A sexy, pouting thing, judging from her pix, a quasi-throwback to the ratteased, black stockinged bad girls of the early 60's, meeting behind back fences at the girls' gym. The kind whose boyfriends were definitely not named Sam or Ernie. Why be reminded of this unsavory bit of growing up?