Free A Freewheelin' Time by Suze Rotolo

patch wasn’t a bad accessory.
    Annie, Mike’s wife, was working at the Metropolitan Opera Guild and she could get free tickets. Deciding it was time I left the house, she gave me a ticket to see a matinee performance of Alban Berg’s
Wozzeck.
She knew I was self-conscious about going out in a neck brace and eye patch, so she lent me a long, flowing chiffon scarf and helped me wrap it elegantly around the brace as she pushed me out the door. I will never forget
Wozzeck.
I was an Italian kid brought up on Puccini and Verdi. I never knew an opera could sound like that! To my ears, accustomed to the melodic drama of lyric opera, this music sounded like moaning; it was guttural and slightly menacing and it was thrilling beyond words.
    Thanks to Annie, the ice was broken and I began venturing out beyond visits to the physical therapist and to my mother a few blocks away, miserable about being immobile in a full leg cast for six months. She told me that she never lost consciousness during the accident and would forever be haunted by the sight of me crumpled in the car with my face covered in blood. I know she didn’t mean it that way, but I felt as if I had done it to her on purpose.
    Fortunately Pete called and took me for more car rides and eventually, when I looked better, to Gerde’s Folk City.

After Effects
    The plan to move to Italy was put on a back burner and I soon forgot about it. My eye had improved, and I had graduated from a neck brace to a foam cervical collar that I wore to alleviate the pain from a pinched nerve. A lawsuit was in the works, but there was no way to know how long it would take to sort it out. A great deal depended on whether the insurance companies involved would settle or go to trial. The outcome seemed obvious, but the companies still had to duke it out.
    My mother’s lawyer came up with a strategy that he felt would benefit me, the passenger. He suggested I sue my mother (in actuality, her insurance company) in a separate suit. We’d go after the insurance company of the woman driving the white Cadillac in a separate legal action.
    This scheme was legally possible because, although a minor, I was living on my own and was financially independent of my mother at the time of the accident. An innocent young passenger on the witness stand with a scarred eye and nearly broken neck would pull on the heartstrings of a jury, said the lawyer. And he insisted that my separate suit would not mean that my mother was at fault. This was a common tactic, he assured us, used in civil suits that involved insurance companies suing each other.
    No one liked this notion, particularly my mother, who felt horribly guilty about the accident. But in the end she deferred to the professional. Didn’t the lawyer handle things like this all the time? About a year or more later, the case went to civil trial. During the voir dire process, each prospective juror was asked whether he or she objected to a daughter’s suing her mother. It was not legally permissible to say that it was really about suing her insurance company. My mother and I had to sit there and listen to the majority of them respond with disgust. One man even made an indignant What is this world coming to? speech for the occasion.
    Uh-oh. I was put on the witness stand to describe the pain from the pinched nerve and the various effects of the whiplash, which limited neck movement and sapped my overall endurance and strength. The cross-examining lawyer stunned me by saying that none of that seemed to hamper my ability to participate in political protests in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, to work at places like CORE and as a waitress carrying trays, to attend art classes at the Art Students League and the School of Visual Arts, and to live the life of a beatnik in Greenwich Village (hippies hadn’t been invented yet). The cultural divide of the 1960s was already evident.
    In the end I was to receive something like $7,000 and my mother about half that,