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'm travelling north in a rental car on I-95 from Washington to Baltimore with Patty Larkin. There's no road manager, no truck full of equipment. Just Patty, alone with two guitars and luggage in the trunk. After tonight's performance, we'll continue on to Philadelphia. It's raining. We're looking for a church outside of Baltimore where her gig will be. Following the directions she received, we find a very small, old chapel, all boarded up. "Well, this ought to be interesting!" she says. We sit in the car contemplating this forgotten church, abandoned on the edge of some woods that separate it from a housing development. "There's a ballad here," I suggest. "Let's get something to eat," she sighs. On our way to the restaurant, I ask her about writing folk music. "Folk music is personal," she said. "It's story-telling. It comes out of the living room. In my own music I'm trying for homemade intimacy." "Like in the song "I Told Him That My Dog Wouldn't Run?" I asked. Well, yes, she replied. It came from the painful experience of bumping into a former lover who Patty hadn't seen in many years. He had been institutionalized for a while and talked about fairies and reading the Bible everyday to fight off his fears. "It generated a flow of thoughts and feelings for me, like about where does old love go? I was thinking about writing this into my journal, but I picked up the guitar instead." An hour before the show, we return to find the church still closed up. No lights. Not a car in the parking lot. The rain has turned to snow. But we see lights gathering in the distance, and it turns out that her concert is actually in a new, spacious assembly a few hundred yards behind the former church. Quickly she goes through a sound check and then heads down to her dressing room where she begins her nightly ritual of re-stringing her guitars. She's tired, fighting off a cold, and constantly drinks hot tea to keep her voice together. And off she goes, up to a packed church audience. © Nubar Alexaniun 1996, all rights reserved.