The Day Sharon Tate Died

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The White Album is the title
of a  Joan Didion  anthology
which includes an essay about 
living two miles from where 
the Manson "family" killled
Sharon Tate and four 
other people.





[August 8, 1969]
I was in the shallow end of a swimming pool 
in Beverly Hills when we received 
a telephone call about 
the murders at Sharon 
Tate Polanski's house
on Cielo Drive.

The phone rang
many times in the next hour...
twenty dead, no twelve, ten, eighteen.
I remembered all of the day's information  
very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish 
I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.

Joan Didion

Innocence ends when
one is stripped of the delusion
that one likes oneself.

The next Didion page is  here. 
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