Anticipating the Stevie extravaganza with great excitement, Mom got all Stevied-out. "She put on a blowy skirt, the earrings, the hippie perfume. We made it a picnic, bringing with us a few bottles of Chiante. My mom's a little tipsy . . . and Stevie keeps us waiting for half an hour. All right? Finally the guard came out and said, You know what? Stevie's really sick, she has food poisoning. So I never got to see her face to face, after all we shared."

Looking back on the conversation, Dunn says that Stevie bonding reached its apex right around the topic of leg warmers.

"I told her that the video for Gypsy, where she's got the three-way mirror, the leg warmers, and she's spinning and spinning, there's a scene that proved pivotal in my young life: the dress goes up, and the leg warmers are displayed. Well, I ran right out to the department store and bought a pair of light blue leg warmers, but I never had the guts to wear them. At our suburban high school, people were wearing them over jeans. It was a very strange yet curiously appealing look, directly inspired by Stevie.

"So I kept the leg warmers in my room and I wore them indoors. I may have spun in them once or twice, but they never saw the light of day. And I told her, and she was just loving that."