In the late 1960s, the San Francisco rock and folk scene was moving toward its apex. Almost any night of the week, kids could go to large auditoriums to see the newest artists. In her early teens, Kitty Margolis well knew that her parents would not allow her to go to any of these places alone, and it came as a great surprise to her one day when her parents actually invited her and her brother Peter to go with them to the Fillmore West.

You have to have seen The Fillmore at that time to understand how unusual an idea this was. The room could hold a few thousand people, and virtually all of them on a given night were in the hippy uniform ... Levi's, tie-dyed shirts, sandals, long hair, and beards for the men, gypsy-like, only semi-clad exoticism for the women. Marijuana and LSD abounded. To be accompanied by your parents — Dad in a tweed jacket and tie, Mom in a conservative dress more suitable to the Burlingame Club, wearing pearls and white gloves — was surely unusual.

“But they took us because they knew already that we were going to go,” Kitty says.

Kitty’s fear wasn’t so much that she’d be seen with her parents. She was as thrilled as possible to go to The Fillmore under any guise. What she most feared was that they wouldn’t let her stay there. She doesn’t remember who they saw that night, but she knows that it was a watershed moment for her.

The others in the audience actually treated her parents with a kind of deference. “Some of them tried to pass my father a joint. My father said ‘Oh, thank you. But, no, thank you.’”

The experience seemed not to be too unsettling, however, because Kitty’s parents did allow her and her brother to stay at The Fillmore that evening, although with the strong suggestion that they come home as soon as the performance was over. They went to The Fillmore many, many times after that.

When she was thirteen, Kitty had a chance to work with Arlo Guthrie, although Guthrie himself, kind as he was, was not overly moved by her audition.

“We were on vacation at Waikiki and there he was, sitting on the sand with his new bride. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I introduced myself and told him I liked to play guitar. He seemed interested, so I ran up to my hotel room, grabbed my little traveling guitar and ran back down. I plopped myself in the sand next to them and played the whole of his big hit "Alice’s Restaurant." It was 15 minutes long. They were very sweet, but they must have wanted to kill me.”