40s / 50s decade

  

I always like to believe that the world does justice on it's own way, that it has a very ironic way to restore it's balance by fighting evil with good. On April 30th of 1945 Hitler died by suicide, the stars aligned in the most beautiful way and on the same day at 10:55pm (not sure if the time is correct) Mimi was born in Standford Hospital, Palo Alto, California. Sounds to me the most perfect swap the universe has ever made. 

The girls ♥ (1948?)

When Mimi was little, Joan and Pauline "hated" her. She was the youngest and the prettiest, so for a while they conspired against her, but as they grew, Pauline became a loner, and Joan and Mimi became closer and discovered each other. Altough they were jealous of each other for diferent reasons, they knew they loved each other. 

Mimi had physical confidence and studied dance since she was five. 

When she was five, she lived for a year in Baghdad - Iraq, one or the famile's most unhappy relocations, where her father was building a physics laboratory at the University of Baghdad, teaching and conducting research. All of them found it a trial on some level, but it was the six-year-old Mimi who particularly suffered. She says her memories of that year are exceptionally vivid, both because of the brutality she witnessed ( "from my perspective, which was so close to the ground, I saw animals being mistreated and a lot of other things that frightened me" ) and because of what she experienced as emotional brutality at the hands of the British nuns at the convent school she attended. This was the first time facing organized education at a convent school. She was the smallest and youngest in a classroom that included both of her sisters - Joan was nine and Pauline 11 - and she remembers the teacher, "Sister Rose," deliberately humiliating her, asking her to read in front of the class, knowing she couldn't. (i shall not coment this, because it wouldn't be elegant). The harsh manner of the nuns was an ongoing torment to her. Indeed, she and her father remained convinced later in life that the experience had nipped any untapped love of academics in the bud. 

She traces a lifetime of educational phobia to the experience - she still has trouble reading - and says she only realized years later that she is dyslexic. "When I found out that most people in prisons are dyslexic or have other learning disabilities I thought, 'Aha!' No wonder I'm so comfortable in those settings.' "

Because she was so miserable in school, she says she lived for her after-school dance classes and the hours she spent at home practicing the violin, which she picked up when her family moved from Baghdad to Southern California. "I was good at the violin and I was a good dancer and I knew it," she says. "Which was such a relief from feeling incompetent. When I danced or played music I could be who I really was."

On third grade she scored high on a music aptitude test and had violin lessons for several years but she prefered to sing than to play. 

The family moved briefly to Stanford and then to Belmont, where Joan discovered the folk music revival "or it discovered her" and Farina taught herself to play the guitar, pleased at how easy it was for her to learn.

"I watched my girlfriends struggle over chords, and it was simple for me, which was fun for a change. And I impressed Joanie's boyfriends, which was even more fun," she says, laughing. "But here I was going to Belmont Junior High where I felt completely inadequate, and some Harvard guy would pick me up after school in a Corvette because I'd impressed him with a guitar lick."

When she was 9 years old she went to a concert of Pete Seeger at the Palo Alto High School under Tia's influence. Mimi would not remember any of the concert and altough she was not a out-in-front girl like her sister, they both decided they wanted to sing.

Mimi played guitar every night at home. In shcool, she struggled to parse the jumbled letters in her books and peeked at her neighbors to see when to turn the page. She hated shcoolwork because she was dislexic (undiagnosed). Can you imagine? Trying to do exercises and to understand the subjects and not being able to do anything? She mentions she felt dumb and very unconfortable facing this everyday. Plus, Joan made her feel slower because she managed the situations another way. 

What she really wanted was to be a dancer, and for a while, in Europe, she was. Living (after Belmont) as a teenager with her parents in Paris, she joined a troupe and toured Germany. But her sister Joan had just made the cover of Time magazine. "Her career was soaring and I felt such competition, that what I was doing was so insignificant," Farina says.

Still terrified of the classroom, she was finishing high school at home, and the future seemed overwhelming. There was the horrifying possibility of college; the more attractive possibility of studying dance at Juilliard, though she was afraid of being on her own in Manhattan; and the equally frightening possibility of emulating her sister as a solo performer. "I didn't have career thoughts so much as a desire to do everything Joanie did. I just admired her so completely."

Their relationship started to get better when Ira asked Joan to imagine that that was Mimi's last hours on earth. At the begining Mimi was very confused about Joan's change of behaviour towards her but it worked and they became very close.  

Debbie Green, Joan Baez and Mimi Fariña