The word premiere perhaps makes it sound bigger than it really was. But I do accurately use lower case and this was, technically speaking, the debut/first public presentation of 30 minutes starring Dylan and co-starring Ricks and me in supporting roles. My Salvation Army buddies, the crew at the Mornington Hotel, Nicolas of the mStore, and other new acquaintances I had made over the previous twenty four hours assured me this was “what you Americans might call a big deal.”
I got out of the elevator and knocked on the door of my director, Ann Victorin, and her husband Ekman Pelle a few minutes before six. Ann was slicing avocadoes for the salad and Pelle returned to roasting pine nuts for the sauce. Ann and I first met on October 25 when she and her cinematographer, Sven Visen, came from Stockholm’s SVT (the Swedish equivalent of PBS) to make the official documentary about Dylan’s Prize for Literature. Ann, a Scorpio sphinx and multilingual lover of all things literary, had made the previous fifteen documentaries and worked to varying degrees with all the Literature Laureates. She and Sven visited Sir Christopher Ricks, a Boston University professor, and me before heading toward Dylan’s shows in Shreveport and Baton Rouge. I had been invited to their apartment, and shortly would be joined by seven members of the SVT, journalistic, and Victorin-Pelle family, for the premiere of Ann’s movie on SVT2.