"Where It's At" is (was?) published monthly by The Saskatoon Gallery and Conservatory Corporation as a co-op service for allied arts organizations.

I was born in Fort Macleod, Alberta in the foot hills of the Canadian Rockies -- an area of extreme temperatures and mirages.

When I was two feet off the ground, I collected broken glass and cats.

When I was three feet off the ground, I made drawings of animals and forest fires.

When I was four feet off the ground, I discovered boys and bicycles.

When I was five feet I began to dance to rock n' roll and sing the top ten and bawdy service songs around campfires and someone turn me on to Lambert Hendrix and Ross and Miles Davis and later Bob Dylan.

Through these vertical spurts there was briefly the church choir, grade one piano, bowling, the twist, art college, marriage, runs in the nylons and always romance -- extremes in temperatures and mirages.

A few years ago, with the sun streaming into the tea lounge of the Mendel Art Gallery, Joni Mitchell in blue jeans sat drinking coffee with the staff of the Gallery and artist Ernie Lindner.

It took some time for the staff to realize that Joni Mitchell was actually there, the real flesh and blood personification of an individual who had in a few short years created such an image of success, that she seemed to most of us, unapproachable.

The recording of her songs by Judy Collins and Buffy Sainte-Marie, created in the minds of her contemporaries an image of such stunning success that they had forgotten how it all began and that Joni was, in the beginning, an aspiring painter who had began a career in music singing in clubs around her native Saskatoon to help pay her art school debts.

That afternoon Joni appeared frail and feminine and much as Peter Goddard describes her in his recent review of her Toronto showing, for the Toronto Star: "the pale, wispy girl from Saskatoon with buttermilk hair, whose sweet, sad songs chronicled her loves, confusion, guilt and loneliness."

But unique to that afternoon was her talking about her home in Laurel Canyon and her friends, and of the demands of being made on her time and of her refusals to those demands and her perceptive reasoning behind the refusals.

She told Ernie how her songs began as poems in a sketchbook, her words and drawings sharing pages, and Ernie -- some weeks later -- having received one of her albums wrote her she should give up singing but continue with her poetry. But anyone, who has seen Joni Mitchell on stage would have to admit that she brings -- through her performance and through her music -- an enrichment to her words that can scarcely be accomplished in any other way. After having witnessed a performance, where words come to life, with music and having listened to the recordings, reading the words helps to establish in the mind, the greatnesss of the artist.

On that sunfilled afternoon, we spoke of painting and Joni later purchased one of Ernie's works. She told us she still painted and we discussed the possibility of an exhibition of her works. We would still like to mount such an exhibition.

A copy of the Toronto Star of February 11th brought us a rave review of her recent Massey Hall concert. The show, says Peter Goddard, "ended with a blast of noise, a puff of cigarette smoke, and a vamp's song about psychoanalysis."

"Joni sang like a winner. Her high, keening voice sounded secure and mature . . . providing proof that she knew how to survive, and that she had become the artist thought she could be."

Saskatoon, it would seem, is to be treated to a performance by a new Joni Mitchell when she comes to the Centennial Auditorium March 14th. Plunging neckline, maturity and songs created in a stone house on a Half Moon Bay of Vancouver Island where she has been living for the past two years.

But to us at the Mendel, it will be the same Joni Mitchell. We saw no struggle, we saw no indecision. What we saw was an artist at work, in the process of climbing that limitless elevation from plateau to plateau. We know that Joni has what it takes to continue upward. For the afternoon she gave to us was as sensitive and as honest as her being.

She stands alone, a lady with her thoughts, her feelings, and her privacy, and in her output she touches upon all the things we see, we feel, and cannot find words to express, and in a manner we readily accept.