On A Wink And A Prayer

Today I'd gone back to being quite uninspired blipwise until my prayers  were answered at the top of our stairs when I suddenly saw this face staring back at me. It felt like it was trying to escape from a striped suitcase, with accompanying barcode luggage tag, in our spare bedroom and suddenly brought some memories rushing back from over 30 years ago.
The face is actually printed on some t-shirt based merch (to promote The Captain Swing album) from a concert we attended in that there London back in the early 90's for the American singer-songwriter Michelle Shocked.
Her music has entered the Billboard Hot 100, she has been nominated for a Grammy and received an award for folk album of the year at the CMJ awards.
Born Karen Michelle Johnson in Texas in 1962 into a Mormon family which was constantly on the move, due to her stepfather being in the US Army, she would in her teenage years go through a punk rock phase wearing a Mohawk hairdo and squatting in abandoned buildings in San Francisco.
By 1984, after attending the Democratic Convention, she had adopted the stage name "Michelle Shocked" - a play on the expression "shell shocked", having said in a 1992 interview that it is a direct reference to the thousand-yard stare which was a term used to describe victims of shell-shock in World War 1 - where she was arrested for protesting and demonstrating against corporations who were contributing to both the Democratic and Republic parties to try to exert political influence (sound familiar!).
She received her first international exposure after her performance at the Kentville Folk Festival in Texas was recorded on a portable tape recorder - later to be released in Europe in 1986 as the utterly sublime "Texas Campfire Tapes" which I still remember buying, somewhat ironically, on vinyl. The concert followed a few years later and I'm still so happy that I have this winking depiction of her.
She has resisted what she sees as the machinations of the music industry (particularly in respect of how artists are so scandalously underpaid by streaming services) and still strives to retain creative control of her work.