The year was 1970, and I was engaged to Sandy. We stumbled into a bookstore at a Baptist seminary in Louisville, KY and found an interesting record. The record was a collection of folk songs by the Montfort Mission. They had taken Peter, Paul, and Mary songs and written new lyrics, then cut their first record with these. The famous trio had even sung with them on the record.That summer Sandy was doing mission work in the inner city of St. Louis, where the Montfort Mission was based. The group had left their Catholic Order and we could only get approximate clues as to their destination. Searching in the poorest part of the city, we found them living in a tenement house, where they gave us a copy of each of their records. One of these had the haunting song Suzanne on it, a song written by Leonard Cohen.You can find the lyrics to this song at http:/allspirit.co.uk/suzanne.html You may want to download a copy of these verses and read them before continuing.—————————————————————–The song became very popular, sung by Joan Baez (3 albums), Neil Diamond, and many others. It was translated into many languages and Leoard says he has even heard saliors singing it on the Caspian Sea. Back then I had the haunting song memorized and we often sang it in our music groups.Of course, one question we always got was who was Suzanne? What did the song mean? What was the river? What is the mirror? And what’s this about Jesus? And the tower? Our reply was always that this was an existential song and could mean anything. Some people thought Suzanne was an analogy for LSD or some other drug, and the song described a drug trip. That would have been an easy explaination for what the song is really saying.In reality, the song describes an actual event that happened in the life of the writer, Leonard Cohen. Suzanne is a real person and the event took place in Montreal. The events in the song took place there in the summer of 1965, but the song was written in 1966.Earlier, Cohen met Suzanne Vaillanourt in Montreal, who was then the wife of a friend of Cohen, Armand Vaillancourt. Both were handsome people. All men were in love with Suzanne. She was the muse to many of the beat poets she knew, but it was Cohen who gave her as a muse to all of us. Suzanne was a gypsy dancer. In Montreal there was a place by the river where the girls would go to dance, and the boys would go to join them. Suzanne would go there with Armand and they would dance with the others.In 1965 Cohen returned to Montreal and looked up Suzanne. She was living in a small apartment with a crooked floor. She was now separated from Armand, but had a child. Suzanne invited Cohen to her place and she served him tea and oranges, just as the song describes. She was wearing recycled clothes from the Salvation Army. There is a harbor at Montreal. There is a church there, known as the sailers’s church, more correctly called Notre Dame de Bon Secour. The church looks over the river. There is a statue of Jesus on the church with arms that stretch out over the seamen.(http://leonardcohenfiles.com/montreal.html). There is a tower there you can climb. You can read Cohen’s side of the story at http://www.ckk.chalmers.se/guitar/suzanne.html.Cohen is now a famous poet and songwriter. He lives as a monk in a small cabin near a monastery in California.Suzanne’s side of the story is told in a 1998 BBC interview at http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/verdal.html. You can even see her picture there as the young muse Cohen met some forty years ago. She says did pray to Jesus, she did use clothes from the Salvation Army. Her marriage was breaking up, and this acurately describes that summer.Cohen and Suzanne went separate ways after that summer. Cohen became famous, but never married (he does have kids by a woman named Suzanne, but she’s not the same Suzanne). Suzanne lives in California today but broke her back in a fall, and that limits her ability to dance and earn income. She’s a homeless, single mother with three kids and lives out of her car. You can read more of Suzanne at http://www.cbc.ca/national/news/suzanne/A movie has just been made of Leonard Cohen’s life. It opens here in Portland next Friday (July 14th). Several top musicians are in it, including Bono. Mel Gibson was the executive producer. And yes, Suzanne is one of the songs that are sung in the movie. See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478197/