The Roxy enters the diary through two brief but connected references: a roller-skating outing with Bianca Jagger and a later recollection prompted by an old movie. Together, they make the venue a setting for skating in the present and an image against which skating’s changing popularity is remembered.

A Roller-Skating Outing

On April 29, 1980, Bianca Jagger wanted to roller skate, so the diarist went with her to The Roxy in Thomas Ammann’s limousine. They skated for about half an hour. The outing was part recreation and part backdrop to Bianca Jagger’s repeated talk of wanting to marry Thomas Ammann: she was eager for him to marry her, and the diary places that desire alongside the casual excursion.

At The Roxy, Bianca Jagger skated “like a little kid,” an impression sharpened by her recollection of a previous skating injury in Los Angeles. She had pulled both tendons and been on crutches; the diarist vaguely remembered newspaper photographs of her entering a California courtroom on crutches as her divorce from Mick Jagger was beginning. The venue thus prompted a memory that joined a playful present-day activity to a more difficult episode in her public life.

The Roxy as a Recalled Image

On May 31, while working at home, the diarist watched an old movie featuring Dick Powell and a cast of people skating. Though the movie was not really about skating, its scenes looked “just like the Roxy.” The comparison makes the venue a visual reference point, not merely the destination of the earlier outing: a screen image of skating brought its appearance back to mind.

The movie also opened onto a compressed history of the pastime. The diarist recalled skating as popular in the early forties, then said it had died out—first naming the fifties, correcting that to the sixties, and concluding that everything died out in the sixties. The Roxy’s two appearances hold that broad retrospective beside a specific half-hour visit: the venue belongs both to an activity enjoyed in 1980 and to an image of a fashion whose popularity seemed to have passed.