Peggy Caserta in Memoriam

Friday, Sept. 12
1–3pm

Join us for an afternoon honoring the life of Peggy Caserta.
Speakers will include:

• Nancy Gille
• Dr. David E. Smith – Haight Ashbury Free Clinic
• Jackie Mendelson
• Linda Kelly
• Shabana Siegel
• Father Dan – All Saints’ Episcopal Church

An exhibition of items related to Caserta’s life and work will be on display at the Counterculture Museum from September 12 through December 31st, 2025. Presented in collaboration with SF Heritage.

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Peggy Louise Caserta was born September 12, 1940 in Covington, Louisiana. Her family moved frequently throughout the South in her youth, and she attended Perkinston Junior College in Mississippi. After graduating, she worked as a flight attendant and lived in New York and San Francisco.

In 1965, Caserta opened a boutique at 1510 Haight Street (at the Doolan-Larson building now stewarded by SF Heritage) and named it Mnasidika (nah•SID•ek•ah). “It’s a Greek girl’s name,” she coyly told one reporter; more specifically, the Greek girl whose lover was the poet Sappho in the pseudotranslation The Songs of Bilitis. If you knew, you knew.

The store initially sold clothing handmade by Caserta’s mother, Novell, with each item containing a custom tag “Made especially for you by Novell.” Peggy still also worked for Delta Airlines, and took advantage of a company perk that allowed her to ship her mother’s clothing to San Francisco for free. In the mid-Sixties it was still somewhat taboo for women to wear jeans, and San Francisco’s laws criminalizing cross-dressing (see LGBTQ+ display in the next room) would not be repealed until 1974. So a lot of the clothing sold at Mnasidika was designed to be androgynous.  

While renting a closet from Judy Dugan, Caserta learned that Dugan had been sewing a triangular patch into the hem of her boyfriend’s Levi’s, allowing them to fit over his boots. She asked if Dugan could make the same alteration to some of the jeans sold at Mnasidika. “They sold so quickly, it was mind-blowing,” she told Levi’s historian Tracey Panek. She then went to Levi’s headquarters on Valencia Street to propose manufacturing her new style. It wasn’t well received at first. But one employee (the only one, he claimed, to have worked with Levi Strauss himself) decided to make a deal: they’d try out the new style for six months, available exclusively at Mnasidika. Thirty dozen pairs sold almost immediately, and Levi’s made the style official: the 646 Bell Bottom Jean.

With her growing reputation and prescience for spotting trends, Mnasidika became wildly successful. Caserta expanded into the adjacent space, buying a former barbershop (the owner claimed nobody was cutting their hair anymore anyway), and offered leatherworker Bobby Boles the opportunity to sell custom boots and shoes.

Mnasidika had become a hub of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture scene, outfitting musicians from Jimi Hendrix to the Grateful Dead, and establishing their signature looks. One could also purchase concert tickets for the Avalon Ballroom, the Fillmore Auditorium, et al, at the front counter—along with tabs of Owsley acid to complement the experience (which was legal until the California ban in 1966). Caserta later closed the Haight Street store and opened To Kingdom Come on Polk Street, and Mnasidika North in Seattle.

A pivotal moment in Peggy Caserta’s life was meeting Janis Joplin. Opening her apartment window, she looked out and saw Janis doing the same, and they exchanged hellos. Later, when Caserta went to see Big Brother and the Holding Company perform at the Matrix, she encountered her neighbor again—this time on stage, and was awestruck by the powerful, gravelly, soulful voice coming from the woman she’d met through the window. The two quickly became close friends, two Southern girls who shared a sense of humor and attitude. Eventually they became lovers. Caserta’s admiration of Janis’ talent helped carry her through the capricious trials of rock stardom and periods of self-doubt about her ability and value as an artist, and gave her the love and affection she craved.

But amidst the drug culture of the times, Janis had also developed a growing relationship with heroin, to which she allegedly introduced Caserta to help her cope after ending a relationship with an abusive girlfriend. Before long they were using together. In October of 1970, they were in Los Angeles—Caserta on Mnasidika business while Joplin was recording Pearl at Sunset Sound—and bought heroin from the same dealer, promising to meet up later. On October 4th, Caserta got the call that Janis had been found dead in her hotel room.

Before, Caserta was known for her confident persona and seemingly effortless cool. But the trauma of losing Janis—for which many openly blamed Caserta—caused her to descend deeper into addiction and eventually lose Mnasidika. At one of her lowest points she was convinced to write (via a ghostwriter) the memoir Going Down With Janis. The $2,000 she was paid for it, she said, “quickly, and completely, disappeared into my arm,” and the book was panned as an overly graphic “tell-all,” exploitive of her former lover. Addicted and alienated, Caserta left for Los Angeles, where she struggled living on the streets of Venice Beach and spent two years in prison on possession charges, before finally getting clean and returning to Picayune, Mississippi, to care for her mother. By the time she wrote I Ran Into Some Trouble (with Maggie Falcon), she had nearly twenty years sober and took the opportunity to tell her story again—this time with a clear mind.

The last years of her life she spent in Guerneville, before moving to Tillamook, Oregon, where she lived with her long-time partner, Jackie Mendelson, in a cabin they had built together, in peace and tranquility.
She died on November 21, 2024. She was 84.