Poker faces.

• Author: Kinney, David
• Position: UP FRONT - Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan, that most sphinxlike and enigmatic of performers, has assumed and discarded numerous guises during his long career. He learned that lesson early. In Chronicles: Volume One, the memoir Simon & Schuster published in October, he writes about a poker game that was always going on in the backroom of a Greenwich Village folk club he played when starting out in the early '60s.

"Bets were usually nickels and dimes and quarters, although sometimes the pot could get up as high as twenty dollars. I usually folded my cards if I didn't have a pair by the second or third draw. [Folksinger Len] Chandler told me once, 'You gotta learn how to bluff. You'll never make it in this game if you don't. Sometimes you even have to get caught bluffing. It helps later if you got a winning hand and want some other players to think you might be bluffing.'"

Reading that--and Ed Martin's cover story in this month's issue--took me back 20 years. As an editor with The Miami Herald, I organized a weekly poker game for members of my staff. The paper's higher powers applauded it as a good way to boost morale, but the real reason was I liked to play poker. Plus, I figured it was a good way to take a man's measure in a manner you couldn't during grueling 10- to 12-hour workdays or even in the camaraderie of closing down some dive afterward, trying to douse the deadline-induced adrenaline in our blood.

I say "man" because the women we worked with never showed up. And if you don't play poker, you're probably wondering how you can try to read someone's character by playing a game based, in large part, on masking emotions and bluffing. But over the course of an evening, you'd start to see what lay behind those poker faces. Some...