Picking up where the hardworking staff left off:

During her thoroughly engaging appearance at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts Wednesday night, Patti Smith read loving excerpts from Just Kids, which chronicled her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the late sixties and seventies, including one excerpt about the July, 1967 day John Coltrane died, “the same summer I met Robert.”

(I was going to call the book Picturing Robert, she said, except it took me so long to write it someone came out with a book called Picturing Hemingway, so I had to change the title. “We stayed together until we knew what we wanted to do in life,” Smith added.)

She also told the story of walking in Times Square in 1969 and seeing a billboard that said, “War Is Over If You Want It. Love, John and Yoko.”

(Yoko Ono runs the same ad in the New York Times virtually every year.)

In addition to singing the praises of walking-around money (“You want something? Get a job. Get some money.”), Smith also sang songs:

• A riveting “Wing” (“Usually I mess it up, even though I writ it.”)

• A haunting Grateful (written after she had a dream in 1995 about the just-deceased Jerry Garcia)

• A soulful My Blakean Year

And then came a reading about the day in 1978 she and Mapplethorpe walked down Bleecker Street in the Village hearing her one Top 20 hit, Because the Night, banging out of every doorway. “Patti,” Robert said, mock-scolding, “you got famous before me.”

And then she launched into a foot-stomping a cappella version of that very tune, which turned into a joyous, soaring singalong.

Because the night belongs to lovers/Because the night belongs to us . . .

Of course, it all belonged to Patti Smith.