COLUMN: Writing on the Wall

All you need is love — and comfortable sneakers

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Once upon a time, there were two young girls, pre-teens at best, swooning and pining and quite very much in love (as much as they could be at 10 years old) with four fab, mop-topped lads from Liverpool, London. We’d never even heard of Liverpool before that (heck, we’d never heard of rock ‘n’ roll before that).

Yes, we were caught up in Beatlemania in 1964, when the Beatles came to America. These cute, witty, harmonizing, guitar and drum-playing boys had girls and women screaming, fainting and fantasizing about life as a groupie (which, at that time, I thought meant carrying their guitar cases.)

And I got to see them, thanks to my very hip mother, who took me and my same-age niece, Linda, to see them perform at Shea Stadium on Aug. 15, 1965. What an experience! Absolutely unforgettable.
So, fast forward 50 years later. So much had happened in our lives. Husbands (a handful between us), children, grandchildren, even a great-grandchild. Moves from Brooklyn and Queens to Long Island and Pennsylvania. Joys and sorrows, thrills and disappointments — we lost touch for a dozen or so yeas, but then we got together, Linda and I, when we could – most recently in February when my sister (her mother) Betty died.

But nothing would stop us from celebrating the golden anniversary of us seeing the Beatles at Shea. So, armed with a suitcase and comfortable shoes, Linda came to New York from PA last weekend so we could observe the occasion together. And I had planned quite a weekend.

On Friday, we enjoyed dinner with the family at Eleanor Rigby’s, a Beatle-themed restaurant in Mineola. My grandsons, 7 and 11, impressed Linda with their knowledge of song lyrics, and she in turn told them the story of how, as a young girl, she jumped on a subway in Brooklyn to catch a glimpse of Paul McCartney in New York City (she ended up scratching his neck when he went by and didn’t wash her hand for a week!)

On Saturday, we literally danced in the aisles to Strawberry Fields tribute band at B.B. King Club in Manhattan, and they gave us a shout out (of course, to a smattering of applause for two old ladies who had actually been a part of pop history 50 years earlier.)

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