Over the years I have scrutinized photos from the concert to see if by chance I could find myself perched on the back of that seat, but no luck. My mother and father did not take any photographs. I do not have a ticket stub or program from the concert. The Beatles performed for only about a half an hour and were then whisked away. Special amplifiers had been designed for this tour, but they weren’t loud enough. My parents claimed they could not hear a single song, and frankly, I don’t think I did either. John, Paul, George and Ringo were there in front of me, singing something I couldn’t hear because everyone was screaming. The stage was a bit far away, and the Beatles looked a bit small, but little Beatles were still the Beatles. Our seats were located somewhere in the vicinity of third base, and this, of course, meant I was somewhat angled closer to Paul, the love of my life at the time, whom I was absolutely, positively, no doubt going to marry one day (I was not the only young girl with that plan). My father, dressed in an impeccable gray suit (this was still a concert, after all), held me up as I balanced myself in my white patent leather shoes on the rim of the seat in front of us. Absolutely no one was sitting down (unless they had fainted). There were 55,600 people in that stadium. Since I was only 8 years old, I was not tall enough to see over the teenagers and twenty-somethings who were now standing and screaming and blocking my view. I will never forget the intensity of the screaming as they made their way onto the stage, and I just screamed my head off with everybody else. When the Beatles came out, there was a tsunami of even more screaming. I don’t really remember Ed either, because when he came out, everyone realized the Beatles were about to appear, and the crowd in the stadium started to stand and there was a lot of noise and movement and anticipatory screaming. There were some opening acts (I can recall nothing about any of them), and then Ed Sullivan came out to introduce the Beatles. My parents gamely purchased tickets, and I now have the coolest possible answer to the question, “What was the first concert you attended?” My mother, an artist (when the Beatles broke up, she was pro-Yoko), thought their hair was quite creative, along with those collarless suits they favored. They were not people who might be expected to attend a rock concert at a baseball stadium, but they found the Beatles rather amusing. They were regular attendees at the Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall. My mother and father were serious classical music devotees. (Note: the words “scream,” “screamed” and “screaming” are going to appear here frequently.) It was the last thing I opened, and then I started to scream. I remember noticing it because it was the most boring looking present on the table. The tickets had been in an envelope with a ribbon tied around it mixed in with my other birthday presents.
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