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The Beatles in our Living Room


The Beatles in our Living Room


When I was just a tyke, somewhere around first grade, my family and I would gather in our living room on Saturday nights for our weekly television watching ritual. This included some cartoon shows, like The Flintstones and such but it also included the Ed Sullivan show.

My parents sat in their comfy chairs towards the back of the room and I always sprawled out on the floor directly in front of the T.V. I still remember how Ed would start the show by saying he had ‘a really big shoe’ for us that night. I can remember some of the regular acts which included Lamb Chop and the little Italian mouse Topo Gigio.

So you can imagine our shock and surprise when, one night in 1964, Ed introduced a musical band from Liverpool called The Beatles. I had only a faint notion of what rock ‘n’ roll was, from listening to my little turquoise blue transistor radio. My mainstay in music, to that point, had been Beethoven and Bach.

I really could not make heads or tails out of what The Beatles were doing except that all the girls in the audience were screaming, something I found bizarre and amusing.

When I turned to my parents to register their amusement over the spectacle, such was not the case. One would have thought a bomb had gone off in our living room from the horrified looks on their faces and their utter silence. They obviously understood it no more than I did.

Much, much later in my life, I would find out that my father, being an aerospace engineer and working on defense contracts had a high security clearance and the employees had already been indoctrinated with the idea that sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll were being used by the communists to undermine our great western democracy. I suppose there was some truth to this, given Chairman Mao and his Red Guard who were young people on a mission to destroy all establishments.

Nevertheless, from that point on, there was no escaping The Beatles. They were a hot item for discussion, even among my little first grade girl friends Genie and Mary who would argue over which Beatle was the cutest or said the funniest things. It was deep stuff, to be sure.

 


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