2/9/64 (Apple #3)

There were five slices of roast beef on my plate. One for each song they performed on the Ed Sullivan Show. Paul sang lead for the first slice: All My Loving.

Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you
Tomorrow I’ll miss you
And I’ll send all my cold cuts to you.

Each slice of roast beef was the size of a placemat. My mother liked to think big but she knew better than to talk to me while I was transfixed by a television set. Multiply me by forty million and you get how many teenagers in America were doing the exact same thing at the exact same time. Some of them were eating hotdogs but all of us were enthralled by the Beatles. This was their first live performance on national television in the United States.

The second song was Til There Was You.

There were birds in the sky
But I never heard them singing
No, I never heard them singing
Till there was cole slaw.

But I was eating potato salad. While the Beatles sang, my twelve year old sister was prancing and dancing across the living room floor. (Our parents were in the kitchen. So were forty million other American parents.) She screamed louder than the girls in the audience of the Ed Sullivan Show. Linda kept shouting “I Love Ringo!”

I ignored her except in the middle of She Loves You when I frisbeed a slice of roast beef across the room. She caught it between her teeth. It was like throwing a bone to a dancing dog. This dancing dog barked Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

So did I.

Three songs in a row from John, Paul, George & Ringo then it was back to Ed Sullivan. At the end of the show, the Beatles sang I Saw Her Standing There and I Want to Hold Your Hand. At the end of the show, there was no more roast beef. No more potato salad. Gone were the five pickle slices. Then I did something as a teenager I had never done before: I washed my own dishes. Linda dried them. We were blabbering to our parents as if we had just witnessed the second coming of Jesus. All they said was “You’ve got to go to bed now.”

The next day was a school day and I was the Monday morning prayer monitor in room 216 of Bishop Reilly High School. At precisely 8:15AM, Brother Lester signalled to me but his students had a surprise in store. Everyone stood up and bowed their heads. Instead of reciting “Our Father who art in Heaven...” or “Hail Mary full of Grace...” I sang “She Loves You Yeah Yeah Yeah...” A classroom full of ninth-grade Catholic boys sang along.

Brother Lester, a stiff upper-lipped Jesuit, stomped his foot in anger but we kept on singing. Then he started dancing and we cracked up laughing. Holding out his priestly robe, he pirouetted around as if he expected to become a flying nun. I wished I could have thrown him a slice of roast beef.

(Apple #4)  is here.