Ailantha
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact

Confessions Of A Recovering Beatlemaniac

2/10/2014

1 Comment

 
What's left of my old Beatles collection
Picture
        I first saw them in a magazine:  Time or Life, or Look, I don't remember, my parents used to get them all.  And I used to sit at the kitchen table and read them, or at least look at the pictures.    
         On this particular occasion I was studying the photo of the four guys with the long hair when my mother stopped to look over my shoulder.
        "Look at them,"  she laughed.  "They look like little page boys from King Henry's court."
        I agreed with my mother (something I was still doing at that time in my life), even though I didn't know who King Henry or what a page boy was.  I was twelve years old without a clue who I  was, let alone King Henry and his page boys.
        But I read and re-read the article, several times, in fact, and the more I stared at the photos of these four guys, the Beatles, the cuter they looked and the more intrigued I became.
        I started surrepticiously listening to my mother's radio station but never heard their songs.  I'm not sure who connected me to  the Philadelphia rock station WIBG, but it was from the disc jockey named Hy Lit (or, as he called himself,  and subsequently all of us, his 12-year-old fans called him, "Hyski-a roonie-mcfatio-zoot")  that I got my first taste.  I was immediately hooked.  And of all the WIBG ( or "wibbage", as we called it) Good Guys (as  disc jockeys used to be referred to back then) 'Hyski" was my preferred dealer.  
        Now, every 12-year-old girl back then loved the Beatles, even though (or maybe because?),  as my old grade-school chum Michelle recently reminded me, we were barely out of Barbies.  But those other girls didn't love the Beatles the way I loved the Beatles.  I had Beatles pins, sweatshirt, posters, magazines galore, every record they made as soon as it came off the press, wallpaper - Beatles wallpaper  for goodness sake!   (Romaine - do you remember that Beatles wallpaper that I made Mom put up in our bedroom?)
        To say I was obsessed with the Beatles was probably accurate.  
       But looking back in retrospect I believe it was more than that I loved their music and thought they were cute. I believe that for me the Beatles opened the door to adolescence.  They gave me an identity:  I was a Beatles fan.  I now had some  sense of myself,  a way to present myself to myself and to the world.  And I did.  Boy, did I!  
        There was one other girl in my seventh grade class whom I'll call Peggy (changed her name, she'd probably want it that way) who was in competition with me  for being the most hard-core Beatles fan.   But then one day she came into school bragging that the night before there'd been some kind of gas leak at her house and her parents tried to make her get out of the house until the gas company got there to fix it because the house could blow up, but Peggy stayed inside in her bedroom because she couldn't leave all her Beatles stuff so she decided that if her Beatles stuff was going then she was  going  with it!
        I remember being in awe of Peggy (and goofy enough to have asked her whether her house ended up blowing up).  I relinquished to her any pretensions to the position of The One Who Loved the Beatles The Most.  
        But by eight grade things were different. I  was different.
        And at the beginning of my freshman year of high school I prevailed upon my mother to take down the Beatles wallpaper.  Immediately.
       She did.  
        I still loved the Beatles.  Fifty years later I still do.  Just not enough to have them staring at me from the wallpaper in my bedroom.


1 Comment
Romaine
2/10/2014 02:04:23 am

Yes I remember that Beatles wall paper all too well. I was always embarrassed to get undressed because there were always these Beatles faces staring down at me. I was very happy when that wall paper came down. :-)

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Picture
    "Equal And Opposite Reactions"
     by Patti Liszkay
    Buy it on Amazon:

    http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa
    Picture
    ​"Hail Mary"
    by Patti Liszkay
    Buy it on Amazon:

    https://www.amzn.com/1684334888
    Picture
    "Tropical Depression" 
    by Patti Liszkay
    ​Buy it on Amazon:   
    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTPN7NYY

    Archives

    June 2025
    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013

    RSS Feed

    I am a traveler just visiting this planet and reporting various and sundry observations,
    hopefully of interest to my fellow travelers.

    Categories

    All


























































































  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact