Not written for a UMUC course.

“You don’t understand,” I said to the indignant middle-aged woman standing in front of me, “I have loved them my entire life.” We stood in a darkened auditorium between the stage and the hundreds of people who sat politely in rigid, straight-backed chairs. I had flown all the way from Illinois to Washington D.C. to attend a summer writing clinic. This was the last night of a weekend full of poetry readings and creative writing seminars. The convention leaders had organized an elaborate farewell dinner with a concert by a group of Beatle impersonators. I’m not sure if anyone has ever dared to dirty dance to the Beatles before, but having been born in the late seventies, I was never taught to do the twist. This woman had come to ask me to sit down. She was dressed in slacks and a long-sleeved shirt with buttons that climbed up her torso and clung tightly to her long, slender neck. Her hair was pulled back into a taught bun that stretched her well defined features into a firmly held scowl. How could I explain to her, or to anyone what the Beatles meant to me? So many years ago, they were all I had.

Daddy was in the Air Force and that meant he was always away from home. At the time I was unable to pronounce where they had sent my father, to the Philippines, but standing on tiptoe I could just reach the map on the wall calendar to trace the familiar island chain. I did not understand why Daddy had gone “overseas” I only knew that he was missing from my life. My mother was very ill in those days. I can only remember that she used to lie on the couch all day in front of the TV, snuggled up against my older sister. I was often locked in the basement where I would not be in the way of a parade of grandmothers and aunts who visited my mother daily. Left to myself, and as far as I knew, completely unloved, I would turn on the radio and keep company with the voices of my only childhood friends.

I was named after a love song and that made me a princess. At the age of three, I had no idea that lots of people are named after songs. Using a safety pin to fasten my baby blanket around my neck, I would dance around the living room in a swirl of pink and blue. I knew every word by heart and would sing into a microphone made from a plastic ball stuffed inside a cardboard toilet paper roll. An old plastic container of bubbles, drained and filled with rice, became a tambourine. And so I would dance, floating with Lucy through the sky above the cold basement floor and family trauma I was too young to understand.

Momma died soon after and Daddy came back to take my siblings and me to a new home and a new life. The Beatles would follow me. I remember being five years old, lying on top of a bean bag and pretending to take a nap at a baby sitter’s house. I don’t believe I ever fell asleep but I would lie there quietly, trying to be good and anxiously waiting to be nudged awake. At three o’clock, after all the soap operas and game shows were off the air, the cartoons would come on. The Beatles had a cartoon. Now my guardian angels had faces to go along with their angelic voices. I can’t remember the story line, but even then the cartoon seemed a bit silly to me. There was always a music video at the end of the show and I would sit anxiously atop the bean bag to see if they would sing ‘my song.’ Then one day the cartoon went off the air. I remember falling into my father’s arms and tearfully asking him why. He told me the only thing he thought a five year old could understand, “John Lennon was shot.” Shot? I knew all about that. Because of my mother’s illness, I had been to a doctor’s office on numerous occasions. I knew all about those horrible doctors and all their sharp needles. After that I hated all doctors, so convinced was I that John Lennon had met death at the end of a long, sharp needle.

Still, I had the music. Turbulent childhood built a foundation for rising teenage angst. I would lie in bed clutching the radio to my pillow. I kept the volume down low so that no one would know I had been up all night crying. Sometimes it felt good to cry. The Beatles did that for me. Pain builds tight, constricting knots in the stomach that constipates all emotion, even tears. It was then that I would listen to the sad songs. Tears would pour down my cheeks as I listened to the songs of long-lost loves, what-if’s and should have beens. But the sad lyrics were not the only things I would hear through my radio. I also heard that I was not alone. I was not the only one who ever cried or felt pain. Baptized in tears, I would then sing the happier songs. It was then that I knew that true love still existed and that I would find it somewhere, someday, I would fall asleep happy and dream about one day meeting the Fab Four in real life.

The music changes, and I am once again in a D.C. hotel with the scowling lady in front of me. I suddenly realized that although I was not alive during the sixties, that I had not missed their message. Had not rock and roll been about revolution? I wondered to myself where this woman had been during the years when rock was young and whether she had ever dared to dance. No, I was not born in time to experience the sixties or to ever attend a real Beatles concert. Looking back over painful childhood years, I can truthfully say that I was the original fifth Beatle because I needed them more than anyone.

By coming to the concert, I found myself once again in a childhood dream adorned by the gods of my idolatry. It was a fantasy that came true in the only way it could come true, in the form of four talented impersonators. I did not sit down.