My First Time; His Last

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:11:06 -0500

Last month was John Lennon's 70th birthday and December marks 30 years since his murder. Thanksgiving is the anniversary of his final concert. A teenager with her own rock-n-roll dream is thankful she was there.

By the time I crawled into bed after seeing my first concert it was near three in the morning, yet I found the energy to scribble in my beloved red diary. “FANTASTIC!!!!!!” I wrote in my loopy adolescent script. It stretched across an entire line, its widely spaced upper case letters followed by not one, not two, but six exclamation points. Then I dropped off to sleep with my lips turned up in a smile and my ears still ringing. My review would turn out to be a huge understatement.

The show was opening night of Elton John’s sold-out run at Madison Square Garden, Thanksgiving 1974. I was 15 and took the train into Manhattan with three girlfriends, leaving behind half-eaten turkey and untouched pumpkin pie. Rumors were flying about a special guest—someone really big. I was moony about the Stones so I pinned my hopes on Mick Jagger, although my true love was Charlie Watts because, more than anything, I wanted to play drums like him.

The drum thing hadn’t gone over well with my parents. “That's ridiculous. Girls don’t play drums!” they insisted. As far as I knew, they were right. But I wore them down and they reluctantly agreed to lessons. “She’ll outgrow it,” Mom whispered to Dad, a corporate nine-to-fiver who dismissed the entire rock music industry as “a bunch of long-haired hippies.” When it became obvious that I wasn’t going to outgrow it, they promised to buy me a set of drums. By Thanksgiving, I had picked my color: blue sparkle.

That night, my first inside the Garden, we hiked up to our $7.50 seats in the green section, third row, with a view of Elton John’s back. Binoculars helped. Lighted matches and the red-hot embers of cigarettes, legal and not, transformed the dusky arena into a sweet-scented planetarium. I didn’t smoke a thing but I was giddy just the same.

I ping-ponged between two fantasies: imagining Mick Jagger strutting on stage and imagining myself on stage behind Nigel Olsson’s eight-piece honey-gold drum kit, my skinny arms and legs pounding out a powerful rhythm, like a train engine. This required considerable mental effort because to me, rock drummers were tattooed British guys who overindulged in sex and drugs, not uptight Jewish girls who worried about split ends and acing geometry. Yet Olsson was slim and catlike, with black bangs nearly covering his eyes and hair draping past his shoulders, swinging with a rhythm all its own, like Cher’s.

“He looks like a girl,” I thought, and suddenly all things seemed possible.

About an hour later, Elton confirmed that a special guest would join them on stage. “I’m sure he will be no stranger to anybody in the audience, when I say it’s our great privilege, and your great privilege, to see and hear...”

“Mick Jagger,” I whispered, crossing my fingers and toes, and possibly several internal organs.

“…Mr. John Lennon!”

In that fleeting vacuum before I reacted, I had one crystal-clear thought: Thank you, God, for ignoring an idiot like me!

Twenty thousand fans erupted in that frenzy known as Beatlemania. I scanned the stage with my binoculars, which was no easy feat because the Garden itself was shaking. In the white spotlight was a slender man with thick auburn hair parted down the middle. It’s his hair I remember, perhaps because it reflected the light like a halo. Mick Jagger evaporated like smoke from a spent match. After all, I knew the Beatles trumped the Stones.

Then I was screaming, waving my arms like wayward windshield wipers until I accidentally belted a guy holding a rather large camera. It sailed out of his hands in a sickening slow-motion arc that, by some miracle befitting the evening, he managed to intercept before impact. At that moment, I sorely wished I’d brought mine. Lennon launched into “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and finally “I Saw Her Standing There,” which he introduced with a credit to “an old estranged fiancé of mine, called Paul.” Then he left the stage.

Six years and one week later, on an otherwise ordinary Monday evening in December, Dad gently woke me just before midnight with horrible news that instantly transformed my first concert into John Lennon’s final public performance. This time I waited until the next day to write about it in my diary. There was no upper case and no exclamation points, just paralyzing disbelief. Dad, who by now had somewhat softened his stance on long-haired hippies and girl drummers, seemed wounded, too, in some intangible way. This was the same man, after all, who used to sing "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" to me when I was five.

I no longer care that I forgot my camera that Thanksgiving because, magically, that entire Elton John concert was immortalized on CD. Today when I play it, I try to place the moment when the ground is shaking and the camera is falling. If I listen really closely—there it is, one impassioned scream from the green section, third row, from the lungs of a 15-year-old girl at her first concert. She can’t believe she’s seeing John Lennon! Nor can she quite believe she’ll get what she so desperately wants—to play blue sparkle drums in front of a cheering crowd, onstage in a band. I want to reach into the speakers, back through time, and gently rest my hand on her shoulder. I want to whisper to her, “Yes, someday you will.”

It’s Chic! It’s Retro! It’s the 1970s Gym Uniform!

Sat, 3 Apr 2010 01:04:11 -0400

By Robin Eileen Bernstein

I took my 15-year-old daughter shopping for spring clothes the other day at an upscale boutique in suburban New Jersey, near my parents’ home.

“Ma, look!” she said. She held up this….this….THING. It was a mustard-colored, one-piece contraption with something that resembled bloomers at the bottom.

“Oh, my God,” I said. “That’s my high school gym uniform!” At the very least, it was some sort of revamped version, more suitable for a night of club dancing than a morning of push-ups.

For women of a certain age, let’s say middle age, school gym uniforms were de rigueur, a fact of pubescent life as traumatizing as SATs, chin zits and first crushes. So when my fashion-forward daughter told me, with an obligatory roll of her eyes, that the item in question was called a “romper” and was “in style now,” I had to laugh. If there was ever a fashion trend that deserved to rot in obsolescence or, at the very least, had earned a display case at the Smithsonian, it was the girls’ gym uniform.

Cinched with elastic at the waist and adorned with a series of cold metal snaps running from neck to crotch, the uniform was designed to make everyone look, well, uniformly bad. It was essentially an infant’s onesie reconfigured for an adolescent female. No matter if you were a willowy five-eight and 120 pounds like my genetically fortunate daughter, or short and curvaceous, or a big-boned athlete, the gym uniform would cut you down to size. It was the great leveler, which maybe was its purpose. When I was 15, I was five-four, flat-chested and skinny to the point of embarrassment. “She looks like an upside-down mop,” my dad would say of my stick figure and frizzy hair. “She has a fast metabolism,” my mom would counter, ever the peacemaker. All I wanted was to look like Laura, the reigning high school beauty who reminded me of a raven-haired Marcia Brady. The last thing I needed was a pasty yellow onesie that made me look like an ironing board.

Unlike me, my daughter loves to shop, hence, her knowledge of things like rompers. I hear “romper” and all that comes to mind is Romper Room, a popular TV show from the 1960s that took place in a nursery school. Those innocent five-year-olds didn’t yet know about gym uniforms, or about sitting at the wrong table at lunchtime, or about having a crush on a cool guy named Tom whose straight brown hair swept fetchingly across his forehead like a rock star but who was so aloof he didn’t even know you existed even though you sat one row away from him in tenth-grade social studies class. Oh, and he was smart, too. Give those adorable Romper Room girls another decade and they, too, would suffer the indignities of the Toms of the world, and the misery of gym uniforms.

My daughter doesn’t know of gym uniforms. Perhaps they’ve been banned, along with dunce caps and corporal punishment. She gets to wear the t-shirt and shorts of her choosing to gym. She tried on the romper. It was softer and more feminine than my old gym uniform, without the hard snaps and military angles. It was trendy and chic. Yet at its core, there was no hiding where it took its inspiration. It looked awful on her, despite her model-like frame, and she knew it. Thirty-five years ago, it would have looked awful on gorgeous Laura, too. I smiled. Call it a gym uniform or a romper or what you will, apparently every generation has its own great leveler.

Robin Eileen Bernstein's Open Salon Blog

My First Time; His Last

It’s Chic! It’s Retro! It’s the 1970s Gym Uniform!