The tickets had been in an envelope with a ribbon tied around it mixed in with my other birthday presents. I remember noticing it because it was the most boring looking present on the table. It was the last thing I opened, and then I started to scream. (Note: the words “scream,” “screamed” and “screaming” are going to appear here frequently.)

My mother and father were serious classical music devotees. They were regular attendees at the Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall. They were not people who might be expected to attend a rock concert at a baseball stadium, but they found the Beatles rather amusing. My mother, an artist (when the Beatles broke up, she was pro-Yoko), thought their hair was quite creative, along with those collarless suits they favored. My parents gamely purchased tickets, and I now have the coolest possible answer to the question, “What was the first concert you attended?”

There were some opening acts (I can recall nothing about any of them), and then Ed Sullivan came out to introduce the Beatles. I don’t really remember Ed either, because when he came out, everyone realized the Beatles were about to appear, and the crowd in the stadium started to stand and there was a lot of noise and movement and anticipatory screaming.

When the Beatles came out, there was a tsunami of even more screaming. I will never forget the intensity of the screaming as they made their way onto the stage, and I just screamed my head off with everybody else.

Since I was only 8 years old, I was not tall enough to see over the teenagers and twenty-somethings who were now standing and screaming and blocking my view. There were 55,600 people in that stadium. Absolutely no one was sitting down (unless they had fainted). My father, dressed in an impeccable gray suit (this was still a concert, after all), held me up as I balanced myself in my white patent leather shoes on the rim of the seat in front of us. I continued to scream my head off.