An online Beatles fan club for and about Beatle fans
Thursday, September 30, 2021
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
Japanese summer visit
Emi Sugiyama is a cook who is starting to add a vegan day to his restaurant. He shared this photo of himself with the Lennons and has these memories:
Actually, I started to be conscious of" vegan "when I was young. I happened to have a relationship and was blessed with the opportunity to eat with John Lennon's family and my family in Karuizawa. However, they didn't touch the meat dishes among the various dishes on the table. I was wondering about that, and when I asked my mother later, they said, "They are vegan. They are people who only eat vegan food. ”So, I was surprised by the child's heart that there was such a way of eating, and I remembered it strongly later. When I think about it now, they eat ice cream. I was eating, so I wasn't vegan at the time, but a vegetarian (laughs).
A precious summerat that time, I wouldn't shot of interacting with John Lennon's family. Playing with my son Sean on soap bubbles and frisbee is a lifelong memory. And have thought that the experience at that time would affect Mr. Sugiyama now! Yoko's right-hand side is Mr. Sugiyama, and his left-hand side is Mr. Sean when he was young.
Monday, September 27, 2021
Sunday, September 26, 2021
Thursday, September 23, 2021
Thinking of Linda
Wednesday, September 22, 2021
Tuesday, September 21, 2021
He was just a normal, regular person
This was an article published in the Daily Mail newspaper shortly after John's murder. I typed it up exactly as it was originally published. There is a word that is not acceptable to use today but was used in 1980 regularly when talking about people with cognitive disorders.
By Don Singleton
Daily News
December 12, 1980
Nearly 10 years ago, on a cold, rainy night in late
autumn. I sat with five or six other
people in a basement apartment in Greenwich Village, relaxing after an evening
that included a Broadway play, dinner and drinks afterward.
It was late, probably 1 or 2am, and the party was just about
over. I was sitting by myself, lounging
in an armchair, recalling bits and pieces of the evening. In one corner of the room two women chatted
quietly, and on a sofa, a young man sat plinking idly on a guitar. I found myself listening to the guitar. Plink, plink, plink – a must undistinguished
melody. He could have been any of a
million hack-around musicians of the early 1970s.
I found myself grinning, “Son of a gun,” I thought. “Here I am sitting in John Lennon’s bedroom,
and he’s over there playing a guitar, and there’s really nothing that special
about him at all. He’s just a normal,
regular person.”
He saw the smile on my face.
“What’s oop?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “I
was just thinking about something funny.”
Obviously, John Lennon was a normal person. But normal glimpses of him were rare – during
that entire night on the town, for example, there was never a moment when
people weren’t aware of John and Yoko, pointing at them, taking their pictures, asking for autographs. Poor John had to think about every move he
made.
Like it or not, John Lennon was forever on stage, and as a
consequence, the John Lennon the world saw was an on-stage John Lennon. N fact, the world became so used to the on-stage John Lennon that it just about refused to recognize that he was really
just an ordinary person with some very ordinary things to say.
Poor John – No matter how many times he said some things, no
one ever seemed to believe him, or even listen to him. Take, for example, the new interview in
Playboy magazine, which contains the very same questions and answers that have
been published 100 times in the past decade.
A large chunk of the interview, for example, deals with the
notion that Yoko was the person who broke up the Beatles, and that she was
Svengali who controlled John’s mind.
“Why can’t you be alone without Yoko?” asked an interviewer
for Rolling Stone in 1971. “I can be,
but I don’t wish to be,” John Lennon
answered. “There is no reason on earth
why I should be without her. There is
nothing more important than our relationship, nothing.”
“And we dig being together all the time. And both of us could survive apart, but what
for? I’m not going to sacrifice love,
real love, for any friend, or any business because in the end you’re alone at
night. I’ve been through it all and
nothing works better than to have somebody you love to hold you.”
John and Yoko had their troubles, of course, but their
relationship was strong enough to keep them together, and for the last 10 years
at least, if you want to know about the private life of John Lennon, you’re
just going to have to accept the fact that John Lennon was – and is—the other
half of Yoko Ono.
A lot of people just couldn’t accept that, but it was true.
Not because Yoko wanted it that way, but because John wanted it that way.
As everyone knows, John Lennon took the past five years off
to be a “househusband,” raising his and Yoko’s son, Sean, while Yoko handled
the family’s business affairs – and handled them very successfully, by all
accounts.
But just because John cut his connections to the press for
all that time, that doesn’t mean he stopped being an ordinary person – an
ordinary person who just happened to be a very generous, decent guy.
Just by accident, I happened to get a call the other day
from a lady who told a story that shed some light on the kind of guy John
Lennon was.
The lady’s name is Ruth McCarthy, and she lives in East
Haven, Conn. She has a retarded child
who lives at the Southbury Training School in Southbury, Conn.
“After five years ago,” she said, “a group of mothers at the
school held a celebrity auction to try to raise money for activities for the
children. So we sent letters to a lot of
famous people, asking them if they’d be willing to contribute things to auction
off.
“Some people did answer the letters,” she said. “Walter Cronkite sent a letter or something
and Barbara Walters and Paul Newman and lot of songwriters. Most of them sent letters and some sent
little things like tie clasps.
“But John Lennon – do you know what he sent? He sent a little statue, one of the Grammy
awards that had won. The little statue
itself. Most of the things at the
auction brought $5 or $6, but that one brought $600 or $700 – it probably would
have been more, but there was only some families of retarded kids and some
staff people.
“You know this has been on my mind all these years, and I
never told anybody,” she said. “But when
I heard this morning that he had been killed, I just thought the world should
know what a big heart John Lennon had, that without any fanfare at all, he
would five away such a treasured possession for a bunch of retarded kids.”
Monday, September 20, 2021
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