Ask Not

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My son’s generation will always remember two key events of their teenage years — where they were when news came of President Kennedy’s assassination, and seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.

I learned of the former in a guest room at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in Chicago — in the company of Miss November, fittingly enough. Soon, amid beauties with their mascara running, she and I had hunkered around a portable television with a little gray picture in a big shiny white kitchen. The latter broadcast I somehow missed, but Sam has made it abundantly clear over the years that the February 9 appearance of those four Liverpool lads on The Ed Sullivan Show was right in there with JFK getting it.

My son once told me that that joyful noise had signaled a rebirth for his generation, the Baby Boomers, granting them permission to smile and have fun and be silly again. But it also signaled the end of barbershops as we knew them and extended the fad called rock ’n’ roll through the rest of the century and beyond.

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