WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2010
KLMNO ‘It still hurts, all these years later’ lennon from C1
like another ‘Paul is dead’ hoax,” Rosenay!!! says. “I hung up on him.” But the calls kept coming. He
turned on the TV and heard the
reports.Cosell repeatedthenews. Then a call fromABC Radio, and one fromanother network. “All I remember from that night was, for hours, doing interviews,” he recalls. “They wanted a ‘spokes- person,’ someonewhowasaBeat- les
fan.Theywantedtoknowhow to get ahold of peoplewhomight have knownJohn.” Rosenay!!! decided the con-
vention — scheduled for that weekend — would go on. “The fans needed it. It was cathartic. We needed to commiserate and share together.” It wasn’t until the next Mon-
day, after the whirlwind of news andconventionshadpassed, that the reality of Lennon’s death fi- nallysankin. “Iwasdrivinginthe car with my mom, and ‘Starting Over’ came on the radio. I pulled over, andI just
startedcrying.For 20minutes, I just cried.Hewasas close to me as someone could be without me knowing them,” he says.
‘Real emotionalmoment’ Nine hundred miles south, in
Decatur, Ga., Bill King had just put together a second anniversa- ry issue of his magazine, Beatle- fan — now the longest-running Beatles fanzine in the United States — which had launched in December 1978. His wife, Leslie, returned from the typesetter’s a little after 11. “I greeted her at the door, smiling. She said, ‘You ha- ven’theard,’ ”he recalls. King was the rock critic and
music reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—a post he still holds. “I called the city desk, to see if they needed anything, and dictated a bunch of back- ground of Lennon for them.” His instinctual “reporter mode” on, he hopped in his car and headed to work, listening to reports on the radio ashedrove. King and his wife decided to
scrap their planned anniversary issue of Beatlefan and put out a Lennon tribute issue. “This is be- fore the days of e-mail—we sent out mailgrams from the Postal Service to all our contributors, asking for pieces. We had the issue delivered to the printer on ChristmasEve, the first fanpubli- cationtribute tohimout there.” Again, it wasn’t until the dust
settled, after days of being inter- viewed himself, that King had a chance to grieve the loss of one of his favorite humans: “Yoko, John’swidow,hadcalledfor a few minutes of silence around the world a fewdays afterhis death. I was listening to it on the radio, and . . . thatwas a real emotional moment for me. The reporter’s instinct got me through the first 24 hours without having time to grieve.But inthatmoment, Idid.”
‘Worst day ofmy life’ Mark Lapidos never needed a
reminder of when Lennon’s birthday was – his father’s was also Oct. 9. In late 1973, the Sam GoodyRecordsstoremanagerde- cidedtoput togetherBeatlefest— now called the Fest for Beatles Fans (
www.thefest.com)—a pop- ular annual fan convention, still hugely successful, the first of which was held in New York the next September. Six years later, on Dec. 8, the
Lapidoses were about to board a plane in Los Angeles to return east, having just signed contracts for a Beatlefest at the Bonaven- ture Hotel for the next year. “We were at the airport, and some- body I knew paged me,” he says. “That’showI foundout.” Lapidos spent the red-eye
flight in shock. “I asked the flight attendant to ask the crew if they could verify what I’d been told. Maybe it was misinformation — maybe it was Jack Lemmon.” Upon landing in New York, the couple got into a cab for a ride home. Lapidos asked the driver, “ ‘Is it true?’ He just answered, ‘Yes.’ ” Lapidos called his brother,
who told him that, for the first time he’d ever seen, “peoplewere just walking the streets of New York, openly crying.”He stayedin his home for a week, sickened by the grief. “Itwas theworst day of my life. It still hurts, all these years later.”
‘Itwas just . . . awful’ In Liverpool, England, Jean
Catharell was lying in her bed blissfully unaware of what had taken place in New York a few hours earlier. Then her husband startled her awake: “You need to getup.” Catharell can remember see-
ing the Beatles play in clubs and other venues aroundLiverpool in 1963, just before the internation- al explosion of Beatlemania. She put on Radio Merseyside, which
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THE LENNON ARCHIVE
TIMETOGRIEVE: Yoko Ono, here with Lennon, called for a moment of silence following his death.
was playing Lennon’s “Imagine” andrepeating the badnews. Eventually Catharell pulled
herself together enough to go into town toMathew Street, Liv- erpool’s famousmain thorough- fare. “When I got there, there were people wandering up and down the street, carrying can- dles, guitars,” she says. Opposite the Cavern, the
famed hole-in-the-wall club where the Beatles’ career began, a shrine of Lennon artifacts be- gan to assemble. “There were things like the Lennon cap and T-shirts. People had given up some of their treasures just to payhomage to John,” she says. Catharell lingered outside the
Cavern.“Icouldn’t tellhowlongI sat there.Hours and hours. I sat there till itwas dark,” she says in her lyrical Liverpool accent. “It
K EZ SU
C3
‘Mojo’: Studio goes seedy and it’s something to see
theater review from C1
bottom of the barrel, especially in its portrayal of three guys who occupy the bottom of the bottom. Sweets (Matt Dewberry) is a lumpen candy addict; Potts (Dan- ny Gavigan) is a magnetic blow- hard of a coward; and Skinny (DylanMyers) is a skittish, whin- ing bundle of petty grievances. These actors list on their re-
DAN GROSSI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
FABFOUR: PaulMcCartney, left,GeorgeHarrison, John Lennon and Ringo Starr (back) perform in 1964 on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” which was watched by an estimated 73 million Americans.
“For20 minutes, I just cried.Hewas as close tomeas someone could be withoutme knowing them.”
—Charles F. Rosenay!!! who began organizing Beatles fan conventions in 1978 and held one immediately following Lennon’s death
must have been quite a long time becausethecandleswerelighting up the street. Itwas just . . . itwas just awful.”
‘He believed in peace’ In Southern California, Kristy
Mundt stayed home from work thedayafterLennon’smurder. “It broughtbackall theawfulmemo- ries of losing John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King,” she says. “The Beatles had come just after JFK’s assassina- tion, right at the right time, to get young people out of that rut and that depression. And now some- bodyhadkilledJohn.” In 1995, not long after joining
the Come Together Beatles Fan Club in San Diego, Mundt heard that Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, who had been sen- tencedto20yearstolife,might, in fivemore years, be getting out of prison. So Mundt began circulating petitions, gathering signatures of
fans who also didn’t want to see Chapman out of jail — ever. “I realized that, if nobody did any- thing, hemight just slip through the cracks and be out and free to dowhateverhewantedtodo, and he should not be allowed to do that,” she says. There was another reason. “It
wasmyopinionthat, ifhegotout, somebody was going to kill him,” shesays. “AndIdidn’tbelievethat was something that John would want. He didn’t believe in an eye for aneye,he believedinpeace.” Mundt gathered 700 signa-
tures the weekend of the Beatle Fair and by October 2000, after circulating the petition online and to fan clubs around the world, had 35,000 signatures. So the grocery clerk fromSanDiego flew to Attica State Prison in Up- state New York — on her own dime — to deliver the signatures and protest Chapman’s possible release outside the prison gates. (He is still inprison.) “John’s death was such a
waste,”Mundt says. “Itwasoneof the stupidest things ever done. I’m 58 now — I look at what I’ve accomplished in the last 18 years, since I was 40,” says the breast cancer survivor. “To have that time taken away, in your own life . . . it’s just awaste.”
style@washpost.com
Hurwitz is a freelancewriter. 6
ONWASHINGTONPOST.COM Do you rememberwhere you
werewhen you heard the news of Lennon’s death? Share your memories
atwashingtonpost.com/ style or tweet themwith the hashtag #wherewereyou.
sumestheirworkwith small com- panies in and around the city, but impression-wise, “Mojo” repre- sents a big step up for each of them. Gallu and 2ndStage have done a service, putting each un- der a spotlight. Myers turns Skinny into such a commendably petulant irritant that, like the other characters, you will feel an irresistibleurge towringhis neck. Dewberry entertainingly invests Sweets with the personality tics of a young man harboring multiple anxieties. Even more effective is Gavigan, whose fine veneer of swagger conveys both the resent- ments and insecurities of a small- time hood who’s got the will but not the wit to lead. Gallu stages the play arena-
style, in Studio’s raw penthouse space. With just a few rows of seats on each of the theater’s four sides, everyone is practically breathingonthe
actors.This does put a bit of extra pressure on the performances: You can hear all too clearly that some in the cast aremoreproficient than others in approximating the vowels of low- er-class London. But the configu- ration also gives you an inviting opportunity to hunkerdownwith these characters, to view up close what transpires when their goals conflict and their eyes meet. The eyes that have the trickiest
task belong to Daniel Eichner, who plays Baby, the erratic, enti- tled son of the club’s owner and a bloke who gets his jollies tor-
menting the easily provoked Skinny. (In two instances, the lights come up on a scene that illuminates the extremes of Baby’s proclivities.)Babysupplies a goodly portion of the evening’s tension, its increasingly apparent malice; you laugh during “Mojo,” but a sense of dread should cut through some of the giggles. You get the feeling that embodying a threat does not come naturally to Eichner, or that he and the direc- tor struggled with how soon in the evening to reveal the depth of Baby’s pathology. In either case, the air needs to be suffused with a moreprofound degree of menace. Even so, Eichner’s reaction
pays off in the play’s culminating sequence, when an antipathy that’sbeensimmeringall through “Mojo” reaches its inevitable boil- ing point. It’s thanks to the au- thoritative performance by Mc- Kenzie, as a weak man desperate to project strength, that the lid is kept on convincingly as long as it has been. Ultimately, though, McKenzie’s Mickey proves as helpless as any of his charges to alter the course of nefarious events. Gallu directs “Mojo” with a
keen understanding of its pecu- liarly nervous energy, of the way terror can heighten a moment and hilarity can make itself felt, even on the precipice of violence. It’s mayhem of a high order.
marksp@washpost.com
Mojo
by Jez Butterworth. Directed by Christopher Gallu. Sets, Luciana
Stecconi; costumes, Frank Labovitz; lighting, John Burkland; sound,
Brendon Vierra; choreography, Joe Isenberg; dialects, Elizabeth van den
Berg. About2½hours. Through Dec. 26 at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St.NW. Visit
www.studiotheatre.org or call 202-332-3300.
SCOTT SUCHMAN
NE’ER-DO-WELLS: Daniel Eichner, left, as Baby and Scot McKenzie asMickey in“Mojo” at Studio 2ndStage.
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