Los Angeles, Summer 1956
Staring at the television open-mouthed, I let my peanut butter and jelly sandwich drop onto the plate in my lap as chills ran up and down my body.
Home alone after school, I was sitting cross-legged (my favorite position, still) on the floor in front of the TV enjoying the peace and quiet and watching my favorite show, American Bandstand. "And now, ladies and gentlemen, Ray Charles," Dick Clark announced as the camera panned to a handsome man in sunglasses sitting at a piano.
"Georgia, Georgia . . . ," he began, and I burst into tears. I couldn't believe he was singing a song about my mom. As tears dripped onto my sandwich, I'd never felt more connected to anything in my life. Ray Charles's voice and the melody seemed to express exactly how I felt.
It took me weeks to get over seeing him sing, and in some ways, I never did, but then someone whose songs I first heard on the radio blew a hole in my understanding of the world and I was never, ever the same. As I stared at the TV with my mom watching The Ed Sullivan Show, a popular young singer named Elvis Presley filled the screen. Mom and I were two of the sixty million Americans who witnessed that historic performance in September 1956.
Even though Elvis was dressed quite traditionally that Sunday night, he looked and moved differently than any performer I'd ever seen. He began by singing "Don't Be Cruel," and by the time he broke into "Love Me Tender," I felt as if he was singing only to me. I wanted to jump right into the TV and be Elvis.
When I heard a year later that he was giving a concert at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles, I rushed home with stars in my eleven-year-old eyes. "Mom, Mom! Elvis is going to be at the Pan-Pacific! Can we go? . . . Please?" I was convinced that I had to be there. Secretly, I thought that he would spot me in the crowd and pick me, although I'm sure that's what every girl thought.
Luckily for me, my thirty-one-year-old mother was as crazy about Elvis as I was, a fact that impressed my friends because their moms didn't approve of his raw sexuality. To this day I don't know where she found the money, but somehow Georgia did. Mom and I dressed up and made our way into town, more like sisters than mother and daughter. Feeling the tension grow the closer we got to the Fairfax District, we soon found ourselves caught up in a pulsing mob of nine thousand noisy girls.
We were swept inside the auditorium on a wave of pure adrenaline. Our folding seats were about halfway back in the audience, but that was fine by me. Looking around at all the girls gazing in anticipation at the darkened stage, I could feel my heart pounding inside my flat little chest—a sensation I was to become all too familiar with later in life.
The stage was dark, but when the spotlights hit him, Elvis was there and he was magic. There was a roar from the crowd that was like nothing I had ever heard. An explosion of flashbulbs went off. I only wished I'd brought our little Kodak Brownie. Elvis was standing there in his famous gold suit, which was shimmering and changing color in the spotlights.
He was so handsome with that amazing smile and lustrous black hair, exactly the same color as mine. Everyone around us jumped to their feet and started screaming so hysterically that we could hardly hear a word of "Heartbreak Hotel." But, boy, we could see his moves—the way he gyrated his hips and shook his legs so that they quivered. Not content with making as much noise as they could, the girls began jumping up onto their chairs for a better view, which meant that from then on, we could only see Elvis's head and shoulders.
Being in the middle of that shrieking crowd was like being caught up in a massive swivel-hipped tidal wave, swept along with the hysteria toward the stage. I had no idea why everyone was acting so insane. I was too young to get that part of it, truthfully (but if I had been three years older and my mom had been three years younger, we would have fainted). It was the most exciting experience I'd ever had because I knew that I wanted to be on that stage in the spotlight one day too.
When I looked over at my mother, she was down for the count. We were both mesmerized. She looked so beautiful dressed in some amazing outfit that of all the girls in the place, including me, I felt sure that Elvis would have picked her.
Pressing my mouth to her ear so that she could hear, I cupped my hand over it and yelled, "Mom, can we stand on our seats and scream, too?"
"Yes," she replied, grinning like a teenager and taking off her high heels. "Come on, let's do it!" So we did, straining on our tip-toes to see him.
Glowing with happiness, I tried to work out if Elvis would be too old to marry me by the time I was grown, so that he could sing to me every day. Dreaming of being Mrs. Presley, I couldn't stop talking to Mom about Elvis for weeks as I floated around on a gold lamé cloud.
Quite the influencer, our guy.
