Chapter 5 of Days of A Christmas Carol Past, My Thirty Year Relationship With Victorian Ghosts

“It’s so sad! I can’t believe it.”

It was my mom talking to my sister in the hall outside my bedroom door, so early that cold morning, it was still dark. My thoughts went right to my dad in Eastern Europe.

He was there on a theater tour, even though his adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which he directed and which I was performing in, was still running at a regional theater in New Jersey.

I had heard news on TV that there was unrest in Poland, one of the countries my dad would visit. It was my vague understanding, at age fourteen, that there was a popular uprising against the Soviet government still in power in Poland at the time. It seemed like a dangerous place to be that December of 1980. My mom’s words of sadness and alarm did not bode well. I thought my dad must be in harm’s way.

Lying in bed, I remembered crying in the car when Dad drove me home after opening night of this, the second production of his “Carol”. He had given me a bouquet of flowers and said he would miss me and the whole family when he was away. He left almost immediately after that.

Then, waking up a bit more, I realized my mom sounded too detached to be talking about my dad. Even she, as unsentimental as she prided herself to be, would be more audibly upset if my dad were in danger.

What had happened? I don’t remember if I opened my door or if Mom did. I remember her asking me, “Do you know who John Lennon is?”

“Of course. One of The Beatles. I mean, he was. He has a new album out.”

“He’s been shot. Some looney shot him. He’s dead.”

“Oh, no!” is all I could say. OK, that’s what mom was talking about before.

My mom talked a lot about “the price of fame” during my childhood. She had told me about Judy Garland’s death when I was still a little girl watching The Wizard of Oz. Judy had taken too many sleeping pills, just like Marilyn Monroe had.

Mom had also told me all about the assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother, Robert, and Martin Luther King Jr. I knew a lot about celebrity deaths, but this is the first time I ever heard of a rock musician being shot. Why would anyone do that?

For the next few days, it seemed all that was in the news was John Lennon. The shooter was a crazed fan who had waited in front of Lennon’s New York City apartment building. He had given himself up to police and was probably mentally ill.

Ringo had visited Yoko, John’s second wife and mother of John’s five-year-old son. Five years old and no dad now. It was a Dickensian type of tragedy. The radio played a constant stream of Beatles and Lennon songs, many of which I heard for the first time that week, like “Strawberry Fields”. It was mind bending.

I had not been to the theater to perform as Tiny Tim’s sister since before this John Lennon thing had happened. He was shot the night of Monday, December eighth, and Mom heard Howard Cosell announce his death on TV during Monday Night Football. We didn’t have a show until Wednesday or Thursday.

I don’t remember performing those next few nights after John Lennon’s murder. I only remember the devastated actors, all younger than my parents, crying and hugging, all sharing what looked like the painful grief of having lost a childhood friend, which, I guess, they had.

And yet, A Christmas Carol had to go on, as did the Christmas season. I remember a couple of actors bravely helping us kids in the cast make paper snowflakes in the rehearsal room to pass the time when we were not on stage. One little boy, called the “swing boy” because he played several parts, was running around, not sitting at the table with us. That was his usual behavior.

He was, as rumor had it, “hyperactive,” as we called it in those days. His parents let everyone know he was not to eat candy or cookies or drink soda out of the vending machine. Yet, he still could not sit still most of the time. But I remember this seven or eight-year-old boy most for what he told us as we were cutting paper snowflakes.

“Last night I dreamed the ghost of John Lennon appeared in my bedroom, covered in chains like Jacob Marley.”

It was the longest sentence I’d heard that boy utter. The room got quiet. I think all of us there were contemplating that ghost, which seemed to be haunting us all that week, one way or another.

News reports said the assassin was under a delusion that he was John Lennon, and he had signed that name on the sign-out sheet at his work before he left for New York City. The swing boy must have heard that, because there, on the line where he was supposed to sign his name on the call sheet on the last day of that production of A Christmas Carol, the boy had signed “John Lennon”.

We, his fellow actors, thought it was creepy, but the grownups were also worried about him. I don’t know whatever happened to him.

I hope the boy merely turned out to be a serious Beatles and John Lennon fan, as I turned out to be. For me, the 1980s would not only be years of high school, college, and MTV, but also the start of my obsession with The Beatles and John Lennon which helped me cope with a lot of life to come.

I knew I was born on a cold December morning in New York City, but I later learned it happened at Roosevelt Hospital, the same place where John Lennon was brought fourteen Decembers later for the last few minutes of his life.

Maybe it’s a stretch, but this fact made me feel a strong connection to him, at a time when I had few friends and fewer goals. I was not haunted by John Lennon, but I felt a closeness to him. His spirit did not wear chains. It set me free of mine.

____________________________________________________This chapter was originally published on Medium.com.