I Evoke a Distant Summer

Yesterday, was about as perfect a weather day as I can imagine.  It is yesterday's kind of weather that is summer to me.  Clear skies, temperature in the high 70's, little humidity. It made me think of a summer night 44 years ago.  I and a friend, who shortly would disappear out of the lives of all his high school friends, went to see the Beach Boys in concert at the Auditorium Theatre in Rochester.  This was when the Beach Boys were young.  Long before Brian Wilson went schizo and Dennis Wilson drowned, and Lord, I can't think of the name of the other one, the chubby one. Carl, . . .I think he's dead, too.

The opening act was a duo with only one hit song.  The song was "I Got You, Babe," and the duo was Sonny and Cher before they were famous.  Sonny dressed like a train engineer and Cher dressed in a raccoon coat.  Her hair was almost down to her butt.  Sonny pretended to smoke so he could toss his butt to the crowd.  Strange, sonny.

It was the summer of "California Girls," still my favorite 60's song and my current ring tone.  We had front row seats.  We were so close we got sprayed by band sweat, although, this was long before leaning onto stages or crowd surfing.  Heck, I wore a sport coat to the concert.  It was a madras sportcoat, which means very little to anyone who wasn't in high school from about '63 to '65, but believe me it was cool.  Dennis Wilson twice broke drumsticks and tossed the surviving half to the crowd.  They came nowhere near where I was sitting. Dennis tossed his sticks to girls.

The concert ended with the Boys singing "In My Room," probably the sweetest sounding of any Beach Boys song.  I left that concert elated, wishing "they all could be California girls."  People say that the most evocative of all senses is smell.  If I could have gotten a whiff of English Leather cologne yesterday, I might have been transported back there.