Frivolous Friday: Reuniting the Beatles

The Beatles

Short tale about weird kid things.

I was eight when the Beatles broke up, and I was devastated. I mean, DEVASTATED. They weren’t just my favorite band: I’d grown up with the Beatles, I’d never lived in a world without the Beatles, and it had never occurred to me that they might not always be together.

So for a while after they broke up, I had daily fantasies in which I reunited the Beatles. With the help of Batman. The Beatles, Batman, and I would save the world in some way — usually by fighting some villain who was trying to destroy it — and in the process of saving the world, the Beatles would realize that they should get back together.

I’m tempted to write something schmaltzy and deep here, about how this showed some sort of character truth about me. Something like, “In a way, I think I’m still trying to reunite the Beatles and save the world, with Batman’s help.” But I think I was just a weird kid. Although maybe not so weird: I’m reminded of the bit in Amy Poehler’s memoir Yes, Please, where she describes her childhood game of pretending she was being chased by Russians. “I would pretend to wait until they were gone and then jump out of the leaves to get to the business of delivering the microchip into the hands of Pat Benatar.”

What was some of your weird kid stuff? Did you imagine saving the world with the help of celebrities and fictional characters?

Frivolous Fridays are the Orbit bloggers’ excuse to post about fun things we care about that may not have serious implications for atheism or social justice. Any day is a good day to write about whatever the heck we’re interested in (hey, we put “culture” in our tagline for a reason), but we sometimes have a hard time giving ourselves permission to do that. This is our way of encouraging each other to take a break from serious topics and have some fun. Check out what some of the other Orbiters are doing!

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Frivolous Friday: Reuniting the Beatles
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3 thoughts on “Frivolous Friday: Reuniting the Beatles

  1. 1

    When I was four or so, I had a dream where there were very low, pink clouds above the parking lot outside our house, and I jumped up to touch one. When I did, the clouds opened and a king on a giant, golden throne told me not to touch the clouds. It wasn’t God, mind; he was like a guy in his thirties, definitely not how I imagined the Christian God. (I didn’t believe in God – not for any great reasons, though, probably just to be contrarian. I also had a weird childhood thing of emphatically thinking “God doesn’t exist” to myself whenever I entered a church.)

    So after this, the Cloud King became my imaginary friend-slash-personal deity. He was fighting against the God that everyone else believed in, you see, and I was his special agent on Earth. And I promptly decided that people with dogs are all also agents. If the dog likes me, it’s an agent of the Cloud King, and if the dog doesn’t, it’s an agent of God and I should avoid that person.

  2. 2

    I used to tell myself stories about the Ninja Turtles going to Oz. Unfortunately, I don’t have the greatest imagination for making up stories, so they never really got any further than “Hey, we’re in Oz!” “Who are those big turtles?”

  3. 3

    I really liked bugs (and Thus the “Honey I Shrunk The Kids” movie), and when I was like 5 I fantasized about having a big jumping spider to ride on. Because I loved jumping spiders. Because being able to jump made them cool. Plus, their arrangement of eyes were the most aesthetically pleasing spider face I knew of. Not like those uncool-looking other spiders. Also praying mantises, very cool. And wasps, bees, and ants.

    I wasn’t into super heroes at all. I was nominally a fan of Spider Man because, duh, spiders!

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