BALTIMORE ― It was important to look your best. After all, The Beatles were in town.

For four 15-year-old girls preparing to head into downtown Baltimore for a rock concert, such matters were vital. Who knew what could happen?

“In my mind, I thought for sure that Paul’s gonna love me, he’s gonna see me ― in my little-girl fantasies, he’ll know that eventually he’ll marry me,” explains Judy Comotto, now 65 and recently retired from running the continuing education program at Roland Park Country School in Baltimore, then 15 and, as Judy Troch, a star-struck teen totally in love with The Beatles. “We were all dressed to the nines. Little girls dressed up for occasions back then, with the patent leather shoes and a skirt with crinoline and your best ironed dress, your hair was perfect.”

Comotto laughs heartily at her memories, and at her teeny-bopper naivete. As do the “we” she refers to ― four grade-school friends, tight as could be back in 1964, and still close decades later. How close? Close enough that they planned to come back Baltimore from all over the Northeast to mark what they all agree was among the most pivotal events of their young lives.

Come Sept. 13, it will be 50 years ago to the day that The Beatles, in the midst of their first U.S. tour and just seven months after conquering America from the stage of CBS’ “Ed Sullivan Show,” played a pair of concerts at what was then called the Baltimore Civic Center (it’s now the Baltimore Arena, and looks pretty much the same as it did half a century ago).

It was a very big deal.

“It probably changed our lives, liking The Beatles,” says Luisa Girlando, also 65, who lives in Annapolis and works for an airlines telecommunications company, when she isn’t arranging reunions with her thick-as-thieves girlfriends. “It opened my eyes ― The Beatles were a whole new, different sound. We were four good girls, and this is the only way that we could rebel ― to like music that everybody else thought was awful.”

By Chris Kaltenbach

(The Baltimore Sun)

(MCT Information Services)