love me do; In 1964, Penelope Rowlands's Beatlemania landed her in the pages of The New York Times, and got the attention of her distracted mother.(experiences of a music fan)

Byline: Penelope Rowlands

The article, written by Gay Talese, ran in the September 21, 1964, issue of The New York Times. Titled "Beatles and Fans Meet Social Set," it described how almost 4,000 "hysterical teenagers, who should perhaps have been home in bed or doing their homework," had gathered at the Paramount Theater in Times Square the night before. Arriving hours before the band was due onstage, they "screamed and squealed at everything."

A photograph shows a row of young women doing exactly that behind a banner reading, beatles please stay here 4-ever. The girls have an operatic look: They could be a row of divas, mouths open wide in song, arms flung dramatically wide.

I'm standing dead center in the photo, pushing forward, a frenzied expression on my face. I'm flat-chested, freckle-faced, and curly-haired-a very young thirteen. For months I've been screaming and squealing every chance I get. I've snuck into the band's hotels with other similarly obsessed girls. I've chased after autographs, any possible souvenir, including a square of fabric from John Lennon's boxer shorts that I bought for a dollar from an ad in a fan magazine. The thought that this might be a hoax crossed my mind, but only briefly. I knew for a fact that this cloth had once touched a Beatle's flesh. Somehow I could tell.

When I opened the Times and saw the photo, after school in my family's crowded apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side, it could have been a thrill. But it distinctly wasn't. I prayed that my mother wouldn't see it, but no sooner was she home from her job at St. James's, our family church, than the phone rang with friends passing on the news. By the time my new stepfather-I couldn't bring myself to pronounce his name-came home to our apartment for the first time, I was well on my way to being grounded for the next 20 years.

It was the first day of their-our-new conjugal life. They'd headed off on their honeymoon the week before, leaving us children in the care of our maternal grandmother. Racing off to Bucks County, Pennsyl_vania, with a man we scarcely knew, my mother called out, "Be sure you don't go down to the Beatles' hotel while I'm gone!"

I ignored her, of course. I couldn't have done other_wise, for George Harrison was the most important person in my life. A photo that ran in Vogue in January 1964-their first mention in this magazine-shows him as he was then: 20, jocular, glossy-haired. I fell in love with him in that image. I knew that George would understand me as no one else did-and that I would do the same for him. Loving him was more than just a feeling. It came with a future, a life. I'd imagine us making the scene together in Swinging London-the locus of everything that mattered then. I kept his picture in a cheap gold frame from Lamston's and kissed it every night.