This evening on the CBS Evening News there was a story about my favorite fan on the Sullivan show. I always think of her as the "shock" girl. She comes on right after the camera pans to Ringo towards the end of "I wanna hold your hand." She is wearing glasses and is so excited and then calm down a bit and then sort of jumps a little as if someone had just shocked her. And while I have been trying to figure out who she was for years, I am glad that CBS found her.
You can watch their video here. This is the transcript of the article. (I want to keep it here for later years when it is gone from the CBS page)
Ed Sullivan, 50 years ago this Sunday -- it was a really big show. Fifty thousand people requested tickets to see The Beatles that night, but there were only 728 seats in CBS Studio 50 – which is known today as the Ed Sullivan Theater. Andrea Tebbets was 13 years old that night in 1964, and she scored the hottest ticket in town. "I remember just the thrill of hearing them start to sing," she said.
She had come from Connecticut with her mother to hear The Beatles American debut at The Ed Sullivan Show. Her grandfather, an advertising executive, had gotten them the tickets. In the theater, now home to David Letterman, they saw a section of open seats in the balcony. "And the usher said 'No, you can't sit there. That's for the screamers,'" Tebbets said. "And my mom to her enduring credit said, 'Oh, that's alright,'" she said. That night, Tebbets wouldn't just be part of the audience. She'd be part of a broadcast seen by more than 73 million people.
As the Beatles sang "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," the camera slowly swooped in over the band toward Ringo and then ..."There I am!" Tebbets said.
"I was chewing gum," she said. "I had the little ladybug earrings. I'd just had my ears pierced. And that's it."
She looked happy to be at the show.
"I was," she said. "I was beside myself. I really was."
"It was, I guess, my 15 seconds of fame. And also my 15 seconds of popularity in junior high school. Because I was about as uncool as you could get," she said. "Mostly known in school for being clumsy and a Girl Scout and the secretary of the science club, and then here I was on national television." As a fan, she'd collected Beatles' magazines and cards. At an exhibition opening this week at the Library of Performing Arts in New York, some of the souvenirs on display in a typical teenager's bedroom were actually hers.
"Oh, a museum piece, me," she said.
That 13-year-old girl grew up to be a tax attorney with the U.S. Justice Department. "Part of the whole Beatles' phenomenon was people like me," she said. "It was the fans. It was the screamers." Those who thought it all was just noise were wrong. It was the sound of the future.
