My Ticket to Ride

"A true tale of a young girl coming of age during the exhilarating first wave of Beatlemania ... In 1964, 16-year-old Janice struggles to find happiness after growing up in a broken home in Cleveland, Ohio. She is jolted by hearing the very first broadcast of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" on her AM radio and immediately falls in love with the Beatles and the sense of freedom and hopefulness their music offers. Together with a friend, she hatches a plan to escape their dreary lives and run away to London to meet the Fab Four. After attending the riotous first Beatles' concert in Cleveland on Sept. 15, 1964 (front row, center), the two girls make their escape aboard a TWA flight to "Beatleland." In London, they rent a flat, learn to live on their own, and venture out to the hip clubs of London's Soho neighborhood in search of the Beatles. Instead, they meet pair of delightful and polite English boys-musicians-who show them around the clubs and hitchhike with them to Liverpool. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, the two girls have become an international news story. Headlines in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic report that a search is on, and even the Beatles are involved. ("Beatles Join Hunt for Two American Runaways," the Daily Mail reports.) The adventure ends suddenly after 16 days when a London Metropolitan Police officer approaches Janice near Picadilly Circus: "Excuse me, miss, would you happen to be from Cleveland, Ohio?" The two girls are whisked from police station to U.S. embassy and (and a hasty press conference) hauled back to Cleveland with a police escort to encounter a nightmare in the juvenile justice system. As a result of all the publicity, Cleveland's mayor decrees that Rock and Roll concerts are banned from city facilities. Janice is punished. The adults around her tell her to forget her adventure and put it behind her. She doesn't speak of it for 50 years. Until now. A story for anyone who wonders what it was like to be caught up in that first wave of Beatlemania. Full of insight on an era when teenage girls exercising agency of their own was perceived as a threat by "responsible" adults in society"--