Who was Ed Sullivan?
” she said. I said I didn’t think I understood the question. “I mean, who was he?” she said. “Was he, like, your generation’s David Letterman?” Not precisely, I said. “Well, what did he look like?” she said. I asked her if she meant that, were Ed Sullivan to walk into the room at that very moment, she would not recognize him? “No,” she said. “I wouldn’t.” Then she said: “Did he look like this?” She stood up and let her arms hang in front of her like an orangutan. I said that actually he had, indeed, looked a little like that. Where had she seen him? “I think I saw him in a Beatles video,” she said. The Beatles hadn’t made videos, I said; they had made movies. “Let me ask you something else,” she said. I said to go ahead. “Is it true that Elvis Presley and the Beatles made their first appearances on the Ed Sullivan show?” she said. I said basically that was true. “Well, why did you watch them, then?” she said. “If they hadn’t been on TV before, how did you know that you wanted to see th
