The Day John Lennon Died
“Sometimes you wonder, I mean really wonder. I know we make our own reality, and we always have a choice, but how much is preordained? Is there always a fork in the road, and are there two preordained paths that are equally preordained? There could be hundreds of paths where one could go this way or that way — there’s a choice, and it’s very strange sometimes.” ~John Lennon: The Last Interview, RollingStone
December 8, 1980.
That was the end of the Fall semester of my junior year of college. We were striking the set for the last production of the season for the Theater Department — The Shadow Box — for which I’d been the Properties Designer. Anything one did for any production at my university required undivided attention, generally to the exclusion of all other academic responsibilities. All that is to say that, like most of my classmates, finals were rolling up on us, we were way behind on classwork and wildly unprepared for cumulative tests, and none of us were sleeping much.
Late that morning, I was sitting on a bench in the Ruth Taylor Fine Arts Building between classes and I was so tired I could hardly breathe. My classmate and close friend, Sue Taylor — a very tall goddess of a gal with a long blonde braid — walked across the empty lobby and sat down next to me. She whispered.
“Someone shot John Lennon in New…
