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It was the summer of 1965, and the Beatles were preparing to go on stage.
"Five minutes!" Called the stage manager, and the band could feel the vibration of the screaming crowd, could feel their own blood thrumming through their bodies in anticipation of the reception that awaited them and the simple joy they took in playing together.
Paul McCartney was nearly unable to contain himself. There was nothing he loved more than running on to the stage to play his own songs, and singing his heart out. He wasn't nervous at all, only ready. How could he be nervous, when he knew he was born for this?
Finally, revving to go, he turned to his partner, John Lennon, and gave him a smile so big it threatened to swallow his whole handsome face.
“Johnny," he breathed, "Can you believe it? Can you believe we get to do this together, for a living? Isn’t this the coolest thing? I'm so excited to be playing with you! I’m so glad we’re partners! I’m so grateful that we’re together! I’m so happy we met! I've loved every day of this, even the hard days. I've just loved it, all of it. I can't wait to do this!"
Paul’s energy just rolled off him in waves. He was almost babbling, and John let him, because it was adorable, yes, but also because allowing Paul to express all of those feelings meant John did not have to.
Because he felt exactly the same way. He was excited, happy, grateful -- so glad to be with Paul he often blessed the day they met. But he could never say it. He was too cool, to image-conscious to say those words, to betray the excitement he felt whenever he and his Macca were working together, changing the whole world one song, one performance at a time.
He couldn't ever betray those feelings to anyone, though, sometimes not even to himself. It made him feel too vulnerable, to easy to laugh at, to easy to mock, or tease. And so he lived the giddy heights of his own exhilaration vicariously, through Paul, allowing him to express enough for both of them, because Paul was willing. He wasn't afraid of the social or peer-group repercussions. Then again, Paul was pretty much convinced that the band was peerless, as in had no peers, and that made him curiously free. Perhaps that's what happens, John considered, when you feel like you're doing the thing God created you to do.
He actually envied Paul his freedom, envied the quiet self-confidence that permitted Paul to express himself without fear, without worrying that if he showed too much happiness, too much pleasure in world before them, he would be seen as unhip, unsophisticated, uncool. Macca was plenty sophisticated, John knew, but he was also free, inside himself, and John loved that about him. His partner knew who he was enough to not give a damn what anyone else thought about it.
A rare gift, that ability to shrug off everyone else's opinions, especially in show business, which was a haven for the neurotic and the insecure and the perpetually needy, who never got enough of what they thought was love, and who would conform to every idea, every social trend, in order to feel like they belonged, like they fit in. If smiling was thought to be stupid, they would not smile.
And yet here was Paul, radiating pure and unrestrained joy -- practically shimmering with it.
Paul was happy, and he was brave enough to show it. What a lad.
"Two minutes," the stage manager cried out, and now the crowd was nearly atomic in its roar. Paul put one foot on the staircase, and could feel the vibration from the crowd above. He turned back once more and looked at John, his face flushed, his smile and his eyes putting out 10,000 megawatts of light. He was an arc of blinding, unbound euphoria. If I believed in the Rapture, Lennon thought, I'd expect God to pull him right up into Heaven, he's so lit!
Paul was shouting now, but the crowd was too much, and Lennon could only lip read, without his glasses, and guess at what McCartney was saying, which in reality was was nearly exactly what John imagined: "I’m about to burst out of my skin! I might have to bite you, Johnny! Isn't it great? Isn’t it great, Baby?”
And all John could do was silently smile and let himself gaze directly, with naked love, into Paul's eyes.
Because yes.
Yes.