It was Marion Lyman-Mersereau’s 64th birthday party, but as the lithe, silvery blonde shook it up to the Beatles’ “I Saw Her Standing There,” played by a live band, she could almost have been “just 17,” as the song goes.
Having asked her guests to wear ’60s-era costumes and the band, Puna Rock, to play only Beatles songs, the radiant hostess wore a multicolored tie-dye T-shirt, bell-bottom jeans, slippers and flowers in her hair, flowers everywhere.
In her invitation, the Punahou social studies teacher, who sometimes contributes book reviews to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, added her own lyrics to John Lennon-Paul McCartney’s “When I’m Sixty-four”: “Now that I’m older, my hair has gone gray/…Will you eat and drink and help me celebrate?”
During the run-up to Ringo Starr’s Honolulu concert on Tuesday, the Star-Advertiser learned of Lyman-Mersereau’s Oct. 23 party at Medici’s in Manoa Marketplace while seeking out local fans. Assuming there are enough Beatlemaniacs to fill Blaisdell Arena for Starr’s show, could any of them be much younger than 64?
Yes, they could. At Lyman-Mersereau’s party, millennials clad in mod and hippie styles danced and cavorted to songs that dominated radio airwaves 20 years before they were born.
“They just played one of my favorite Beatles songs, ‘Rocky Raccoon,’” said Lyman-Mersereau’s 30-year-old son, Kaniela, who was sitting at a table near the stage with his girlfriend, Tasha Stiritz, 27.
“‘Here Comes the Sun’ is my alarm clock,” Stiritz said with a wide-eyed smile.
Sporting a beard and a dress shirt in a minifloral print, Kaniela’s brother, Kaiwi Lyman-Mersereau, 33, danced with his wife, Mailyn, 27, sylphlike in a bell-bottomed jumpsuit with cutaway sides.
Sharlyn Foo, a youthful 61, was hippie chic in a daisy headband and silky flared pants. “Bells are coming back,” she said.
The hostess’s niece, Aleui Lyman, 30, hair in braids, strutted in fringed suede boots and “my mod dress” with bell sleeves.
As the band played “In My Life,” Lyman and her boyfriend Robert Bounds, 34, exchanged smiles. “That’s our song,” Bounds said.
BEATLES fans “from middle-schoolers on up” shopped at Hungry Ear Records, said manager Jim Williams before the vintage-music store closed last month with plans to reopen in a to-be-announced new space. “Baby’s in Black” played over the audio system as Williams leafed through dozens of albums, from “Please Please Me” in 1963 to “Abbey Road” and “Let It Be” in 1969.
Customers on a Friday afternoon included Leon Mark, 20, a student at Kapiolani Community College whose favorites included “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Magical Mystery Tour,” and Andrew Cho, 23, who works at American Apparel in Ala Moana Center.
“I just bought ‘Help,’” Cho said. He explained that he grew up listening to Beatles albums that his Korean-born father played constantly, along with Pink Floyd.
Williams, 51, said he’d watched “the Beatles cartoon on TV when I was 3 to 4 years old.” He planned to take his 12-year-old daughter to see Ringo Starr at Blaisdell Arena.
STARR stopped off at Honolulu Airport in 1964 en route to Australia. Newspapers at the time ran photos of him with greeters in hula garb.
“We were hula models for Carter’s Gift & Picture Shop at the Hawaiian Village Hotel,” said Kanoe Kaye, 78, speaking by phone from her home in Orlando, Fla.
When she met Starr at the international terminal, “We did, like, small talk. He gave me his autograph,” Kaye said. “He looked tired.”
Presented with lei, “He said, ‘Thank you, they’re very nice,’” she remembered. “He had that British accent.”
Although she doesn’t really talk about the long-ago encounter, her four children like to bring it up, Kaye said. “They’re proud of it.”
THE ENDURING appeal of the Fab Four was explained by Eddie Mersereau, 45, at his aunt’s birthday party. “The Beatles are timeless, so you don’t have to be born in the ’60s,” he said. “‘She Loves You,’ ‘Hey, Jude’ — you can connect to it.”
This rang a bell. Cho, at Hungry Ear, had said “Yellow Submarine” was a childhood favorite, but he now preferred “Hey Jude” and “Eleanor Rigby.”
It was a reminder that the Beatles, perhaps more than any other group, could take a sad song and make it better.
