Richard Grayson author of Who Shall Kiss the Pig: Sex Stories For Teens, filed this report about the Ronnie Spector show at the McCarren Park Pool. You can see pictures on his blog.

By Richard Grayson

As we walked the few blocks up Lorimer Street from Dumbo Books HQ to the McCarren Park Pool at 5:30 p.m. last night, we were thinking about a boy we knew who graduated Meyer Levin Junior High School 285 in East Flatbush on the last Monday in June 1965.

Richie had just turned 14. Since the boys in the sixteen ninth-grade classes marched in and sat down, as did the girls on the other side of the auditorium, in size place, he was first out of the 250 of so boys. Next to him was the second-shortest boy, a Negro he’d never noticed before, and he didn’t know what to talk about with him. In Richie’s experience, you were probably best off talking baseball or music with Negro kids, since they were things everyone had in common, though he knew enough not to talk about the Beatles or Herman’s Hermits.

There were fewer people than last week at the pool, and a few more people with gray hair. We don’t have gray hair, but we might as well since everyone assumes we dye it. An older man, seeing our maroon Brooklyn College T-shirt with gold lettering, says, “I used to go there too.” We talk to this elderly person and discover that when he was an undergrad, we were serving on the alumni association board of directors.

Getting some Fuze diet white tea at the booth near the dodgeball players, we notice the skinny sky-blue JellyNYC balloon figures are up again, swaying in the wind. They weren’t here last week. Or were they and we just don’t remember?

With nine members of the band already onstage, Ronnie Spector enters holding a mike. She’s shapely in a zaftig way, in a black pantsuit. All the nine band members are wearing black too. “I dream about the boys,” she sings. Her hair is a modified 21st century beehive. The song is “I Wonder.” Crowds move forward, and we go closer too.

Ronnie Spector, after the first applause dies down, says that when she woke up she was afraid of it being rainy: “But, no, not in Brooklyn. This is where I started.
The Brooklyn Fox with Murray the K shows. I’ll never forget them.”

And she starts singing again:
Why do they say that we’re too young to go steady?
Don’t they believe it, that I love you already?
Gee the moon is shining bright
Wish I could go out tonight
Why don’t they let us fall in love?