It's Yoko Ono's birthday

Sometimes, in an attempt to move away from the stereotype of "John Lennon's widow", Yoko Ono is written about as an "avant-garde artist". However, as the author of these lines remembers well, more than ten years ago at one of the art exhibitions in Kyiv (very, by the way, interesting in general) a small work by Ono was presented - and if there had not been a label with her last name, hardly anyone would have paid attention to this exhibit.

So whether someone likes it or not, Yoko Ono will remain in history as "John Lennon's widow". She is also called "the homewrecker of The Beatles", and this is also unlikely to correspond to reality. As Paul McCartney said several years ago, Lennon, whose parents separated, lived from the age of four in the family of his aunt Mimi, who raised him in a "repressive spirit". Therefore, McCartney explains, Lennon always wanted to "break out" - from his aunt's family, from society, from The Beatles. So, most likely, his relationship with Yoko was simply a trigger here.

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Does this relieve Yoko of responsibility in many unpleasant episodes of that time involving Lennon? Let's take, for example, the situation with Lennon's wife at the time, Cynthia, who, having returned to Greece earlier than planned, found John and Yoko Ono in their family home, meditating in dressing gowns on the veranda. According to another version - not on the veranda, but in the bedroom. And according to a third version, John even wanted her to "catch" them and was not at all embarrassed by this.

But the thing is that even if John himself was the initiator of this situation, Yoko could have refused to participate in it. But she did not refuse, although she should have understood what a mental (heartfelt, etc. - after all, such a "performance" was simply offensive to Cynthia) wound she was inflicting on another woman.

And if we are talking about performances, then the only performance with Yoko's participation that has remained in history is again connected with John Lennon. More than half a century ago, having registered their marriage in Gibraltar, the young couple rented a presidential suite at the Hilton, demanded that all the furniture be removed from it, leaving only a double bed, and sent a postcard to the media: "Come to Yoko and John's honeymoon: a lying protest, an Amsterdam hotel." Naturally, journalists flocked to them. John and Yoko received them, lying under a blanket in their pajamas, and from 9 am to 9 pm they answered questions from the media, and also talked about peace and the fact that it was time to end the war in Vietnam. All this was all the more piquant because not long before this they released their first album, "Two Virgins", which, musically, was absolutely nothing special, since there was no music on it. But the entire cover of the envelope was decorated with a photograph of naked John and Yoko.

There are many versions of "what it all was". We will put forward our own, based on the principle of "who benefits from this?" Later, Lennon wrote that, supposedly, "we decided that we would sell our product, which is called peace. And in order to sell it, we need bait, which we made a bed for." What's funny here is that John pretends to be a cool marketer, which he never was - The Beatles always did their business outside of music in a slipshod manner. And John didn't need advertising promotion: the breakup of the group, leaving his first wife for Yoko, etc., were already stirring up the press and fans.

But who needed all this was Yoko, whose main advantage, apparently, is her iron character. It seems that this is exactly the kind of woman Lennon needed, who, despite all his external "prickliness", remained a lonely teenager in his soul, thirsting for maternal love and guidance.

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