Thirty years ago today, I was living in up-state New York, in Saugherties, and the then-significant other and I headed down to Kingston to get a hotel room, because the Dolphins were having a winning season, and the only way to catch the game was on cable. We didn’t have cable, hence the field trip.

I was sitting on the bed, watching a nail-biter of a game, when Howard Cosell came on and said that John Lennon had been shot. Then he came back on and said that John was dead. I grabbed the phone and called Jayne, The Coolest Person in the World, and we sobbed over the phone on each other for what seemed like hours.

It was unthinkable that John was shot. It is still incomprehensible.

I met Yoko Ono six years ago at a White Party event (where I was wearing a mermaid costume…one of my finer moments). I wanted to tell her how my heart ached for her, how I admired her grace and her strength and her passion in keeping their message of peace alive in this day and age. I think I managed to ask if her hat were Phillip Tracey. It wasn’t. But it could have been.

This may be apocryphal, but it is still my favorite John Lennon quote: “I would have been a fisherman if I could, but I can’t because I’m a fucking genius.”

He was, and will always be.