Coming January it would be just 20 years to Elvis’s 100th Birthday.  That thought came to me last night at Miss Saigon (a thousand true stories.)  All I remembered from the first time were the helicopter and the faces of abandoned children.  I felt my soul feel the hurt of them all, including my own.  That first time it was closer and so was I, veteran of a different campaign in Southeast Asia: same same, but different.  Now I feel full of history.

The Fifties were sixty years ago.  Poison dwarfs wrecked the movie-house on Delamere at the first screening of Rock Around the Clock.  Bob Mitchum got punched by a husband in the Long Bar.  Elvis Presley became the best-known name in the world without the benefit of Twitter, Facebook, Fox or Sky.  The Thirties seemed like a really distant past, too far back to picture.  None of us had any idea of what the future, the Sixties, would be like.  I had a picture, when I thought about it, which was rarely, of a continuation of the time that we knew.  Elvis changed all that.

The King is dead.  Long live the King.