I do recall the first time I saw a rock concert, however. That might’ve been the same summer I saw my first drag race. My first rock show was the Beatles at Dodgers Stadium in 1966. I was four years old. I remember schoolgirls screaming, throwing pennies, fainting and wetting themselves.

Okay, I don’t exactly remember girls wetting themselves, but I have heard that happened a lot during the days of Beatlemania, and I was definitely there that night.

My first drag race could’ve been the same summer I saw the Beatles. It was probably after.

Of course, I could just make something up about the exact date and location of my first drag race and act like I remember it like it was yesterday. (Ironically, I remember the Beatles playing “Yesterday” at Dodgers Stadium, but I don’t even remember “Yesterday” like it was yesterday.)

Or I could just kind of reverse-engineer the time and place and at least establish the general setting of my first drag race. For instance, I lived on 8th Street in San Fernando, west of Maclay Street and less than a mile from “the Pond.” Johnny Whitaker, the little red-headed kid from the “Family Affair” television situation comedy with Buffy and Mr. French, was two years older than me and lived a couple of blocks west, also on 8th Street. Occasionally I would see him walking to school, but we never said anything to each other. The Chicano kids on the playground said he was some stuck-up rich kid/child star. Finally, one morning I said hello to him and he said hello back, which was rather pleasant behavior and totally contrary to the scathing schoolyard scuttlebutt. Even though Johnny was actually pretty cool, his classmates resented that he was on television. My guess is that having curly red hair didn’t help his cause. To that end, one day the older Mexican kids pantsed him on the playground and threw his clothes over the fence and he had to climb the chain-link in his underwear. Which may or may not explain why after his show was cancelled, he became a Mormon missionary and then a drug addict.