Waiting for Paul
Paul McCartney at Key Bank Center, November 14, 2025
November 20, 2025
There are different kinds of waiting. One type of waiting is painful and frightening. Say you found a lump and went to your doctor to get it biopsied, and now you wait, wait, and wait, dreading the call that might relegate all your innocently happy times to the past.
Another kind of waiting is excruciating in a most gorgeous way. This is the kind of waiting whose end result you know you’re going to love.
At 8:05 PM on November 14, 2025, I stood on the ground floor of the Key Bank Center in Buffalo, New York, as the floor-to-ceiling-high screens that had been scrolling photos of Paul McCartney’s musical career faded and Paul’s bass guitar began to fill the screen. The music — “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make”— slowly faded. Soon. Everyone was on their feet. It had to be very soon.
When I was a teenager, the Beatles changed my life utterly. Their music, their friendship, their wit, their art had brought out of me the creative exuberance I had been keeping to myself out of a belief that it was too weird, too overflowing — in short, too different from the coolness and self-containment I saw in the way the popular girls in my school behaved. In emphatically, expressively loving the Beatles, I opened up into being me.
I saw them perform live in Chicago in 1965. Now, sixty years later, I had splurged on a really good seat to see Paul.
As the guitar filled the screen, I got out my phone tapped on the video, for I wanted to record the wait and its triumphant end for my good friend and fellow Beatle- and Paul-lover, Carrie Field Pandis, back in Omaha.
Now the guitar exploded into radiant fragments, like a super nova, and the music shifted to pure sound, building to a crescendo. The lights went blue, and then came the introduction that none of us needed and all desired at that moment more than anything else: “Ladies and gentlemen…!”
You couldn’t hear the rest. As he walked onstage, the entire audience erupted into collective joy. A woman nearby shouted, “Paauuul,” drawing out the vowels, almost like a plea for the return of a long-lost love. And there he was, in person, Paul McCartney, former Beatle, indefatigable music maker, earnest charmer, the “cute Beatle of the 60s now 83 years old with jowls on his, yes, still handsome, face. He was walking back and forth on the stage just a few hundred feet away from me and waving to the crowds.
For the next three hours he sang, and I was on my feet the entire time, exhilarated, singing along, reconnected with part of the great force that taught me about love and spontaneity, quirkiness and friendship.
The following day, back at home, I played the video I’d made. I watched it over and over, for the way the wait exploded into his actual arrival felt exciting every time. It wasn’t until I had played that video several times that I realized that that woman with her plaintive cry — Paaaauul!” — was me.
What I’m reading…
At the recommendation of a friend I started reading Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City. At first I was put off by the theme, which, in the beginning had a tint of complaint about one woman’s experience living in a strange city, New York, and not knowing how to relate to people.
But Laing’s writing is exquisite, and I quickly became hooked. She writes about several artists, including Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper, and David Wojnarowicz — who also struggled to make connections in New York and were able to work that loneliness into their art. But she doesn’t just tell their stories, she delves deep into them to explore themes like how a lonely person’s sense that they are likely to be rejected makes them retreat even more into isolation, and how the AIDS epidemic exacerbated the fear and grief of illness by blaming those who were sick and refusing to get close to them or even offer them compassion.