A very, very happy birthday to the very, very wonderful Yoko Ono who turns 78 today!

I was introduced to Yoko Ono (I mean the concept of her; her work) when I was a little kid, probably 6-years-old, and I found a copy of her book Grapefruit at a church rummage sale for like a quarter. I’m not trying to impress anyone with how smart or sophisticated I was when I was a small child, Grapefruit was something I stumbled across. All I knew about her then was that she had something to do (I didn’t know what, exactly) with the Beatles, who I was all into because I’d recently seen Yellow Submarine at the local library.

Grapefruit, a tiny book of the short, simplistic and often hilarious aphorisms Yoko was known for, is not exactly beyond the comprehension level of a precocious child. Here are some examples:

Carry a bag of peas.
Leave a pea wherever you go.

or

Steal all the clocks and watches
in the world.
Destroy them.

or

Imagine the clouds dripping.
Dig a hole in your garden to
put them in.

It helps if you imagine Yoko’s voice reading it. I was always in love with Grapefruit and with Yoko Ono. There has never been a time when I wasn’t. I grabbed her albums from cut out bins and garage sales throughout the 70s. Yoko was awesome and made music like no other! I never got the whole “Yoko sucks” thing. It seemed so idiotic to me, then as now. She’s a charter member of my pantheon of personal heroes. I even own a “Box of Smile,” her conceptual art piece that mass mass produced in 1971 (it’s a small plastic box with a mirror inside).

When Yoko Ono announced on her Twitter feed in 2009 that she would answer some questions, she answered mine in the first batch. Keeping in mind what I wrote above, here’s what I asked and her reply:

@RichardMetzger
Do you find that children “get” your conceptual art pieces better than adults?

@yokoono
Not necessarily. There are kids who think they are grown ups and don’t want to know anything that smells like kids stuff. And there are grown-ups who are still kids at heart who clearly get my work.

That made my day, I can assure you. Here’s a vintage clip of Yoko Ono live in 1974 at Japan’s One Step Festival, doing “Mind Train”: