THE NIGHT THE BEATLES CHANGED POP CULTURE

Seventy-three million viewers tuned in to “The Ed Sullivan Show” that Sunday in 1964. It was Feb. 9, and Americans of all ages wanted to see what the fuss was about over four mop-top lads from Liverpool. But none more so than the teen and pre-teen girls who swooned over The Beatles’ songs on the radio.

The Beatles playing on the Ed Sullivan Show. 

The theater — where David Letterman’s show tapes now — only held 700-some-odd seats, and reports say the show got 50,000 requests for tickets.

The Post caught up with three of the lucky local girls who got inside and screamed their hearts out for The Beatles.

Toni Scott, of Flushing, Queens, was 14 and on her first date. Her neighbor Howie, a year or two older, had asked her.

Long Islander Alice Kestin, also then 14, listened to The Beatles “all the time” on WMCA, WABC and WINS, the city’s Top 40 stations in 1964. A classmate, Fred Marrone, had sent for Sullivan tickets a while back, and got four for The Beatles show. They went with a couple other pals.

Linda Reig — then Plotnikoff — was just 12 when she followed the Fab Four around town. First, she caught The Beatles at the newly renamed Kennedy Airport, where the group landed. “We lived, like, 20 minutes from the airport,” in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, says Linda. “So I begged my mom to take me there. I cut school.”

After participating in the screaming and carrying on at the airport — “I couldn’t see much of The Beatles. I was little, I’m still little, only 5 foot,” Linda says. “I begged my mom to take me into the city, to the Plaza.”

The scene there, she recalls, “was chaotic. There were thousands and thousands of kids.”

Linda and her mother couldn’t get near the hotel where The Beatles were staying; they stood across the street. “We saw [the band] at the window, we saw them waving,” she says, as full of excitement as if it happened yesterday, not 50 years ago.

On Sunday, she saw them play live on “Ed Sullivan.”

Linda, who wore all of her “I Love Paul” buttons, was screaming, “Paul!”

“Just Paul,” she says.

She had gotten her tickets through a cousin who had concert-ticket connections around town. Her 19-year-old brother — “he hated The Beatles” — drove and accompanied her to the show.

Sitting in the back of the balcony, Linda couldn’t see much, but that didn’t stop her from yelling her heart out.

“Every time I got up to stand and scream, my brother would make me sit down. ‘You’re embarrassing me,’ ” he told her. In all the noise, Linda says she could hear The Beatles “a little bit.”

Alice, who clipped Beatles pictures from magazines and covered her dresser mirror with them at home, was in the balcony for a show that taped earlier in the day. (That particular performance aired two weeks later, on Feb. 23.) “When everybody was screaming at Ringo and George,” she says, “my friend and I would scream at Paul and John, so that we could get their attention — and occasionally, they’d wave or blow kisses.

“My God, it was just like being in a dream.”

Queens girl Toni says, “I was totally in love.” But not with her date, Howie.

Dressed in her finest sailor suit, Toni recalls, “I was screaming, ‘Ringo!’

“Ringo and George were my faves. Kinda the underdogs. It wasn’t that I didn’t love the other two. I was probably willing to settle for something more attainable,” she laughs.

“Poor Howie, he didn’t have a chance,” Toni says. “There were times, I was sure, that I forgot that Howie was the reason I was there. He didn’t try to hold my hand, and he just kept saying, ‘Shhh, shhhh.’ He told me, ‘I don’t get it.’ ’’

The curly-headed boy next door also told his Beatles-besotted date, “You know, I’m not wearing my hair like that. I can never wear my hair like that.”

Says Toni, “I don’t think I even said anything to him. I was in another world.”

“[The experience] was incredible,” Linda remembers. “But it was so short. They had other people on the show, but everyone was screaming over them. Nobody wanted to hear these other people. They should have had a show just about The Beatles. That would have been perfect.”

Toni got into the music business herself, designing album covers for Sire Records. Today, she is an interior designer in New Jersey.

Alice, now in real estate in New Jersey, says if she were to run into, say, Paul today, she’d tell him: “I just enjoyed everything he did from the time I was 14 years old.”

And Linda now lives in Florida, but she did end up living her teenage dream during the 1970s: She worked for Apple Records in New York and, yes, she met The Beatles.