THE BEATLES IN BALTIMORE

The Beatles perform onstage at the Baltimore Civic Center on Sept. 13, 1964. Note the drum kit for one of the other acts on the bill, the Bill Black Combo, off to the right.

It was important to look your best. After all, The Beatles were in town.

Today, it's hard to believe such things were important. But for four 15-year-old girls from Highlandtown, preparing to head into downtown Baltimore for a rock concert, such matters were vital. Who knew what could happen?

"In my mind, I thought for sure that Paul's gonna love me, he's gonna see me – in my little-girl fantasies, he'll know that eventually he'll marry me," explains Judy Comotto, now 65 and recently retired from running the continuing education program at Roland Park Country School, then 15 and, as Judy Troch, a star-struck teen totally in love with The Beatles. "We were all dressed to the nines. Little girls dressed up for occasions back then, with the patent leather shoes and a skirt with crinoline and your best ironed dress, your hair was perfect."

Comotto laughs heartily at her memories, and at her teeny-bopper naivete. As do the "we" she refers to – four grade-school friends, tight as could be back in '64, and still close decades later. How close? Close enough that they'll be coming back to Baltimore from all over the Northeast later this week, to mark what they all agree was among the most pivotal events of their young lives.

Come Saturday, it will be 50 years ago to the day that The Beatles, in the midst of their first U.S. tour and just seven months after conquering America from the stage of CBS' "Ed Sullivan Show," played a pair of concerts at what was then called the Baltimore Civic Center (it's now the Baltimore Arena, and looks pretty much the same as it did half a century ago).

It was a very big deal.

"It probably changed our lives, liking The Beatles," says Luisa Girlando, also 65, who lives in Annapolis and works for an airlines telecommunications company, when she isn't arranging reunions with her thick-as-thieves girlfriends. "It opened my eyes – The Beatles were a whole new, different sound. We were four good girls, and this is the only way that we could rebel – to like music that everybody else thought was awful."