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One Saturday we drove into Boston to see the Cowsills at the Hatch Shell beside the Charles River, a free concert that attracted 30,000 people. The Cowsills had seven kids, like our family. The band included the mother, Barbara, with WASPy good looks and au courant frosted hair, and five of her six sons - Paul, Will, Barry, Robert and John - handsome boys with cleft chins and mops of hair, and Susan, a year older than me, with a pixie haircut like mine, who made her live-concert debut that day. The Cowsills were the ideal American family, good-looking, clean-cut. In my memory, I linked the Cowsills with milk, the image of scrubbed wholesomeness. I thought this association was because of the cow in their name, but I'd forgotten that the Cowsills promoted milk in ads for the American Daily Association.
For a brief moment my mother dreams that we, too, could be a family band . . .
In Boston we parked a mile away, it seemed, and held hands as we weaved through the crowd, the paper-doll chain of us traipsing through the city streets to the field, where my mother spread a blanket and unpacked lunch. When the band played, the audience roared. My father lifted us one by one to his shoulders, and from that vaulted view I saw tiny Susan Cowsill way up on the stage tapping her tambourine as the speakers blared the hit song that everyone recognized, the crowd cheering as the Cowsills sang, flower in her hair, flowers everywhere / I love the flower girl, the family band and our family that day, as the song promised, happy, happy, happy.
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