Sometimes the peace-and-love message has to be celebrated in near-drive-by status, at least when there’s still a pandemic going on and you’re a Beatle trying not to draw a crowd. And so Ringo Starr’s annual birthday celebration happened in somewhat furtive fashion Wednesday, as he met with press and posed for photos in front of his peace-sign statue in the park at the corner of Santa Monica and Canon in Beverly Hills.
Starr’s birthday gatherings are usually bigger, pre-announced affairs, with a lot more than the 20 fans who had sussed out the location and were watching from behind a barricade Wednesday. Probably more fans were staking out the Capitol tower in Hollywood, where the star(r) led global “peace and love” shouts at noon Pacific time in 2014-17 and 2019. (Last year, the event was online-only, and in other years, it’d been based at Hard Rock Cafes around the world.)
He was turning 81 Wednesday, but said he didn’t pay any mind whether it was an odd number like that or last year’s major round number.
