It has been almost 50 years since Beatles’ legend John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono staged their now-iconic week-long ‘bed-ins’ as a way of making a peaceful protest against the Vietnam War in the late 1960’s.
Now the late singer’s former bandmate Sir Ringo Starr has joined Ono beneath the sheets to recreate the renowned protests, staging their own ‘bed-in’ in New York City to mark the annual ‘Come Together’ day.
“It’s an incredible day for me to finally go to bed with Yoko,” the iconic drummer told the Daily Mail, as they were joined by actor Jeff Bridges and a host of students for the event in New York City on Thursday.
Yoko, who was Lennon’s second wife, looked frail as she stepped out in New York City, where husband John was murdered by shooter Mark David Chapman, in the lobby of his apartment building The Dakota on December 8, 1980.
The 85-year-old, who was 36 when she tied the knot with the 29-year-old Liverpudlian star, stuck to her standard colour palette of black and white, wearing a black fedora-style hat and dark cat-eye sunglasses.
Ono, originally from Tokyo, wore a sheer black top underneath a black blazer jacket, and completed the look with a pair of contrasting white slacks for the event, which was also attended by NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio.
Starr, whose real name is Richard Starkey, lay down beside Ono, 85, and The Big Lebowski‘s Bridges, just as John and Yoko did in 1969, when they held two week-long ‘bed-ins for peace’. The couple, who married that same year, staged the non-violent protests by remaining in bed for an entire week, first at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam and again at Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth in Montreal.
Thursday’s ‘bed-in’ was part of the fifth annual ‘Come Together: NYC’ event, in collaboration with the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus, and theme was ‘activism’.