yoko performed at the benefit for tonic on feb 19th 2005
"Benefit for Tonic: Yoko Ono & Sean Lennon, $50. Celebrate Yoko Ono's 72nd birthday party and make a donation to Tonic at the same time! "

NY Post (February 19th 2005) reports: "'We'll be pushing the envelope a little bit," Yoko Ono says of her performance tonight at the Lower East Side's Tonic, with her son, Sean Ono Lennon. "There's some multimedia, some movements - body movements. Sean and I will do a duet, with him playing instruments, and me on vocal." (--) "In the spirit of avant-garde adventure, Ono will close her show with an audience-participation piece, called ONOCHORD. "Each person will get a card when they come in the door," she explains. "I don't want to tell you too much, but at the end, they all do something, so we participate together. "Then they can take it out into the world."

the surprisingly sexy septuagenarian
New York Metro (from the February 14th 2005 issue): "When Yoko first came on the scene as a public figure, her hair was long and unkempt, her clothes loose, baggy, outrageous for the time. “It was such an improper thing to do, to grow your hair.” She giggles a childish giggle, still delighted at the naughtiness of her former self. It was after John Lennon was killed that she cut her hair into the henna’ed spikes she still wears, and adopted boxy men’s suits. “This was when people were all wearing nightgowns! I wasn’t wearing that,” she says. “I created a kind of outfit that made it easy for me to work. It’s a male society, and you have to not be totally different from them; you have to sort of use their vocabulary in some ways to deal with them.”

yoko ono - horizontal memories
Yoko Ono's two-hour lecture at Filmens hus in Oslo, Norway, was webcast live on Friday January 21st 2005: Yoko spoke at length about her films as they were being shown to the public - related anecdotes, stories, what she thought at the time they were being made; during the Blueprint For A Sunrise film she improvised a kind of a dance on the stage; she did some vocal modulations accompanied by piano music by Sean Lennon who also sung one of his new songs at one point of the Q&A section. This lecture opened her art exhibition in Oslo, Norway.

love rocks
Rolling Stone (January 2005): Yoko Ono is among the thirty-two artists featured on the double-disc compilation, Love Rocks, due February 25th. Proceeds from the set go to the Human Rights Campaign, an organization dedicated to fighting for equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people. Yoko: "I just think it's a human rights issue. The constitution of this country is based on human rights and justice and freedom... For [politicians] to say, 'OK, we're going to change the constitution so the gays can't get married,' I think it is outrageous... I just immediately started to feel that it was important to send that message out that anybody can fall in love regardless of the difference of religion, or race, or sex, or age. Love is love. It's beautiful."