On February 18th, 2023, Yoko Ono turns 90. To mark the occasion, her son, Sean Ono Lennon, has launched a virtual ‘Wish Tree’ website where people can post their wishes online and, with the help of One Tree Planted, plant trees in Ono’s honour.
Ono came up with the concept of Wish Trees in 1996. Since then, she has collected a dizzying two million wishes from over 200 Wish Tree installations in 35 countries. This new ‘A Wish Tree for Yoko Ono’ website allows virtual wishes to be posted online via an interactive Wish Tree. You can visit the site here.
“Make a wish,” Ono wrote in her original instruction for the Wish Tree. “Write it down on a piece of paper
Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree. Ask your friend to do the same. Keep Wishing
Until the branches are covered with wishes.”
Yoko is also the subject of a new documentary set to revisit the week in 1972 when she and John Lennon hosted The Mike Douglas Show. Daytime Revolution was authorised by Sean Ono and Lennon and will feature rare archival footage from each of the five episodes broadcast in 1972.
Directed by Erik Nelson, the documentary will also include behind-the-scenes stories from the set of The Mike Douglas Show and conversations with surviving guests interviewed by Lennon and Ono. The couple’s five-episode stint saw them address a range of controversial topics, including envorntmal conservation and police brutality. The pair even interviewed activists Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panthers.
“It’s become a cliche that Woodstock was the defining moment of the counterculture,” Nelson said of his new documentary, “[but] when I watched these broadcasts in their entirety, I realised that, in reality, this week in 1972, when Lennon and Ono essentially hijacked the airwaves and presented the best minds and dreams of their generation to the widest possible mass audience… was as far as the counterculture would ever get.”