MY BOGGY BLOG: find your way through the murk

A Whole Lotta Gaga

Last night, DD and I got to go to the Lady Gaga concert at the Excel Energy Center. Yay for the free tickets I won from a local radio station! I had wanted to see LG but wasn't sure I wanted to actually shell out for the tickets, so this worked out well.

This was really the first concert for DD (19), and the first big-time-flashy-pop-star-phenomenon concert I'd been to... I mean, I'd gone to concerts in the 70s and 80s before there were jumbo-trons and tons of costume changes. And the concerts I've been to in the last 20 years have been folk singers like the Indigo Girls, who are accoustically wonderful but they barely move around on stage and certainly do not change outfits. So this was pretty new for both of us.

Before the concert, we hung around outside the Excel enjoying the people watching. I knew it would be good and it didn't disappoint-- so many people dressing up like Gaga, or mimicking something from her videos, or just dressing weird. All kinds of bouffy hair in all kinds of colors, a bubble wrap dress, yellow "dresses" made of caution tape, some S&M types in chains and leather, teetering high heels, a few drag queens. We got asked to take people's pictures with their cameras 3 or 4 times. There were also some proselitizers waving confusingly illogical signs and yelling about Jesus and hell, and workers from Out Front Minnesota asking people to sign petitions to be given to the governor about supporting gay marriage (we gladly signed).

I'd never been in the Excel, and our seats were up in section 201. Man, this place is HUGE, and our seats were almost directly stage left, way at the top of the arena, and all the seats seem to go up vertically, so it was easy to get vertigo looking down. The jumbo-tron screens were perpendicular to us, so we couldn't really watch them, and anything on the stage looked like a little Lego figure. Oh well, free seats!

After sitting through the strange, pompous warm-up band (I'm not even going to bother to look up who they were), we walked around a bit, looked a little for my SIL who was there across the arena from us somewhere (we didn't find her). We went back to our seats and Gaga came on... I'm trying to remember her first number, maybe "Let's Dance." But it wasn't long before some woman tapped me on the shoulder, holding up 2 tickets to me and asking if we'd like to move downstairs to section 101, directly below where we were sitting.

At first I was suspicious... was she asking me to trade tickets with her, was this a scam? But I took the tickets and noticed she was doing the same for others in our pitiful section. After convincing DD that we should take the time to move downstairs ("but we might miss something!"), we followed others down the stairs and found our new seats, smack dab in the middle of a crowded row. It was definitely a good move-- upstairs, we'd been looking down on the concert, pretty removed from it, but in our new seats, we were able to see a lot better (still couldn't see the screens at all and couldn't make out Gaga's face, but I got a good view of her curvaceous buttocks and could see how strong the muscles in her legs were!). We were a part of a dense, gyrating crowd, a sea of people, and there was energy here. Thank you, Anonymous Ticket Lady, for making our concert experience better!

Gaga sang and danced for a bit over 2 hours-- and it was a very energetic concert. She changed costumes about every 2 songs, leaving the stage while electronic music played. She had a lot of dancers and choreographed moves, very elaborate costumes like this huge white bird-looking dress, a huge train and headdress, and she could barely move in it (she stood on a giant disk that lifted her high into the air). During her "Monster" song, she wore another white costume, this one a sleeker outfit that had a headdress that resembled a jelly-fish-looking-muppet.

She liked to talk to the crowd a lot, too. She likes to address her fans as her "little monsters," and she talks all motherly to them... kind of. She swears a lot (doesn't bother me), and gets a little preachy, giving advice about loving yourself and being who you need to be. Good messages even if done a little heavy-handed. I had more of a problem with her frequent encouragement to her fans to get drunk and drink more-- I guess it's just edgy and rebellious, an image she likes to portray, but I grew up with alcoholics so I'm sensitive about this. Yeah, I drink moderately, have been known to get excited about drinking... but do we really need an icon encouragiing everyone to get drunk? At one point, she said something like, "I smell marijauna. Don't you know it's not nice to not share?" Hmmm... not necessary, I think.

Her biggest numbers were at the end. Her last song was "Papparazzi" (sorry, don't have spell check right now), and up sprang a giant monster figure on stage, DD said it was like a lantern fish. It looked like a giant lit-up octopus with teeth, its long tentacles waving, being manneuvered by the back-up dancers. Gaga sang to the monster, she wearing a little green Tinker Bell-type dress and white heels. The whole crowd sang and danced.

She came back for an encore and did "Bad Romance," which was electrifying for the crowd. For the whole concert, there was a long cat-walk and extended stage that they used to be more a part of the crowd, and Gaga and her dancers finished off the night out there. It was great to be a part of it, even if we did get jostled and splashed on by the beer-drinkers around us.

After the concert, we took our time leaving, knowing that trying to exit our parking ramp was going to take forever. We sat and watched the stagehands taking apart the stage construction until the security guards asked us to leave, went outside and people watched some more. It was very festive, with everyone still in an excited party mood. Some guys with giant plastic buckets were drumming fiercely on the pavement, and people were dancing and singing all around them, a kind of jungle energy. Even though we spent a lot of time outside, when we finally got to our parking ramp, we saw that cars were at a standstill in trying to exit. No movement at all. So like many, we just sat in our car listening to music, and watching the active crowd in the ramp, many of whom were blasting their own music and dancing in the ramp aisles. We didn't even try to leave our parking spot for another half hour.

Home around midnight... not bad at all. I'm so glad I won the tickets and scored even better ones. Now I'll know what to expect if I try to go to another big pop-star-phenomenon-type concert. Very fun!

That First-Day-of-School Feeling

Well, it's here. The 15 yr old is already off to the first day of 10th grade, a backpack full of new notebooks, folders and mechanical pencils. Even though my older kids went to his high school, I only recognize one of the teachers' names on his schedule... making me wonder if he has a bunch of new teachers. I am hoping this will be a good year for him, after the struggles of 9th grade. He always seemed to be working hard but was not quite focused, so he was always behind and missing work. This summer he showed great progress in tackling his summer school Algebra work, self-motivated in the evenings to getting through the material. I'm sure it helped that he just had to focus on one class... I hope he can manage to keep his head above water this year with 6 classes (at least one of them is gym, so that shouldn't be too stressful).

School years always do feel like beginnings to me, even as they are about endings. End of summer, end of relaxed schedules, end of oppressive heat (well, we'll see... September can be pretty hot). But the beginning of a new routine, a chance to change old patterns and habits, to learn something new, to meet new people. As we are packing up the 19 year old for college today, I'm hoping for all those new things for him, too, a fresh start and a good experience, even as I'm sad to see him go. The other 19 year old will still be around with me this week until she goes back, so that will help me ease into all this newness and the leavings. Change is hard, but there's a freshness about this change that feels good.

But for now, it's time to partake of the Betsy-Tacy Communion (at least one of them...)-- back to school muffins. It's a tradition. The McCloskey's always had muffins on the first day of school too... and so are we!