I Went to See My Favorite Band with 2/3 of My Favorite People

 

I am a pandemic cliche, because March 2020 is when I and all the other depressed teenagers fell in love with Mother Mother, a 15-year-old Canadian alt-rock band.

To be fair, though, I didn't discover them on TikTok the way all the other depressed teenagers did; instead, my own personal resident depressed teenager, with whom I share a Spotify Premium account, started playing them on heavy rotation, and they just sort of absorbed into my subconscious. 

Actually, the first wave of the pandemic was pretty solid as far as discovering great new bands. My teenager also introduced me to Arctic Monkeys sometime in the 2020 months of the pandemic, and I spent many happy hours disassociating from my fear of imminent death AND my constantly-present family by listening to their complete discography on repeat. Our Spotify Wrapped that year was... repetitive. Delightful, but repetitive.

So in this newly post-pandemic world that I'm trying to live hard in, I was ecstatic to pack an overnight bag, shove my husband in the car, grab our kid from her Color Theory class (the other kid stayed home to walk the dog, feed the chickens, and go to her Chemistry class. Also, she's not into music), and drive four hours--

Okay, we stopped for gas, sandwiches, and autumn-themed Little Debbies. If you make an autumn-, Halloween-, or Christmas-themed snack food, I WILL BUY IT.

--straight to The Pageant in St. Louis, where this marvelous, miraculous, magical event was occurring: 

Here's my best memory of the night: after standing in line for an hour, getting wanded by security (who did not blink when I told him it was my steel-toed boots setting off the metal detector, because, you know, all the other depressed teenagers were wearing them, too!), and getting our hands stamped, we finally entered the venue, where my teenager stopped dead. 

"Are they playing tonight?" she asked, gesturing to the Vundabar backdrop that was already in place.

"Uh, yeah," I said, distracted by looking for the best spot to hold our ground for the next five hours. "Sly Stone had to pull out, so Vundabar's the other opening act."

The teenager, who was already happy about seeing Mother Mother live, proceeded to be very much more happy, because apparently I had not known that Vundabar is one of her favorite bands. It was a piece of lucky concert magic!

Here's my favorite song from the first opening act, Transviolet:

And here's that lucky concert magic in action!

Happy teenager spotted in the wild:

Here's my favorite Vundabar song:

And here's the most exciting moment of my life to date:

They played all of my favorite songs. Like, ALL of my favorite songs. All of them!

I rewrite my list of favorite Mother Mother songs constantly, but here's my current favorite, and part of that is because of how beautiful its live performance was:

I love everything about watching a favorite band perform live, but I love most the experience of the entire venue, cell phone flashlights on, singing along with a beloved song. It's what I remember sitting in a church pew and singing a hymn along with the church choir and the rest of the congregation to be like when I was very small.

I was beside myself with glee, and my teenager was sweet enough to record that glee for posterity:

I didn't mask, and even though I'm double-vaxxed and double boosted, I fully expected to get Covid here. But I did not! Another piece of lucky concert magic!

That teenager behind me HATED me, and kept putting her giant phone right over my head and speaking really loudly during songs. Everybody else in front of me had really giant phones, too, though, and the view through all of their screens was so sharp and saturated that at one point I leaned over and screamed in my teenager's ear, "How come everyone else's cell phone photos look better than ours?"

My teenager screamed back, "They've all got fancy iPhones!" 

We've got the cheapest Samsungs that AT&T will sell us, so that solves that!

However, my teenager took all these photos on my crappy Samsung Galaxy (Girl Scout Ambassador Photographer badge, here she comes!), and I think they are marvelous:

It was the BEST show. I was SO happy:

Hobbling back to the car on sore feet after midnight Central time wasn't quite as fun, and the entire post-midnight staff at the 24-hour McDonald's coincidentally also hated us, but still. It was the best.

The next morning, we had exactly enough time to walk to this creperie, eat a delicious crepe each (is this my first crepe ever? Perhaps!)--

Nutella, strawberries, and bananas!

--and walk back to the hotel before we had to check out and drive the four hours back home to get the teenager to her ballet studio in time for class. 

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!