We Left the Dog and Her Kid in the Hotel and Went to a Concert

Mother Mother was the first post-pandemic concert that I braved back in 2022. Cavetown was my kid's favorite when she was thirteen, and then she got me into him, too. So obviously, when the two bands announced that they were going on tour together this year, we had to go!

One thing that I feel like I have learned from the past couple of years of concerts is that I am too old and creaky to be battling these tweenagers and twenty-babies for standing space. I'm also short, and old enough that I get mad when I can't see. So for the very first time, I did something that I would probably have sneered the sneer of the poverty-stricken and able-bodied at when I, myself, was a twenty-baby:

Those are genuine VIP/Early Access armbands right there! We were front of the line along with all the other middle-aged moms and dads and their own lucky tweenagers and twenty-babies, all checked in and security screened and lined up ready to get our access to the pit a full 30 minutes before the billion other ticketholders... and then we were told that a storm was coming through and they made us all evacuate.

Let me just say that although the actual employees who worked at our venue were awesome, Live Nation's inclement weather plans suuuuuuck. They had a much more famous fumble that same night, when a sold-out Noah Kahan concert got cancelled after the crowd was already there, and nobody knew what was going on and nobody knew how to evacuate and nobody had cell service and everyone was confused. In our case, the entire crowd of Early Access ticketholders, and an ever-increasing crowd of regular ticketholders, walked behind a single employee who guided us A FULL MILE in the hot, muggy weather via various sidewalks and footpaths to a parking garage near Soldier's Field, where we all just sort of dispersed ourselves inside and milled about:

All those people facing left are mobbing an honest-to-god Snapple machine just outside the frame. I swear that I had not so much as seen a Snapple in twenty years until that afternoon, when I saw about a hundred come out of that machine. Whoever owns that Snapple machine had a GREAT day!

Here's me, looking like I could really use a Snapple:

We hung out in the parking garage for nearly an hour, during which time it never rained, and then we all hiked in a big mob the mile back to the Huntington Bank Pavilion, where absolute chaos was in progress. There were multiple lines, but it was unclear who had organized said lines or how they were structured or where they went. The VIP line was long gone. Mostly there was just a big crowd of people milling toward the one entrance, with everyone being confused and having different ideas about what everyone else was meant to be doing. 

Matt and the kid and I sort of milled purposelessly along with everyone else, and then someone said that someone else said that they were letting people with VIP wristbands through another entrance, so we went over there and milled about, and indeed, every now and then an employee would call for VIPs, and we'd all hold up our wristbands and mill our way to the front, and she'd let us through a few at a time back through the security line and back into the venue.

Thoughts and prayers for the VIP Early Access ticketholders who hadn't checked in and gotten their wristband by the time we were evacuated, and also for the regular ticketholders, because I saw on reddit later that many of them were still in line to get in long after the concert had started!

But silver lining: what with all the chaos and milling about and what-have-you, the three of us somehow managed to get spots right at the barrier in front of the stage. The only person I had to try to see over was this cameraman!

My personal rule for being right in front of the stage is that if you're there, you do the work. And so we manfully did our part as the opening act's biggest fans, as well:

Fortunately, it wasn't a challenge to be the biggest fans of Meet Me @ the Altar, because they were so good!

Here's a look back at the crowd between sets, when reddit tells me that about half the ticketholders were still waiting in line outside:

I'm SO glad I'm not standing in the back, craning my neck and sharing sweat with strangers on all sides. Such is the burden, and the beauty, of old age.

And here's what we were all waiting for!

I wanted to enjoy my favorite songs, but I also wanted to get some videos of my favorite songs, but I also wanted to sing along to my favorite songs but I learned at the last Cavetown concert that singing along while I video is suuuuch a bad idea because shockingly, I am SUCH a bad singer! I am an enthusiastic singer, but I am apparently reliably flat! So my strategy was to get at least a verse or a chorus of my favorite songs on video, then enjoy the rest.

I mostly refrained from singing while I was videoing, but I did not refrain from dancing, and I do not regret this. Enjoy the camera shake!

The kid and I spent the time between sets mostly gossiping, peoplewatching, and discussing how her older sister would have HAAAAATED being there with us. 

My partner was as miserable as she would have been, but he's a team player and is generally happy to hang out with us and hold our bags and hit the merch tent with screenshots of what we want, etc. He's the perfect concert partner!

The next week I would be in my doctor's office trying to get an audiologist referral, and when she asked me if I'd been subject to any especially loud noises recently, I would say no, but then when I got home I'd remember this moment and have to mark the "You accidentally lie about something" square off my Doctor Visit BINGO card. To be fair, my hearing has been deteriorating for a couple of years now, but also... um, as a matter of fact, I HAVE been subject to some especially loud noises lately, and I couldn't have been more excited to have been so!

I'm more of the Mother Mother fan and the kid is more of the Cavetown fan, but I still couldn't help sneaking peeks at her during the Mother Mother set so I could watch her having fun. It's objectively SOOOOO creepy to stare at people's faces, but I am fully leaning into my Soon-to-be Empty Nester Midlife Crisis Mindset, and I am soaking in that baby's face!

Also, can I just be extra middle-aged here and say that I love that she doesn't have her phone in front of her face? She's being much more Present in the Moment than I am, since I'm the one snapping blurry little pics and taking shaky little videos!

I was SO excited about this double headliner, and I definitely loved it, but just between us, I preferred the 2022 concert when Mother Mother was the sole headliner and played a super long set that included every single one of my favorite songs. Here, their set was still over an hour, but they omitted a couple of songs I love and condensed my absolute favorite song into kind of a medley. Here's a snippet of me cherishing the couple of verses we got to hear:

But here's the proper whole song so you can cherish it, too:

Nevertheless, we did get through a goodly number of my favorite songs:

Just picture me incandescent with joy!

Almost as soon as the concert had finished, the storm that we'd evacuated for earlier finally hit, and it absolutely dumped down. I have never experienced rain that intense! It was like actual buckets of water being poured directly on our heads, and it was super fun figuring out where to get the bus in the dark and the crowds and the buckets of rain and, it turned out, the fact that they'd closed off the street that the bus stop was on and so decided to just put the bus stop... somewhere else. 

And then it turned out that the bus also wasn't making proper stops, but was just stopping whenever someone dinged the bell? And not even at the next bus stop after the ding, but right when you dinged the bell the bus would screech to a stop and out you went into the maelstrom! So we accidentally got off several blocks too early, which wouldn't have been a big deal if it hadn't been, you know, DUMPING DOWN ACTUAL BUCKETS OF WATER ON OUR HEADS. We ended up scurrying between awnings, stopping under each awning to catch our breath and be upset, and then scurrying for the next awning, occasionally ending up under the same awning with other sodden souls. At least I wasn't worried about being crimed, because how could one possibly manage to hold us up in such a downpour?

The older kid did NOT appreciate being woken up when the three of us poured ourselves, dripping, into our hotel room, but OMG I was so happy to exchange my wet clothes--wet down to the undies, y'all!--for a hot shower, a pair of sweats, my brand-new concert T-shirt, and a heaping pile of McDonald's. 

The next time the four of us take a road trip together, it will be to drop them both off at their colleges!

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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!