I’ve been noticing a trend among my friends lately: claiming a cool, avant-garde artist as your first concert, only to sheepishly admit it was REALLY…oh, I don’t know. New Kids on the Block.
I’m just as guilty as the next 90s kid. For years, I claimed Peter Murphy as my first. Oh, Bauhaus, with all your dark gothy glory, and then the pop strings swirlings of “Cuts You Up”. And Peter himself, all pale and malnourished at the height of my Anne Rice reading years. Come ON. Who wouldn’t claim him?
And it was the first concert that I risked rebuke for. I went, alone, against my parent’s wishes. I took the Metro to George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium, and bought my ticket at the door with my babysitting money. It was a school night, and I’d asked permission and been denied. I was 14.
It was an amazing show, but I spent the whole Metro ride home with a pit in my stomach, imagining the phone call I’d have to make at the other end of the Red Line Metro. The one where I’d call my mom, at 11 pm on a school night, and sheepishly admit that I wasn’t babysitting, that I had gone to the concert, and could she please come pick me up?
My logic was flawless. My folks thought that I wouldn’t be safe at a concert alone. So I would go, come home safe, and they’d slap themselves on the forehead and say, “DUH! We should TOTALLY let Lindsay do whatever she wants. She’ll win eventually, with her Jedi mind tricks…Let’s just make it easy on ourselves!”
But sadly, my parents never saw the light. My mom did pick me up, in our maroon Chevy Impala wagon. I was quite grounded, and got a big speech about Gothy things being all dark and nasty. Imagine the eye-rolling, my friends. It was epic.
But my REAL first concert was the year before. Three friends and I were escorted, BY my parents, to see Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, also at GW. We all took the metro down together, with my friends and I disdaining any knowledge of my parents. We kept up a façade of being chic urbanites, out for a night on the town. Or, so we thought. We were probably more like the gaggles of cuties I see everywhere with store names emblazoned on their heinies, ordering Frappucinos. Except we wore black and stuff.
The funniest thing: There was so much weed being smoked at that concert, I swear to you my mom got a contact high. Now, my mom was known, in a very loving way, as June Cleaver among my cohorts. She just liked everything to be as normal and happy as possible. And then she got…me. Gothy teenager=not happy. But she tried really hard. That night’s one of the only times I remember not being embarrassed at the mere fact that I had a mother.
The metro ride home was so funny…maybe we were all buzzed, I don’t know. Suddenly it didn’t matter that my parents were my parents, only that we had all just shared this incredible experience. I remember my dad humming “Tomorrow People”, as my mom bopped along beside him. I felt a warm calm that was not a hallmark of my teenage years.
“Your parents are so cool,” someone said. And I rolled my eyes and was all, “Whatever.” But I remember thinking, in a quiet, internal voice that trumped my usual spitefulness, “Yeah. They are.”
So my confession: I love me some parents, and happy reggae music. 
Quick, take away my Goth card!
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