Sunday night I took the boys to a rock concert. It was four hours long: Don Felder (formerly of the Eagles) opened, then Styx performed, and then Foreigner. We were way up in the nosebleed seats. The concert was loud, it ran late, and it was a lot of fun. Two thirds of the way through, during the changeover from Styx to Foreigner, Son 2 said to me, "I don't know how much you paid for these tickets – but whatever it was, it was worth it."
I told him, "Actually I sold you into indentured servitude to pay for them."
He answered, "That's fine – it's still worth it."
By the very end, … well, I think they still enjoyed it but actually their feelings were a little more nuanced. The audience had gotten steadily louder with each new performer, singing along when they knew the words and shrieking or squealing when they didn't, so that it was actually pretty hard to hear what Foreigner was singing. (I murmured to Son 1, who was sitting next to me, "This is why the Beatles stopped touring.") Also the boys knew most of the songs Don Felder sang, and a large fraction of the songs Styx sang, but not a lot of the songs Foreigner sang (other than "Cold as Ice" and maybe one or two others) … so they couldn't let memory fill in the gaps on those songs where the audience outshouted the performers.
Why did the audience get steadily louder? I assume there were three reasons. First, as the concert went on they just got more and more into it. This is pretty basic. Second, the concession stands were doing a brisk business in beer and wine all throughout the concert; so as it got later, the audience got steadily drunker and less inhibited. Third, when Don Felder started singing we were still in daylight; by the time Styx wrapped up and was replaced by Foreigner, we were sitting in the dark of night. That too helped to uninhibit the audience.
The boys don't drink – they are too young and on the whole they are pretty strait-laced – so they were critical of the audience for getting so toasted. But they did allow that there were some advantages to nightfall. A couple of rows in front of us was a young couple who spent most of the concert (when they weren't getting more beer) on their feet dancing … only their "dancing" seemed mostly to involve a good bit of caressing or groping each other's bodies. I was amused by them, and I didn't realize that they made the boys uncomfortable; but later, when we discussed it, the boys told me that one good part about the coming of the dark was that they could no longer see these two.
I did try to explain – again, this discussion was all afterwards – "Guys, it's a rock concert. This kind of thing is normal." Son 1 asked, "How many rock concerts have you been to, Dad?" I admitted that I wasn't quite sure but the number was pretty small; but I added that these were things everybody knew. Rock music was born as an ecstatic experience; the thing that differentiated it so starkly from so much of what went before was the raw and direct way it intoxicated the listener, just exactly like booze or pot or sex. That's why so many moralists condemned it, for heaven's sake. I reminded the boys that girls at Woodstock would take off their clothes and dance naked. Not that I was there, of course. I was just a kid during the Woodstock Concert. And as for the boys, the Summer of Love is farther in the past on their calendars than the Reichstag Fire is on mine. It is clearly, for them, a thing of legend. But I was trying to make a point.
That so many in the crowd were aging hippies contributed to one other factor that made the boys nervous. We were well into Foreigner's set when the woman on the other side of me – she must have been at least my age and probably older – grabbed my shoulder for support, leaned over, and shouted to me (there was no other way to make herself heard), "WOULD IT BOTHER YOU IF I LIT UP A JOINT? I'VE GOT TWO HIDDEN IN MY BRA." What was I going to say? "No"? Come on, … it's a rock concert. Of course I told her that was fine. Then she asked "WHAT ABOUT YOUR BOYS?" In retrospect I'm not sure if she was asking "Would they mind?" or "Do they want any?" but I told her not to worry about it. So she did. Everybody was standing and joining in the song (or at least the noise), so she sat down in the dark using the bodies all around her as a windbreak and fiddled with her lighter. Several times, of course: it's a rare joint that lights on the first try. I wasn't really watching her so I'm not sure quite when she got it lit … I think she handed it to her daughter … and then suddenly I felt her tug sharply three times on my sleeve to sit down and she offered it to me.
Of course she did. That's what you do with pot … you hand it around. It's just common courtesy. And what did I want to do? I had a fraction of a second to decide. So I figured … gosh, it's been a long, long time since I had any of that. Well over thirty years. I'm not working in defense, or in any other industry where random drug testing is a credible threat. So sure, hell , why not? I had no intention of letting myself get fucked up, but I also knew that one or two puffs wouldn't do that. So I sat down, took a puff, and handed it back to her. I had another a few minutes later, and then that was it. I figured I'd stop at two, and in any event she didn't offer more: she later said she had handed it to somebody else who never gave it back. So much for common courtesy.
The boys didn't say anything about it directly, but I think I may have shocked them. Actually when I took my second puff Son 1 chided me, "Hey, remember you've got to drive home." Clearly he has never tried pot on his own or he would realize that two puffs, for someone my size, doesn't mean much. And in all honesty I was never very good at sealing my mouth around a joint the right way to keep the smoke from escaping, so my two puffs probably got me almost none of the actual drug. But yes, all that having been said, I think in fact they were shocked. And we didn't have much time to discuss it, at any rate not in a natural way. I suppose I could have jumped on the topic when we drove home but that would have sounded awfully defensive … and they would have been entitled to wonder, "What's he so defensive about? It must be worse than he's letting on." The next morning, though, I had to go to work while they slept in; and that evening I drove them to stay with Wife for the week. I suppose I'll have to look for a chance next week to bring the subject up in a natural way and talk about it.
For whatever it is worth, they don't appear to have a really good sense for alcohol either, in the sense of understanding what the effect is of this or that amount. There's a line of thought that would suggest this is a defect in their education; but on the other hand it's a little hard to persuade most people that the prudent and effective use of intoxicants is a valuable subject in which to educate youth. I don't quite know where to go with this.
It's a little odd to think this, but in some ways I think they may be more conservative than I am even though I'm the one in his fifties who holds down a boring job while they are both teenagers. I'll have to mull that for a while.
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