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Just got home from my whirlwind trip to Chicago with Kara, Holley and Bono. Much, much to say, but I'm not in a position to do so right now. Hopefully tomorrow I'll get some writing time. In the meantime, I thought I'd recycle share something I wrote in 2001 after my last U2 show. It might put an interesting perspective on what I have to say about last night's show. Or it might just be that I'm lazy and doing the least necessary to appease you people. Here 'tis:

Reflections from an Old Woman in the Mosh Pit

I’m not twenty-one anymore.

I may look like I’m twenty-one. I may bear similarities to who I was when I was twenty-one. But the cold fact is, I haven’t been twenty-one in eight years.


Sometimes, though, you’ve got to act like you’re twenty-one, just one final time. Slow-dance with your youth for a night and reap the consequences later.

I should have outgrown rock star excitement somewhere down the line, the days when I would blindly blow my rent money on concert tickets, call in sick to work for a week so I could follow a band around the Midwest. Sleeping on concrete and bathing in gas station bathroom sinks, just for a chance to dance with other lost souls.

A great deal of rock star excitement somehow survived in me, despite being flogged by adult responsibility.

My friend Kristina is twenty-one, and so much like what I used to be. In the fall of 2001, when everyone was afraid to venture out of the CNN haze of war, Kristina and her roommate Sarah couldn’t stay home. They fled their apartment in Bowling Green, Ohio, in pursuit of U2. In Sarah’s maroon Toyota with her dad’s Texaco credit card in hand; they followed the band to Chicago, Indiana, and Rhode Island. They lugged their sleeping bags to the arenas at five in the morning, sleeping like street urchins, just for a chance to be so close to the stage that they might make a flash of eye contact, feel a drop of sweat, reveal in the humanity of rock stars.

In late November U2, followed by Kristina and Sarah, came to St. Louis. The girls, along with my friend Kara, converged on my house the night before the show. The next day I lunged out of bed at 4:30 AM, my exhausted eyes burning in the darkness, stumbling through the house and waking everyone.
Even the most sludgy, bitter convenience store coffee taste blissful when it’s 5:16 AM, twenty-three degrees, and you’re wedged in a pickup truck with 15 blankets, six pillows, four backpacks, and three sleepy people.

Overnight, a tent city sprouted on the sidewalk along Fourteenth Street. Reaching down the block, sprouting from the side of the arena, little pods of nylon slept with no signs of life. When the stream of tents ended, lifeless bundled masses of humans continued the line, their breath substituted by coffee cup steam and cigarette smoke. They stretched past the metal and glass of Savvis Center and huddled into the cold concrete and stone of the old Kiel Opera House, swooping down a short flight of stairs into a pit, where the wall turned into boarded doors. We descended the stairs, resting our pillows against the frigid wall and spreading our blankets over the bitter floor. Our four bodies, padded and shielded, wedged into our little cubbyhole to wait.

We had purchased our tickets to the show two weeks prior. General admission tickets for $45. It’s a good deal, but g.a. means there are no guarantees. Those who don’t show up before dawn are relegated to the back, far from the stage, watching the ocean of bodies that separates them from the stage. At each show they’d attended, Kristina and Sarah had lined up early and were rewarded with positions that were mere feet from the stage, an arm’s reach from a calloused hand still warm from the metal guitar strings. And that’s why we crammed into our cubbyhole, under a mountain of blankets on that cold November day, before day began. Just for that moment at 7 AM, when the girl with the clipboard and the red marker would brand our hands with numbers, indicating our place in line, and the order we’d be allowed into the arena at 6 PM. A red brand in honor of our tenacity, or to mark us as idiots for the rest of the world.

And so we waited, wrapped in whatever warmth we could gain from the blankets, eating fluffy, warm beneigts brought by my husband, taking walks to Union Station for bathroom breaks and to relieve the unbearable monotony of sitting in a concrete alcove in the cold. Sarah barely moved all day. She stayed in her cocoon, her nose in a biology textbook, saving her energy.

Maybe I should have taken a hint from Sarah. In the days since the show, I’ve played the “what if” game far too many times. What if I’d just stayed still, hibernated in that alcove, instead of letting the boredom get to me? I spent more time walking the streets of downtown than I spent sitting quietly. I walked until the friction of my feet on the sidewalk was strong enough to warm me. I walked under the gaze of the Victorian landmarks and sleek shining new buildings, trying to find a place in my adopted city while my friends sat on the concrete, staring at the sheriff’s department building, watching the building’s inhabitants watch them back. I fought with myself, willing myself to give in to boredom for once, to take advantage of the opportunity to simply sit quietly for a day, knowing that my reward would come when the band took the stage at 8 PM. But that wasn’t enough to stop the constant frenzy that forever resides within me, driven by guilt to be doing anything - anything but sitting on my ass.

I returned from one of my walks shortly before 4 PM, just in time to help gather our blankets and rush them to the truck in the spitting rain. The others changed clothes in the parking garage, hidden behind the opened doors. They fluffed hat-matted hair, drew borders around their sleep-starved eyes with black pencils, spritzed perfume and smeared deodorant, vain attempts to mask the effects of a sleepless night and a motionless day. I stood nearby, still in my navy t-shirt under a charcoal gray fleece pullover that matched the darkening sky. My bag of clothes – low-cut shirt and shiny black shoes – stayed buried under the blankets, and my face remained rain-smeared and wind-chapped pink.

We returned to the arena as the lady with the clipboard began checking the numbers on our hands, lining us up in order. No more warm blankets, no more overhead awning, no more pillows to sit upon. Just room on the sidewalk to stand for two and a half hours as the drizzle grew into dark waves of rain. We’d left our coats and umbrellas in the truck, shedding all items that would be in the way once we were inside the arena. The crowd behind us pushed, and slowly we inched under an awning, damp and cold.
No books to keep us occupied, no place to take a nap, no places left to walk in the rain. We stood, shifting from one foot to the other, giggling wildly, yet nervously. Exhaustion dripped through us, expressed as punch-drunkenness. Kristina kept us entertained by doing silly dances. We chatted with the people in line with us. Anything to keep us from clock-watching and thinking about the cold.
They let us inside at 6 PM. Through the turnstiles, patted by security, we ran through the halls of Savvis Center, rushing through the doors into the arena, flying down the stairs, barely stopping for the ushers to check the branded numbers on our hands. “Slow down! You’re almost there!” one of them told me. But I didn’t slow down. I ran, my legs, frozen from November and atrophy, stretching across the rubber floor that radiated the bitterness of the hockey ice beneath. I flashed my hand to another usher, who nodded me into the passage under the walkway that jutted into the audience. I didn’t stop until I was with the others, dwarfed in the shadow of the stage.

For another ninety minutes, we sat on the rubber floor until the ice began to bleed through, chilling us again. Then we’d stand until the cold permeated our shoes and the skin of our feet. The floor behind us filled, and we joined conversations. People who’d driven from Kentucky, Chicago, Tennessee. People who’d driven to St. Louis immediately after the concert in Kansas City the night before, sleeping in those lifeless tents. People who’d seen them before, telling those of us who hadn’t that we were about to be moved to the cores of our souls. Conversations interrupted by forty-five minutes of the opening act, followed by another thirty minutes of waiting.
The hoard behind us began to push. No more conversation – the time had come to stake claims to the spots we’d waited so long to hold. Bracing against the force behind me, I felt the lunge in my gut, the stomp and flutter of something inside me. My claustrophobia stirred, noting the heat of the oxygen-less air, the closeness of the bodies crushing into me. While my friends clamored and squealed, I closed my eyes and I prayed. It seemed so petty, praying for myself at a silly rock concert when there’s so much horror in the world. People who sleep in concrete bassinettes every night, not just for a chance to stand on the covered hockey ice and play air guitar. People who are so gripped by fear that they can’t leave the walls of their houses, who are struck by paralyzing horror anytime a plane passes overhead. People who have been left alone since one day in September.

And here I am, praying that my fat, dehydrated, exhausted body can withstand the intensity of standing on the ice, crushed against humanity, just to hear some songs.
God, just let me stay upright on these swollen feet and weary legs. Let me stand without being crushed. Don’t let this be the moment I have a heart attack or a stroke. Please keep me from puking. Just please. Please put me where I need to be right now. Let me see what I’m supposed to see.

The music shifted, and Stevie Wonder’s voice swarmed over the masses with the whining keyboards of “Higher Ground”, which launched into The Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, melded into “All You Need is Love”. It wouldn’t be until the next morning that we’d know that George Harrison had died while we were sitting on the frozen sidewalk. In twelve hours we’d be glued to VH1, watching George softly singing “Here Comes the Sun.” But tonight, we celebrated in the truth of the music he’d created before the four of us were born.

With the houselights up, The Beatles gave way to U2 sneaking onto the stage and ripping into “Elevation”

High, higher than the sun
You shoot me from a gun
I need you to elevate me here
At corner of your lips
As the orbit of your hips
Eclipse
You elevate my soul

In the yellow glow of the lights, everyone around me became airborne, their feet springing from the frozen ice below, one mass with three hundred parts, leaping to the beat, with me wedged in the middle. My legs screamed at me as the lights burned into my eyes. In the brightness, the band – not twenty feet away – shimmered in the same light as me, as if the performance was only in my head. My body bounced to the music, disconnected from the portion of my brain that screamed for it to stop, to rest.

I remember when I was ten years old and MTV came to my hometown. The first vision my eyes drank from the screen were of four young men walking the rubbled streets of Dublin. I didn’t get their music, their anger at the politicos of the world, didn’t understand the terror that had been a part of their lives in Northern Ireland since the days of their births. In my child’s mind, it was dark music about a darkness in the world that I didn’t know existed.

Twenty years later, standing on cold ground while breathing hot air, my body surrendering, it made sense. The band returned to those songs I heard as a child, the songs I couldn’t embrace then. Bono, the lead singer, stalked the walkway into the audience to the beat of a military drum.

I can't believe the news today
I can't close my eyes
And make it go away
How long...
How long must we sing this song?
How long? How long...
Tonight...we can be as one
Tonight...
Broken bottles under children's feet
And bodies strewn across a dead end street
But I won't heed the battle call
Puts my back up
My back up against the wall

With those words, my heart stopped. The cold that had crept through my body all day clutched my heart and everything deeper within me. The cold took those words and wrapped them through my organs and pulled me away from the walls of people surrounding me.

I understood.

The song, its images of terror in Ireland over two decades earlier. Images from my own country, still new and unreal in my mind, like they’d grown out of my brain from years of seeing the atrocities that happened to other worlds on the evening news. Through the dizziness and nausea that held me so still, I understood the rage that connects our worlds. The experiences we share, the words that heal both of us. “We’ve been here before,” they seemed to say. “We’ve been here, and we know. And it still doesn’t make any sense. But we know.”

Bono stopped singing, but the band continued to play. Through the crowd in front of me, I watched as he crouched, extending his arms into the crowd. When he stood, his back to me, I could see the fabric clutched in his hands, the broad red and white stripes of a flag. He seemed to cradle it to his chest, an embrace of solidarity and understanding. But when he turned, I saw it was so much more than an embrace. With one arm wrapped around the flag, the other stretched to his side, the fabric draping his fist, he danced. Slowly, he swayed, eyes fluttered closed, mouth turned slightly upwards in a gentle smile, the kind given to an injured child by one who understands the hurt. The embrace of solidarity evolved into an act of love, a slow dance with a wounded partner. As he caressed the fabric to his cheek, someone in front of me raised another flag, the orange, green, and white of Ireland, waving strong and broad in salute. The crowd under the flag no longer lept. They no longer screamed. In silence they watched from under the solid canopy of the Irish flag.

Wipe your tears away
Wipe your tears away
Wipe your tears away
Wipe your tears away
(Sunday, Bloody Sunday)
Wipe your tears away
(Sunday, Bloody Sunday)

I’m not sure when I finally realized that the tears poured from my tired eyes and my throat was clenched in mourning. Everything I’d held at bay for two long months, the heat of terror and grief, had burst through my frozen skin. The battered shell of my body could no longer stand there.

I had seen what I needed to see. I tugged the hem of Kristina’s sweater and told her I needed a break. And with that, I left. I pushed through the crowd, heaved my heavy soul up the stairs, and gulped the open air in the lobby.

I missed the rest of the show while I sat in the lobby, trembling and weak, not strong enough to go to the first aid station. They’d probably just think I had overindulged, and I didn’t feel like pleading my case otherwise.

The disappointment hit quick and hard. After waiting for months to see them, after putting myself through a self- imposed hell, I was missing the show. I tried to feel sorry for myself, but the self-pity didn’t come. Nothing came. Just a long-forgotten silence within me. I could hear the music from where I sat, but I didn’t listen. I didn’t concentrate on anything, just lapped up the solitude. I didn’t feel alone. I could fill my lungs for the first time all day. For the first time in months.

I’m not twenty-one anymore. I can’t physically tolerate the grueling tenacity required to operate on little sleep, with little water, in harsh conditions. The day after the concert I realized what I had done to myself – in an effort to avoid bathroom breaks during the long wait, I hadn’t drunk the gallon of water I consume daily. It wasn’t a heart attack or a stroke that had made me reel; it was dehydration. Something so simple, missing something so elemental had made me ferociously ill. At twenty-one, I could have operated solely on beer and adrenaline.
But at twenty-one, I wouldn’t have understood. I wouldn’t have been able to grasp the truth that comes from an Irishman dancing with an American flag and telling us to wipe our tears away. I was too alienated then, too wrapped up in my own wars to understand such love, love that reaches beyond each individual, each country. At twenty-one I would have rejected that love, because I hadn’t seen the darkness of the world.

At twenty-nine, I’ve seen that darkness. I’ve also seen light. And I’ve seen how music can thaw the cold, salve the burn, and silence the noise.