11:42 - September 21, 2002
take a bow
When I looked straight ahead last night, right onto the stage, with my vision only covering the stage and a little bit of fuzzy wings at the side, I could almost imagine I was at home, at the Metro. I was far enough back that I would have been against the wall or possibly tangled in the light board, but it didn't matter. In between sets, we all sat on the ground, our knees overlapping and our feet fighting. People do touch here. Music majors are perfectionists, but they have a strong sense of what matters, and when they dance they look like freaks to the innocent onlooker, but tears stream down their faces and if you keep watching you'll start crying as well. Ben, looking like a hardcore gangster in my black bandanna, moved from side to side like a snake charmer, shaking his head and weaving his fingers in and out of each other, and Becky and Angela bobbed softly, booty dancing in slow-mo. Andy took up the entire front line with his gyrations and flailing limbs.

I'd only met one of them before, really. In style yesterday he said they had an extra space in the car and I was welcome to fill it, so I did. They all live in the music dorm and know each other and wander into to each other's rooms all the time and play games together, and I live all the way across campus and I'm not even, technically, a music major, but as early as in the car on the way to Denver, I felt as comfortable with them as I would if I'd been in Nora's car with Erik and Mike and Camille on the way to Mitsuwa. Angela stalked into the pizza place when I didn't get my chicken strips and had them give me the strips PLUS extra sauce, so nyah nyah, and we were all going to get a motel afterwards instead of driving all the way back to Boulder but Ben was falling over sideways, so we just drove back. We had a water bottle fight in the freezing cold of 1AM, and I turned Becky upside down because she's almost literally a foot and a half shorter than me, and then Ben chewed on my bandanna so I let him borrow it. And don't talk to Andy while he's driving because he will turn around and look at you and drive into things that aren't meant to be driven into. It feels so good to be able to boringly anecdote things like that, which isn't a verb but fuck it all.

Besides all that, I have new musical idols. Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, step forward and take a bow.

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