Tar-zen's Day Off - Part I

 

Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

This past week, I did something monumental:  I left my house.  For an entire day.  And, OK, so maybe that doesn’t seem like such a watershed event, but then again, I’m the kind of person who, aside from occasionally finding myself semi-conscious at Lowe’s, really just leaves the house to buy groceries and do laundry…and basically I live next door to a grocery store and across the street from a laundromat.  So, it’s not like I have to go that far.  And it’s not like it’s that much of a safari, either.  One time I was going to the store, and it started to rain, so I had to run.  That’s about as exciting as its ever gotten.

I sometimes try to imagine what it would be like if I had a stalker.  That person would die of boredom, I have no doubt, and the only way I’d even find out about it is if the pizza delivery guy showed up at my door one day and said, “Here’s your pizza.  And there’s some dead guy lying out on your curb.”  It would be like an opening scene from Law and Order, and in the end, I’d probably get arrested for depraved indifference to a maniac.   And even if my stalker didn’t die of chronic ennui waiting for me to do something stalker-worthy, I’d probably just find a Post-It note stuck on my door one day that said, “I can’t take it anymore.  I quit.”

Anyway, this week I decided to take a day off from my regularly-scheduled, rather sedate life and go to Toledo  (Ohio, not Spain—I only took one day off, and besides, if I ever went to Spain, I’d call my stalker first just to let him know that there was hope for me yet).  I went there for a guitar festival and to see Jennifer Batten play because I am definitely a fan of hers. But in the course of my journey, I discovered something: after a certain age, being a fan of anyone or anything is more difficult than you’d think because at a certain point, you just have to start making it up as you go along.  But that, as it turns out, isn’t such a bad thing for someone like me.

Now, plenty of grown-ups like plenty of things, but being a “liker” is different than being a “fan.”  The word “fan,” after all, is really just a shortened form of “fanatic,” and I don’t know too many grown-ups who like to describe themselves as “fanatics.”  I mean, there’s just a certain point at which it begins to take on a negative spin that can get you into a whole lot of trouble with a whole lot of government agencies.  Besides, adults are supposed to be level-headed and rational, and if there are two things you don’t usually see in a fanatic, it’s an even-temper and common sense. 

Children are, of course, the best fans on earth because children are inherently fanatical.  About everything.  I mean, you can put kids down on a grassy patch, and they’ll start running around in circles screaming about how great grass is.  And when you take them off the grass, they let out these blood-curdling screams like you’re just killing them…until, of course, you put them down on the pavement, at which point they become fanatical about that.  Children have a ton of energy and really, really short attention spans, so they’re just tailor-made to be fans.  All you have to do is point them in the right direction.

But imagine if adults had that kind of energy and distractibility.  Imagine having the cubicle next to that guy.  He’d spend all day running around in a circle in there screaming “I love this office!  I love this office!”  Imagine being in a staff meeting with someone who spends the whole time jumping up and down yelling, “I love this project!  I love this project!”  “But Jeffrey, we’re going to be done with it next week.”  “No, but why?  Why can’t we keep doing it?  I’m doing it!  I’m doing it more and you can’t stop me!”  “But Jeffrey, the client—“  “I hate the client!  He’s wrecking everything!”  And then the wailing and the sobbing and the pleading would start.  Eventually, he’d end up rolling around on the floor screaming while everyone else tried not to notice.  “He does this every time we have a meeting.”  “Just ignore him.  He has to learn that he can’t always get his way.”  “Yeah, but isn’t he our manager?”

Of course, as children turn into teenagers, things do start to change.  Teenagers roll around on the floor less…or at least for different reasons.  And being a fan starts to take on another dimension.  Teenagers won’t be fans of just anything like children will be, and even when they are fans of somebody, they often won’t admit it because other teenagers might not think it’s cool.  But that only lasts so long.  At some point, teenage fans discover that they are not alone, and then all that repressed fanaticism boils over.  There’s mass screaming and crying and swooning and fainting.  And if they’re Justin Bieber fans, there are also usually a few death threats involved.

One of the strangest incarnations of teenage fanaticism, though, has to be the throwing of underwear at a performer during a concert.  I think that happened to Elvis a lot, and as far as the Beatles went, it was like an undergarment bomb exploded every time they went on stage. A friend of mine told me that just recently, someone threw a bra at Joan Jett during a concert.  So, you know, it happens, but you have to admit, the whole practice is a little strange.  I mean, c’mon people—it’s underwear.  If fans were throwing money or even coupons, that would be one thing.  But it’s underwear, for Christ’s sake.  What are you supposed to do with an entire stage covered with that?  Just think of the safety issues.

It’s also strangely (and thankfully) a practice largely confined to teenage girls.  I mean, can you see some guy lobbing a jock strap at Steven Tyler or Eric Clapton?  Do you suppose John Lennon ever worried about getting beaned with a pair of boxer shorts?  I don’t think even female performers have to worry about that kind of thing because from what I’ve seen, guys just aren’t that willing to part with their underwear.  They’ll yell and scream and carry on, but they’re not giving up their drawers.

And luckily, it’s a totally age-related thing, too.  After all, the bigger and more sensible you get, the bigger and more sensible your underwear gets, and at a certain point, you’re not just throwing your panties on stage; you’re tossing a big ol’ pair of grandma pants up there.  And not only is there something that just seems offensive about that, there actually is something offensive about it.  Imagine being a musician trying to play a song and having a pair of underwear the size of bed sheet come flying at you.  It wouldn’t just be bothersome.  It would be traumatic. “I keep having this nightmare, Doctor, and all I see are these huge underpants with big teeth and claws coming at me.”  It would be a miracle if that performer was ever even able to get on a stage again.

As fans get a little bit older, they eventually just start taking over the look of whomever they happen to be into.  When I was in college in the 80s, you had three choices:  British punk, New Wave, or preppie.  I bounced between New Wave and preppie because with New Wave, you got shoulder pads, and with preppie, you got Weejuns.  It was very practical.  I personally didn’t have enough safety pins to pull off punk, and wearing a mohawk involved putting too much gunk in my hair.  Besides, I was from the suburbs.  We didn’t really know what punk even was, but we were pretty sure it was scary and kind of bad.  Of course, there were always a couple of Madonnas around then, too, and that was cool unless some Pat Benatars showed up, in which case there was likely to be a fight.  My personal favorites were the people who were into Grace Jones.  They were all men, of course, but at least they could work the look.  And they went well with the Princes, who were, of course, all women.

After a certain point, though, the real world sets in and that kind of fandom gets impractical.  After all, you can’t really show up for your job at the bank dressed in a Lady Gaga meat dress, and not too many people want stock advice from someone doing a gangsta rap look.  I mean, when you get to the point where you have to dig your Day-Timer out of the crotch of your pants hanging somewhere down around your knees, you know it’s time to trade in your bling for a Blackberry.  Past a certain age in life, you just have to accept the fact that dressing like a pimp is only appropriate if you actually are a pimp.

But that’s when being a fan starts to get hard because you have no plan to follow.  Sure, there might be mass hysteria, but you’re too tired to participate in it for more than ten minutes.  Besides, you might pull a muscle.  And you’re no longer willing to risk getting your spleen bruised by standing directly in front of a giant stage speaker because while the physical pain would suck, the medical bills would kill you.  And if you start screaming and yelling and carrying on like you did when you were a teenager, people will look at you funny…and then they’ll call the cops on you.  And while I’m sure that being a 40 year-old woman dressed up as, say, Hannah Montana isn’t actually illegal in most states, I don’t know too many people who want to have their sorry asses dragged into a police station for questioning over it.  So, the challenge of being a middle-aged fan is figuring out how to express your fanaticism without incurring a hospital bill or triggering a police investigation.

Then again, while it can be fraught with danger, the absolute lack of direction for fans over 40 is a really good thing for people like me because I’m really pretty terrible at being a fan.  And I always have been.  I wasn’t the kind of little kid you could put down on the lawn and watch run around screaming about what a wonderful thing grass is.  I was allergic to grass.  If you put me down on a patch of it, the only thing you got to watch was me getting hives. And I wasn’t the kind of teenage fan who ever even considered throwing a pair of underwear at a performer.  I liked my underwear.  I needed my underwear.  And my mom would’ve killed me if she found out that I was just randomly throwing it at people because, hey, underwear is expensive, and it’s not like it grows on trees.

Ultimately, I think that being a fan over 40 is kind of like the great equalizer.  It’s the point at which inherently terrible fans like me get to catch up.  It’s where just saying, “I’m a fan” is enough to qualify you as a fan.  The most you’ll ever have to do after that is enter your credit card numbers into the Ticketmaster website, and there’s certainly no reason for you to dress up or scream and carry on just to do that.  But beyond even that, being a Jennifer Batten fan over 40 is kind of like sweet revenge for all incompetent fans everywhere.  Batten is basically an electric guitar virtuoso who does a multi-media show, and the whole point of going to see her is that you show up, sit down, and shut up.  You’re supposed to watch and listen.  If you got up and started jigging around and screaming and flinging undergarments hither and yon, about half the audience would probably call the police.  Hell, Jennifer Batten would probably stop and call the cops on you herself.  If nothing else, you’d almost certainly get some of the most memorable WTF looks in music history.  It’s the kind of situation where a calm fan is a good fan, and given that I am often positively inert, my prowess at being a fan is very nearly the stuff of legends.

So, this past weekend, I went to Toledo.  I saw an amazing musician play an incredible show.  But even more than that, I actually was a fan.  And it was wonderful because what I discovered is that it’s virtually impossible to fail at being a fan when you’re over 40.  No one expects anything from you.  You just have to utter the magic phrase, “I’m a fan,” and you are one. Technically, you don’t even have to show up for anything.  So if you do, it’s like you’re a super-fan.  And for someone like me, that’s like heaven on earth.  It’s the best of all possible worlds.  Of course, the festival itself and all that the trip entailed would’ve made my imaginary stalker proud, and I would definitely have been someone worth following on that day and maybe even for several days before that.  But that, Dear Readers, is a whole other story…

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy. 

© R. Rissler, 2011.  All rights reserved.