intensity

That is the word I'd use for the concert last night. I'm trying to decide what it is about it that makes me feel today like turning over rocks and telling all the bugs of the world to move along, but I'm not sure if that is the music, the presentation or the "package" that went with it.

What do I mean package? Well you know, all the details of a night out. What to wear, what to do with the 13 year old, do we eat first, last, not at all, where to park, buy t-shirts or cd's or beer?

Suffice it to say that we don’t go to concerts of this variety very often. Symphony? Sure, Opera? Occasionally. Theatre habitually. But the music of Sigur Ros is not in any of those categories. But then, it is.

You may not have ever heard the group. I'd heard only the songs played for me by my daughter, who'd given us the tickets to the concert for Christmas, and she tends to have offbeat taste. I liked what I'd heard: haunting melodies, interesting combinations. None of that prepared me for the intensity of the live performance.

I should have had a clue though, from the quiet. The crowd of mostly 20somethings was sober, calm. No one passing joints around, the occasional cigarette was the only disruption to the air. A bar in the lobby, but no line, no one really all that interested in the offerings.

We found our seats, and listened to the opening band, young women from, I assume Iceland, because they didn't speak English very well and their sound had those haunting, wide open tones that seem to come from that part of the world. For their "big" number, one woman played the saw… a real live cut wood saw, with a bow, and it was so beautiful it could bring tears … mournful and full and a touch wild. Two others played what looked like service bells from a hotel, while the other played water glasses. All of this orchestrated by a computer, incidentally the same brand and model as the one I type on this morning.

I wasn't completely sure these girls weren't the band. I hadn't adjusted my attitude appropriately yet, and still thought we were in for the kind of good time we used to have at rock concerts years ago.

I was ready not to be my age. Had on my jeans, which fit well thanks to all the salad, white shirt and had straightened my hair. Okay, if one looked close, they'd see that the concealer doesn’t really deal with the dark circles around my eyes, and the texture of my skin beneath them lately has me trying every kind of anti wrinkle cream I can get my hands on. I won't say we were the oldest people there, but we were in the top ten percent.

My husband was just as bad. He's been to more rock concerts than I ever dreamed of, was actually part of that generation of students who did things like close colleges with protests, went to war. You know, real intense situations. I was always in awe of them, being just a few years too young for it in any capacity but tagalong. He'd already made me promise that if it was bad, we could leave, and just be polite to our daughter should she ask.

So we invited my son's best friend to spend the night… leaving one thirteen year old alone seemed wrong, but the two of them together was okay. (Best friends parents were home, just five minutes away.) Ordered them pizza, decided not to eat before the show. Got directed to four parking lots before we could park.

The second clue that things weren't going to be as we expected was a line in the men's room. But not the women's. Any woman who's ever been out to a public place knows there is something wrong there.

We found our seats, high in the second tier, in the next to last row along far aisle. I will have to ask my daughter if that was intentional… I suspect it was. We really were able to fade into the theater and observe.

The music… electronic and vocal and gifted. Bows used on guitars, I guess that is a new thing, but I'd not seen it. Behind the band, a constant light mural, changing from the faces of the most innocent looking little girl you could imagine, all bright eyes, round cheeks and braids, to, by the end of the set, army boots marching through puddles. The audience was quiet, (and for the most part, there were a couple of inappropriate whoops) respectful. And once I got through the mindset that this was supposed to be a fun concert, and listened, just listened, the intensity of what this little group of people from Iceland were doing struck me. I looked around the room and realized this is the generation that has to deal with things almost harder than that Vietnam group. These people have the legacy of what we've …their parents… done to the Earth, to the world. They don't take anything as lightly as my apathetic generation did. Even their music is intense, and meaningful and what felt like, important.

I can't say I enjoyed it. But I was moved.

The group took no intermissions, did only one curtain call, and returned the standing ovation that carried on for what felt like ten minutes to the audience.

They didn't speak one word. It was all the music.

We left the hall and I realized that I had found something of "not my age" after all. I realized I used to feel that intense about what was going on in the world, that I used to carry a torch with me wherever I went. That was the stake that drove through hearts of my family members. They didn't want to know about global warming or overpopulation or hunger or racial cleansing or back alley abortions and welfare mothers and homeless people and HIV and all the other atrocities that were going on all over the world. It was the Seventies man, and they wanted to hide under rocks and live the lives they were given in their safe little corner of the world, run off to Wal-Mart and Target and buy cheap electronics and country western music cds. They wanted to just be, while I burned with the injustice of it all.

And I'm ashamed. I became more like them, less the idealist. And under what excuse? I had children, a marriage, a job, a career! I could just sit back and enjoy the fruits of labors, not only my own, but those of the rebels before me, who'd won me the right to work for equal pay, to take time off for maternity leave without losing my job, to send my children to free public schools that addressed even their exceptional needs.

And what did it all come down to?

Going to a concert where I wanted to straighten my hair, recapture my youth and rock out, but finding instead, that recapturing youth isn't about sexuality or looks or what to wear… we knew that then…it is about recapturing the fire, the intensity of feeling, that let us have the courage to at least think we could change the world.

And realizing what gifts my daughters have really given me.