ooh baby, baby...ooh baby, baby...

its 'reminisce about your very first concert experience and remember how good it was to be young and innocent because now you are old and jaded and you can't even be bothered buying tickets to your long-time crush's upcoming gig' day in nadstown.

hoorah!

grab a sausage sanger and a glass of punch and come listen to my tale:

the year was 1994. i was an awkward, slightly overweight 13 year old with no dress sense and one large eyebrow. i remember one night i was lying on the floor in the tv room of my childhood home, watching beverly hills 90210 and bugging my mum to hurry up and finish cooking the goulash so we could eat before melrose place started.

suddenly the phone rang and my raging hormone of a 16 year old sister raced to get it, lest it be one of her many annoying, pock-faced boy friends (note the word separation here. she hadn't yet entered the dating world at this point. not sure if she'd even been groped).

practically throwing the phone in my face and scowling at me from under her hip early 90s disaster of a fringe she annoced that my "little friend" keera was on the other end of the line. she tried so hard to be cruel to me during puberty, bless her heart.

keera had rung to ask me if i wanted to go to a concert with her. more importantly, she was calling to ask if my parents would let me go to a concert with her. i miss those days sometimes. the days of permission notes and pocket money and 'can my mum speak to your mum?'. in fact, the last time i flew to melbourne for a spa party i typed up a permission note and asked my mum to sign it. i didn't, of course, mention the bit about the spa party. she might have refused to sign otherwise, and then i would have missed out on all the fun.

my (over?)protective parents were at first reluctant to let me go to the concert. i assured them that i would be fine because keera's dad would be accompanying us(like...how embarrassment!), so they needn't worry about kidnappers and paedophiles and drug dealers and all those other scary low-life types that keep parents awake at night. so eventually they agreed, despite their concerns about keera's dad being "one of those hippy musician kinds".

i was, like, sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo excited.

i spent a few weeks begging my mum for a new outfit, because i had to - i just had to - look "cool" for the concert. she didn't understand why i didn't want to go in my batmitzvah dress, a purple disaster with puffy sleeves and a waist belt to cover my "puppy fat" (meaning that i looked like i'd swallowed a puppy whole. a very large puppy). after a while she got sick of hearing me say "der mum" and finally caved on the new clothes front. i got the "raddest" skirt from sportsgirl and a "mad" denim mini jacket from portmans. i was ready for the crazy times to begin. i was gonna find me some sex, drugs and rock'n'roll and make them my bitches for life.

if only i'd known then what i know now:

if you want to make with the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll craziness, go to a motley crue show with your slacker, exhibitionist, stoner boyfriend, not a salt-n-pepa concert with your pre-teen friend and her dad.

despite the lack of craziness we still had a great time dancing awkwardly on our seats to the likes of shoop and none of your business and push it and what a man and several other hot girlpower anthems we pretended to understand. even mr. keera got into it.

i would also like to note that even when i was monobrowed and clad in sportsgirl at a salt'n'pepa concert accompanied by a parent, we were at least cool enough to boo and hiss when human nature came on to do their support thing. stupid talentless pretty boy band wannabes.

as we entered our mid-teens, keera and i spent a good few years refusing to acknowledge the fact that we'd ever been to a salt'n'pepa gig. we were ultra-hardcore-way-cool-grunge-punk-goth-fairies and we spat on people who listened to that crap. but now we think its the best thing ever and we reminisce often about how funny it was that we went to our first concert with her dad.

good times.

so then, who popped your concert cherry? were they gentle?