glowsticks for everyone!

Today's soundtrack:
"Porcelain" by Moby
"15 Step" by Radiohead
"Stay With Me" by Spiritualized
"Hotel Song" by Regina Spektor

This past week has been a bizarre trip back to the '90s. It started with the serendipitous finding of the sister of my childhood best friend on Facebook. Don't get me wrong - I still think Facebook is the devil, but it is undeniably useful in finding people (hence why it's the devil, but I digress). Through this sister (who happens to work at my favourite restaurant in Saskatoon - cue the X-Files music) I found out that things were pretty much as I feared regarding my childhood best friend. So I threw on some Nirvana, nostalgically thumbed through the few pictures I have of her, and tried to remember the early '90s. A completely futile and empty gesture, but when that's all that's left, what more can you do but remember the summer you helped to build the treehouse in the backyard? Or suntanned on the roof? Or the afternoon you spent at Woodgrove Mall before she completely disappeared?

The week was looking like a bad movie of the week until my new BFF won tickets to see Moby perform on campus. I brushed the early '90s aside in favour of the just-as-tumultuous-but-slightly-better-dressed late '90s. So off we went, surrounded by undergrads who believe this Moby guy has potential, mid-to-late (ahem) 20-somethings who hear Moby every time they open their high school yearbooks, and cougars who seemed to have brought their grey-haired husbands as some sort of back-up plan. We stood in the back (not a big fan of crowds since I somehow got stuck in a Foo Fighters moshpit) and people-watched. Well, more aptly, I'd saw we people-mocked. We mocked the girl with leggings and a fanny pack. We mocked the girls who firmly believe leggings ARE pants. We mocked the seemingly contagious dancing happening beside us. We mocked the heavy-set 30-something whose idea of dancing was spinning around in ever-narrowing circles, followed by some kind of Bollywood mash-up, beside the guy who looked like his dance abilities peaked with his Jolly Jumper. We mocked the cougars who believe that every 20-year old girl wears tight black tanktops and big hair.

And in between the mocking, we watched Moby, blue Moby, hair-light Moby, and this amazing woman who stole the show. Not that Moby is a very confident stage presence at all. The man is painfully awkward and hands most of the singing duties off to his bandmates. But this woman with her sunglasses would strut across the stage with a voice that forced me to stop people-mocking. During the encore, she and Moby did this amazing call-and-answer routine that made me wish I had experienced rave culture firsthand back in the '90s. Silly me, wasting my time with books and obeying my parents when I could have been dancing until 6am! Glowsticks for everyone!

I explained my lack of raveness to the Spaniard when I got home that night and he seemed quite aghast that I'd never been to, as he put it, "a disco". First of all, how wonderful is it that it's still called a disco in Spain? I envision a line of John Travoltas dancing to bad '70s music, but with glowsticks. Next time I'm in Madrid, I'm going to go to one of these discos that doesn't close down until sunrise and dance until my feet bleed.

And glowsticks. There better be glowsticks.