Monday, April 14, 2014

To Change This Lonely Life: A Constant Experience

Hi friends.

I'm here today to talk about men.

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This may seem like a strange choice, given that I spent my weekend basking in the glory of Cher and Pat Benatar who just came through Detroit on Cher's Dressed to Kill tour. But when you see it in a certain way, the way in which I see it, this Cher/Pat Benatar experience was basically a worship at the altar of the modern feminine goddess. (I was thinking this even before Cher's final number, which saw her floating in a ball of white glitter over the audience and singing "I Hope You Find It".)

Much of my life is a study of the modern feminine. Simply because, that is what I am.

But clearly there is not one without the other and for as much as I love women I also love men, taken as a whole. Even though, taken as a whole, they make that hard on me.

Like any 26-year-old single girl, I've had my fair share of ups and downs in the dating world. But I don't think it's classy to talk about them in public detail, because I am a LADY DAMN IT. (I think I will ascend to a new level of ladyhood when I take Cher up on her recommendation of Saturday and start drinking Dr. Pepper mixed with Perrier. But, I might not quite be ready for that.)

In any case, this blog is about music.

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Pat Benatar was amazing. She opened with "Shadows of the Night" and it was a truly transcendent rock and roll moment, I felt like Lester Bangs. And I gained a new appreciation for that song and for Pat Benatar generally and for super-dramatic eighties love-rock that drips tortured emotion with every guitar line. The power ballad.

It gets very hard to date sometimes, much of the time, because it has so many more downs than ups. On Saturday Cher prefaced a certain song by saying that real "dyed-in-the-wool Cher fans" tended to love it, and I was nervous that I wouldn't know it or love it. But it turned out to be "Heart of Stone" which yes, is one of the more earnestly ridiculous of her songs and is definitely a song for people who have wayyyyyyy too many feelings on a regular basis which is just another way of saying "dyed-in-the-wool Cher fans". Don't you sometimes wish your heart was made of stone?

I sure as heck do. I can have a somewhat reserved manner in person, and certainly in writing, so I don't always know if people know that I am an intensely feeling girl. (Intensely feeling and intensely thinking, it's a strange life.) This blog probably helps people know that, which is part of why I write it.

It's been a rough time for my feelings recently, now that I know I am leaving Ann Arbor and moving to New York City. They're getting a real workout. And they weren't exactly hanging in a dusty closet before, if you catch my meaning. But I have enough life perspective to know that the pain of failed things fades away.

My first love/heartbreak left me two things: my appreciation for the duets of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, and a very soft spot for Foreigner. (It was also a good time for Cher in my life, the heartbreak part at least.)

So what I feel now when I listen to "Shadows of the Night" and remember Pat Benatar's thigh high plaid socks is actually not new, just the awakening of something a man gave me a long time ago.

Like I said, there's never one without the other.


The song: Foreigner, "I Want To Know What Love Is"; 1984

Yrs,
AW

inbedwithamywilson@gmail.com