Thank you mama for the concert Tee

This is for the young rockers: Your Hedley is my Debbie Gibson and I know just how you feel. Tomorrow is your first concert. You're going with your three best friends (BFF -until Jacob Hoggard smiles at only one of you!) and you've arranged for a parent to drop you off at the K-Rock Centre and a parent to pick you up -and right away since it's a school night. "No dilly-dallying," your parents have instructed. Or, you're too young to go unaccompanied, so God bless 'em, your parents are going with you.

When I tell people about my first concert experience, I always say it was going to see The Tragically Hip when they played Ontario Place in Toronto to promote their 1991 album Road Apples. But that wasn't really my first concert experience; it was my second. (It's just so much cooler than my first show.)

My first concert experience was when I went to Canada's Wonderland to see Debbie Gibson in the summer of 1988. Her album Out of the Blue, released in 1987, was a smash. She and Tiffany were going head-to-head on all the charts and like all the great battles of my young life in the '80s - Orser versus Boitano, Jem and the Holograms versus The Misfits, and Bryan Adams versus Corey Hart - you were loyal to only one, and I was on Debbie's team.

I was 12 at the time of the 1988 Out Of the Blue tour, so I went to my first concert with my mom and dad and eight-year-old brother.

The show was the first time I encountered the sit-versus-stand concert crowd. Everyone in front of us was standing up, screaming and jumping and singing. But the people behind us wanted to sit, so they kept tapping my mom on the shoulder asking our family to sit down. My mother politely told them I couldn't see Debbie if I sat down, so I'd have to stand since everyone else was standing. (My mother can also vividly recount this night, she had such a good time).

Debbie did all her hits - Only In My Dreams, Out Of the Blue, Foolish Games and Shake Your Love - and I sang along to every one.

At one point, even my mom had a good time. The standers became sitters when some of the people in the row in front of us abandoned their seats for a few songs.

Back in my day, I would have come home to my diary and written about my great night at my first show. You'll come home, update your Facebook page, e-mail your friends the picture you got with Jacob, and then maybe blog about it. The technology is different, but the concert experience is still very much the same. Your heart is racing (Jacob is so cool); your ears are buzzing (the concert is so loud); and your wallet is aching (buy the T-shirt, not the commemorative program. You'll get more use out of it).

And who do you have to thank for all of this? Most of you need to give your parents a big hug and kiss and then go vacuum the house for them, because they've had a role in this night out. They paid for the tickets, or helped you order them on their credit card, or are picking up you and your friends to take you to the arena or are going to the concert with you.

You do need to tuck it in the back of your mind that they made Hedley happen for you because, 19 years from now, (hypothetically speaking, of course), you'll remember that when you went to that Debbie Gibson (er, Hedley) concert, that row in front of you did abandon their seats for a few songs - only to return with concert T-shirts, which they proceeded to whip over their heads like helicopter blades.

Which repeatedly hit your mother in the face.

Over and over and over again.
And here is the rest of it.