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.

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Attack of the Bleacher Creature

At the end of Grade 6, we were all 12 years old, and dying to start Grade 7 because most of our mothers had told us that once we started Grade 7, we could wear makeup. A little makeup. Just a tad.
I remember going to the mall with my friends where we spent hours agonizing over how to spend our allowances. I remember every piece of makeup I bought that day: One emerald green eyeliner, one dark blue eyeliner, one purple eyeliner, clear mascara (maybe the silliest invention ever, but very ’80s ), concealer cream for the black bags under my eyes that my friends insisted I cover (and we wonder why girls and women are so image obsessed) and foundation to shovel on my wrinkle-free, zit-free, perfect 12-year-old skin. (The beauty industry gets you early and gets you good.)
Pretty much every girl in my class looked the same on that first day of school, everyone that is, but Laura.
Laura was a weird girl. She came into Grade 7 with a bad rep because she’d allegedly made out with boys under the bleachers. (Years later when a group of us were reminiscing, we wondered: Our school didn’t even have bleachers, did it?) But what Laura did on that first day, sealed her fate as a weirdo: She came to school with the eyeliner on her lower and upper lids. It wasn’t that she used too much or put it on in a funny way – it was the colour. Her eyes were tomato red. She looked like she had a school’s worth of pink eye. It’s how I looked at Queen’s after I pulled back-to-back all-nighters to finish sociology essays. She had outlined her eyes in lipliner that must have had a name like cherry explosion or red-hot rouge.
I thought about Laura this weekend every time I looked in the mirror. Early Saturday morning, when I wasn’t really awake and hadn’t had any coffee yet, my son and I were playing in our living room. I asked him for a kiss.
He looked at me and smiled and came charging toward me. But instead of his lips connecting with my cheek, his chin smacked my eye (actually the black bag under my right eye). I don’t want to sound like a wuss, but it hurt. A lot. Enough to make me cry.
“I sorry,” my two-year-old cried as he saw a tear roll down my cheek.
I wiped away my tear and then felt another one coming. I wiped that one away too, a pink-tinged tear …
Blood!?
My bag under my eye was bleeding? (At least I wasn’t bleeding black.)
Hours later, for the first time in my life, I had a black eye. Spots around the bottom of my eye was purple, blue – and cherry explosion red.
I was asked the same question repeatedly over the weekend: “What happened to your eye?” (I actually thought it was strange so many people asked me this because what if my black eye wasn’t from a kissing accident with my toddler?)
I’ve also had friends and even a doctor once ask me about the number of bruises I had on my body. One, I’m sort of clumsy. Two, I’ve always bruised easily. Three, when you have a busy life and a toddler, you’re often rushing around, doing things haphazardly, too quickly, too fast and accidents happen. And now I have to do insane things to entertain my son like climb dirt piles and run up slides and give horsey rides around my kitchen.
There are so many more bruises to come.
But bruises disappear.
After a few days, my black eye was gone.
But I’ll always have the memory of my son running so fast, so hard, to kiss to me, that he turned me into Laura Red Eye, the Bleacher Creature.

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A talent for handling raw meat

What mattered most in the Crosbie household when I was growing up was hard work. Just as there are no small parts, just small actors, my parents taught me that when it comes to making and saving money, there are no bad jobs, just bad attitudes.
Like every teenager, when school ended I wanted a summer job that was cool.
(For those of you who think like my dad does, I don’t mean air-conditioned. I mean sweet, fun, comfy, hip – something that would make your friends jealous.)
My very first summer job was working at a community newspaper. I made $9 an hour – which was an incredible amount of money for 1994.
When my job wasn’t available the following the year, I knew I had to go on the hunt and I also knew that it couldn’t get any better than writing stories and columns in a nice air-conditioned building. (Yes, the job was cool on two levels.)
And so hunting I went.
I handed out more than 100 resumes and I waited and waited for a call while all my friends landed what seemed like perfect summer jobs: lifeguarding, summer camp counselors, Gap salesperson. It didn’t get better than The Gap.
And then I waited.
Finally, I got the call. A fast-food place that specialized in fries wanted me to come in for an interview.
I put on a brave face for my parents but I was freaking out on the inside. Fast food wasn’t cool. Being greasy wasn’t cool. But money was money. A job was a job. Beggars can’t be choosers. I remember sitting with my mother in my kitchen going over and over and over possible interview questions.
“Why fries?” the fast-food manager asked the following morning.
“I’m sorry?” I questioned. “Why fries?” was not one of the questions my mother and I had rehearsed.
I had top grades. I had spirit. I had gusto. I had determination.
What I didn’t have was any sort of an answer for this man’s question.
“Why fries? Why choose fries over pizza or subs or donuts?” he said very seriously.
The question seemed far too philosophical for a high school kid looking to making minimum wage (which was $6.85 an hour).
I remember babbling about fries being hot and crispy. Subs and donuts aren’t hot and crispy. No sirree. They’re cold. And with pizza, well, there’s just one pizza slice, but with fries, you can eat just one, or two, or 39. And incredible new advances are being made every day in the French fry industry. Poutine is becoming popular. Some people are making nacho fries, using fries in place of nacho chips. It is a revolutionary idea to add sour cream on fries; a nice way to cool them down on a hot summer’s day, I always say.
I returned home to my parents, completely sure I ruined my one and only interview.
An hour later, the phone rang.
“You seem to have a knack for fries,” the manager said.
“You’re hired.”
I worked hard at that job. No, it wasn’t cool. Mean high school kids flicked pennies and shot spit balls at me when I was working at the cash register and I came home every night slicked with grease. And yes, it was damn hot working around the deep fryers. But I made money. Nothing could compare though to the next summer when, again, I couldn’t get a job – until a butcher shop called me in for an interview.
“You look like the kind of girl who has a talent for handling raw meat,” the manager said.
“You’re hired!”

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