Madonna and Me (23 page)

Here is the thing: Because I have never actually been to a Madonna concert, and because going is something I considered doing at nine and thirteen and twenty-five, it is not something that makes me feel old at all. In fact, it makes me feel rather spry! Then again, here’s another thing: I go to Bruce Springsteen concerts. All the time. As a matter of fact, I have seen Bruce Springsteen four times in the past three months. And what’s more, some friends just yesterday proposed that we fly to Dublin to see him play in November, and to my immense surprise I said that seemed like a good idea, even though I have never been the kind of person who thinks that flying anywhere to see someone perform is a good idea, let alone if you have seen that person perform four times in the past year, let alone if that person is in his late fifties and you are completely aware that your devotion to him sort of dates you.

Also, in the past year, I have paid money to see Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, and Prince. For the record, I have also seen Feist and Neko Case, though we left Neko Case early because it was standing only and sort of hot. And I thought about seeing Cat Power, but didn’t.

But in any case, what I am saying is that I am not one of those people who go to shows by Modest Mouse or the Libertines. I feel comfortable admitting that my musical tastes are creaky.

But I somehow felt bad about the perception that Madonna is a creaky act. Maybe because it makes me feel old. Maybe because my radar was so off that I thought it was cool I was going to a Madonna concert when really it was fogeyish. Maybe, because seeing Madonna was something I’d wanted to do since I was nine, I got momentarily tricked into thinking I was nine again.

Anyway, I went. And I think it’s a good thing I didn’t see Madonna when I was younger, because I might not have been old enough to handle it. There have been a lot of reviews of the concert—which I assume never varies, since who could do anything spontaneous when you have fourteen tightly choreographed backup dancers in chaps?—but here is a rundown of what happened:

Madonna hatched out of a disco-ball egg that opened like a multifaceted DeLorean; there were pulsing lights and reflecting surfaces; it looked like twelve disco emporia had vomited simultaneously all over the Garden stage. A team of shirtless, muscle-bound dancers clippety-clopped around in plumed riding hats; gymnasts did some impressive tumbling and jumping on uneven bars, and a woman in electric blue Middle Easternish gear convulsed in a cage. There was crumping. (OK, the truth is, I thought it was break dancing, but when I read Kelefa Sanneh’s review of the concert in the
Times,
he said it was crumping.) At one point, Madonna donned a white Travolta suit and danced like Tony Manero on a lighted-up tiled floor; at another, she invited the audience to “suck George Bush’s dick.” Images flashed: of dead dolphins and tigers and falling horses. Of Bush, Dick Cheney, Nazis, Scud missiles, Klansmen, red blood cells. There was a roller-skating segment straight out of
Starlight Express
. It was the Folies Bergères, it was Bianca Jagger at Studio 54; it was the Moulin Rouge—if all those things were viewed at a distance, as if they were being broadcast when they were actually live.

After Madonna sang “I have a tale to tell,” the first line of “Live to Tell,” there were performance-arty monologues about falling, or being a gang-banger, acted out on jutting portions of stage by people who were not Madonna. In fact, there was a lot in the show by people who were not Madonna. Several minutes would go by in which Madonna was nowhere onstage but six people in loincloths were climbing jungle gyms or a guy in a turban was blowing a ram’s horn and then all of a sudden Madonna—well-rested and in a new costume—would get lowered from a helicopter or shot from a cannon, or do what she actually did on Wednesday night, which was appear to sing “Live to Tell” hanging from a disco-ball cross dressed in a peasant blouse, a sequined belt and a crown of thorns.

You probably saw the pictures of Madonna on this cross when the tour started. I remember shaking my head in admiration; this woman’s commitment to creating new ways to dismay the public is simply unrivaled. The trouble is she’s made her own job so much harder. Whether she herself trained us not to flinch in the face of manipulated sexual and religious iconography or whether she has simply ridden the larger cultural shock wave past its crest, I’m not sure what her future as a provocateur could possibly hold. The self-crucifixion thing was a good try, but . . . eh. She may have to hang on until the day when, in a retirement gesture that will make Streisand cry in her
tsimmes,
she can disembowel herself onstage.

Anyway, back to the concert: After Madge came off the cross, she launched into “Sorry.” The man in front of me—and believe me, he was practically the only man in front of me; everyone at this concert was female—started convulsing, face in his hands, Beatlemania-style. Then she stripped into a tank top and began singing, for real (which you could tell because her voice was out of breath, as it should be), and ground her hips into a chair. Madonna humped everything that stood still long enough for her to wrap her legs around it. At one point—and I do not think this particular disco egg is worth cracking open here and now—she rode a black man like a horse.

The concert was not at all like watching two hours of Yente from
Fiddler on the Roof,
unless updated productions of
Fiddler
have included scenes in which Yente whips a bare-chested Tevye with a riding crop and yells at the audience, “That’s right, you motherfuckers, I love New York!” Which, I suppose, is possible. I never saw the version with Madonna’s friend Rosie O’Donnell.

In 2004, Sanneh wrote about Madonna’s Re-Invention tour that, “When you imagine Madonna, you don’t see a single image but a time-lapse photograph, with one persona melting and warping into the next.” It’s a great line, and a great description of what I felt last night, watching Madonna live, for the first time in my life. When I look at her, it’s hard not to imagine decades—of her life, and of my life—written on her body. That body. Her legs aren’t even traditionally shapely anymore: Their muscles are serpentine and distinct; she’s an anatomical enterprise as much as an aesthetic or athletic or musical one. I wonder if Madonna made that body so strong because she has to lug so much of her own baggage around on it every day.

Watching that body—not a ligament, let alone a strand of hair, out of place—it’s hard not to think of the soft, ragged young woman who was content to hump a stage in a wedding dress back in 1984. I looked for that younger woman at Madison Square Garden. It was she, after all, who made this older woman—this freak of pop culture—possible. But if it was easy to recall younger iterations of the performer, it was tough to actually spot them onstage on Wednesday night. And I think that’s how she wants it right now.

Madonna played almost all of her new album and only a handful of her classic songs; she seemed to be stamping her feet to convey that she is no nostalgia act. But in drawing such a severe line between her older and her younger selves, in successfully insisting that she’s no foggy, she actually made me feel like more of one.

It was in her grand finale, “Hung Up,” the best part of the night—that it felt like a concert at all. She let her hair down, literally and
figuratively, and when she threw her leotarded bod around the stage, rubbing herself against a giant boom box, there was the first, and only, glimmer of authentic eroticism. It was then, for the first time, that she appeared to let herself get taken in by her own music, to lose just a shred of control. And for a second, she looked so young—like that girl in the New York clubs with her stupid leggings and torn gloves—and she seemed to notice at last that she had a flesh-and-blood audience and berated us, in her old S/M way, to sing along.

“Time goes by—so slowly/ Time goes by—so slowly/ Time goes by—so slowly.” The crowd rose twenty feet in the air on adrenaline alone. And still she kept holding the microphone out: “Time goes by—so slowly.”

And that was when I, or my nine-year-old self, got way overstimulated. Hearing words about time going by so slowly while staring at Madonna’s preserved, warped body; considering all the long-forgotten cultural references on display—whatever happened to Tony Manero anyway? I was confused about why I was enjoying “Hung Up” more than “Like a Virgin,” about why so much of the concert, especially the familiar songs, had seemed so distant but that this new song had brought her alive. And my brain began to expand and contract in sync with the pulsing lights and the rhythmic chanting—“Time goes by—so slowly”—and all I could think was that time goes by so quickly. And that sometimes, like tonight, it can fold in on itself, and remind us of how far away we are from our old selves, our old bodies, our old memories even as we experience things that bring the past to mind. And how this woman, who has been in my consciousness my whole life, seems to be trying to stop time—by singing about it and making her body impervious to it and making her career about the present, not the past. And then I came close to doing the most old-foggy thing I can imagine: crying at a concert. And just then she finally broke the trance with a final euphoric verse: “Every little thing that you say or do/ I’m hung up/ I’m so hung up on you.”

“That was a great fucking song,” Sara said to me, breathlessly. We walked downstairs, out onto the street, talking about the show. And then, as we exited Madison Square Garden, she turned to me. “You know what?” she said. “Maybe we saw her too late.”

Marisela Huerta

 

 

 

 

 

I GREW UP on country music. At six years old I would prance around the house dressed in my short frilly skirt, cowboy boots, and puffy nylon sports jacket with “Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader” on the back. I wore my long black hair hoisted high in two pigtails of giant ringlets. I don’t know if it was adorable or weird for a little Mexican girl to be faking a Southern twang and swaying from side to side while belting out “Islands in the Stream”:

Kenny and Dolly were my favorites, but I sang along to everything from Reba to Hank Williams Jr. I had nothing against the pop and rock my friends listened to, I just liked country better. So did my entire family. As I climbed the ranks of elementary school, my friends began
sharing stories of Bon Jovi concerts, raving about Madonna, squealing about which New Kid on the Block they wanted their boyfriends to be. I’d never heard of Bon Jovi, and I had no idea what the New Kids on the Block looked like. When my girlfriends squealed, I felt like a dork—a dork that listened to country music. With her parents.

But I wanted to fit in, so I stopped wearing my hair in curls and began vigorously watching MTV and VH1, cramming to catch up on all the years of pop music I’d missed.

It was 1991. Madonna’s “Vogue” video dominated both music networks, and soon it was dominating my existence. I learned the dance. I memorized all her songs. Madonna now had me in her thrall.

Now don’t get me wrong. I didn’t dress like Madonna. I didn’t wear Madonna buttons or scrawl her name on my binders or sport a fake mole. I was a fan, but I was a mature fan. I loved her for what she represented. I admired her—not for her foul mouth and sexual escapades but for her confidence and independence. Hearing her songs for the first time as a teenager, I knew they meant more to me than they’d meant to my friends who had listened to her earlier. I was seven when “Like a Virgin” was released; what could my seven-year-old classmates have possibly known about being touched for the very first time? But me? By the time I was into the song, Lord knows I understood exactly what she was singing about. Standing in front of my mirror, envisioning my overprotective Catholic parents, I tossed my hair from side to side and belted out “Papa Don’t Preach”: “You should know by now, I’m not a baby . . .”

I admire the hell out of my mom, but Madonna was a different kind of strong. Mom was a brilliant wife, mother, and homemaker—my lifelong hero. But I wanted to be independent, have a career, go away to college. I wanted to be strong and bold and sexy. I wanted to shed my insecure shell and climb into the skin of a grown, confident woman. Even mentioning sex in our house was taboo, but Madonna showed me it was okay for a woman to express her sexuality, okay for a woman to be successful, independent of a man.

By senior year, I had worn out both my cassette and CD of
The Immaculate Collection
. By seventeen, I’d ripped out my proverbial pigtails and busted out of my chastity belt. I also announced I was officially leaving El Paso to attend college. In Los Angeles.

Fast forward ten years. I was still in Los Angeles, now working for the Grammy Awards. I learned that Madonna would be performing at the upcoming awards show—a duet with Gorillaz. From the moment I heard the news, I was bouncing off the walls like a crazy kid on a sugar high. I couldn’t talk about my excitement with anyone; no one would understand. But I was finally going to see her in person and I couldn’t even articulate what that meant to me. Being a Grammy employee with an all-access pass, I could attend all rehearsals, hang out backstage, stalk dressing rooms if I wanted to. I could watch Madonna rehearse. Private rehearsals—holy shit. I might even meet her. But what the hell would I say? Would I even be able to speak? There’s a fine line between being a fervent fan and being a creep.

On the Friday evening Madonna was to rehearse, I trekked twelve miles in two hours through brutal rush-hour traffic from our office in Santa Monica to the STAPLES Center downtown. When I stepped inside the arena, all thirteen thousand seats were empty. The arena was entirely dark except for the fully lit stage. I gasped and slowly descended the bleachers, marveling at the twinkling lights. At the bottom, on the arena floor, the grandeur froze me, and I stood gaping at the massive space surrounding me. I’d walked into the arena a strong, confident woman but suddenly I felt small, like the girl in cowboy boots and pigtails, like a tiny organism inside a giant petri dish.