It's a Little Bit Funny

One of the nice things about being 60 is that you don’t have to worry about looking cool at a rock concert. At 30 or 40 or 50 I might have been more concerned. I might have bemoaned my lack of black leather boots with 6 inch heels, skin-tight jeans and T-shirt with a low cut neck and skull motif. I never had that stuff at 20 either, but I would have put in more of an effort.   

When I stood in front of my closet this week, deciding what to wear to see Elton John play here in Dayton, and finding neither electric boots nor mohair suit, I thought, “Oh, hell, you’re an Aging Baby Boomer. No one expects a 60 year-old to be rocker chick.”  So I chose comfy shoes for the long walk from the parking lot to the arena, jeans that don’t chafe my thighs and a coat with zippered pockets so that I wouldn’t have to carry a purse.

And if you guessed that the dominant demographic that showed up to see Elton John were in fact Aging Boomers, you’d be right. Well, that makes sense, right? He’s been around as long as we have and was already a super star when we were kids in our 20s. His songs were part of the soundtrack of our youth.

Ken and I slow danced on our first date in 1971 to “Your Song” (first line: “It’s a little bit funny.”) It became our song.

During late nights with my classmates in the interior design studio at University of Manitoba, we turned the radio up loud whenever “Bennie and the Jets” came on. We sang along almost shouting and danced to relieve some of the stress of working on insane all-nighter projects. It became an anthem for us.

When Ken was away at grad school in Michigan from 1974-75, I got feeling quite lonesome and weepy over the lyrics, “Hold me closer, tiny dancer.”

So there we were on a Wednesday night in an arena holding 10,000 people, two 60 year-olds at a rock concert, reminiscing about our younger days, telling a couple of young things that I had seen the Rolling Stones in Winnipeg in 1968. “Whoooaa!” one of them said. “That was like, 45 years ago, Dude!”

Yup, I’m that old. And, I’m still standing!