My Latest Nicks Fix

Last Friday night, I went and saw Stevie Nicks in concert for the 800th time. The hilarity of the night started at Good Dog, with a waitress named Pooper. Seriously, she wore a red, Datarock-esque track jacket with the name “Pooper” on the back, and to be totally honest, the food was uncharacteristically shit. Thanks, Poops!From there we hopped in a cab and headed down to Penn’s Landing to take the ferry across the Delaware (a la George Washington) to the hyper-illuminated Tweeter Center. Upon entering, the female/lesbian bag-inspector asked what I had in my purse, made a really bad joke about my iPod and then went to second base with me. Personally, I think my pink, sleeveless hoodie with original Stevie Nicks artwork that reads “Stand Back” made me look extra touchable. I haven’t been patted down like that in years! Thankfully, we got there just in time to miss Chris Isaak and bought ourselves a few beers. All around us were flowing skirts, anklets, banana hair clips, tie-dyes and perms, but all in all, everyone was pleasant enough. We found a central spot on the lawn and parked ourselves on our blanket, and shortly thereafter, the woman who claims to see crystal visions emerged on stage, triumphant, exuberant and shawled-up as ever. For 59 she rocked pretty hard. She played the classics – Landslide, Rhiannon, Gold Dust Woman, Edge of Seventeen, Stand Back – as well as some really bad ones which shall remain nameless because no one who’s reading this has probably ever heard of them (except for Brynn). For an encore, she wailed on Led Zepplin’s “Rock and Roll” and it was awesome! During the show, some weird things happened. Firstly no one in her band in under 50 and there was an unrelenting amount of leather (and not a lot of lace) up on the stage. From her back-up singers’ jackets, to her lead guitarists pants (he had Sideshow Bob hair to boot), to the OJ Simpson gloves Stevie herself had on at one stage – it was an older persons’ leather-fest… and then there were the scarves/shawls. At one stage – Stevie and Sideshow Bob were engaged in an elaborate, hunched, swaying dance with shawls flowing over both of them. Back and forth, back and forth. Really, they looked like stingrays mating. It was reasonably nauseating/hilarious/confusing. I would rank this concert as the second best I have seen Stevie give. The best being my first Stevie concert back in Hartford, CT in the summer of 1998. It even beat out seeing the entire Mac together (sans Christine McVie) in Sydney in 2004. We also had an impromptu photo shoot on the ferry but those pics are a little too x-rated for this blog!