The first time I went to Metro I was 17 years old and had recently gone through the rite of passage that every teenager must go through or, seriously, you all should have just packed it in and called it a day: My Misunderstood Phase.

The problem with my transmogrification was that I didn't want my parents to know that I was having a misunderstood phase because, well, they understood me. I didn't want to hurt their feelings and have them thinking that the reason I cut off my long curly hair and wore white powered makeup was because they just didn't get how deep and utterly complex I was. As a result, I kept my change pretty simple, say, pairing a long black turtleneck with a cute pair of pants, just so they didn't get the wrong idea, which totally defeated the purpose.

I was not this person but I just thought this person seemed like an excellent idea at the time. Everything on the top half of my body screamed Goth Girl. From waist down I was all Elizabeth Wakefield and oh how I hated Jessica and her perfect, perfect cheerleading life.

I was what the kids like to say A Poseur. Somehow I got by on a couple of Cure Albums, black eyeliner and a profound curiosity for boys with long hair and a deep appreciation for poetry. Both the bad and good kinds. I think it lasted for all of six months, just long enough for me to see Interview With A Vampire on opening night with all the other goth kids as we stood outside the Movies 8 in J-town, holding hands as though we were about to experience something incredibly life-altering. I couldn't hack being that bummed out all of the time and it felt like such a ridiculous lie that it was all I could do not to go running back to the junior department of Marshall Field's.

Anyways, I really couldn't afford the amount of Vamp it took for the image to work.

I don't really know why this picture on the left reminded me of my first show, but Friday night I was at Metro, for the first time in a long while, and I wondered about the girl who graffitied the stall I was in. Why such a desperate message and why anarchy to accomplish such a thing? Anarchy is such a pejorative word and it really only incites the young, at least enough to be scribbling it on a bathroom stall at a rock club. Just the same, it's obvious she was feeling ... trapped.

Maybe the stall door was jammed? Dunno.

I rejoined my friend and thought about whether my life is anymore my own now then it was back when I tried to convince myself that I was something that I wasn't. As I stood there rocking out to music, as I had done so many times before in the past decade from that very same balcony, I decided that no, it probably wasn't though I considered whether anyone ever feels as though their life is their own. We keep waiting for the real life to begin before we start doing any living and I wondered what it takes to convince each of us that this is, in fact, The Real Life in order for that change to happen.

Maybe for now it's good enough that I know that Vamp is not my color, that I look better with long hair and meditating upon nonesense scribbled on bathroom walls will only serve to make one nostalgic for days when I never thought I would do something so foolish in the first place.

Poseur indeed.

Posted by Erin at 05:30 PM | filed under: Odds and ends

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