My Fountain Of Youth Can Be Found In A Mosh Pit

Late nights at punk shows were not how I expected to spend my forties...

Hi Sweetie!

It's Jane here again, and for a Friday treat, I am as promised finally revealing the much anticipated answer to my Two Truths and A Lie family name-drop edition question.

While most of you guessed that the lie was that my mom had a leather sandal shop on MacDougal Street where Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and Peter Paul and Mary were customers, that was in fact, true. And my mom is as cool as that sounds still.

Some others thought the lie was that Kathleen Hanna and I got tested for ESP at the same lab in Durham, North Carolina, but that was in fact true also. My grandfather Gaither Pratt was in the parapsychology department at Duke University and I tested highly, as I recall. I remember being in a room adjacent to someone looking at cards with images on them and "seeing" what the images were. I don't remember if Kathleen said she did well also, but I'm going to assume that she did, because she is most certainly deep.

I guess where I unknowingly threw you guys off was in the multigenerational reference to my grandpa having hung out with Anne Frank, where some of you guessed that I would not lie about Anne Frank. One would think. But I did. My grandfather, Joseph Marks, was close with Anne's father Otto Frank, but never met Anne.

I just love the three of you who were waiting on pins and needles for that big reveal. And I love you all and wish you the most fun and happiest Friday. Regardless of everything.

Love,
Jane

Oh, I almost forgot to say, here is Charlie's wonderful new story for you. I know you miss his writing as I do when he takes even a couple of days off (no pressure, Charlie!). It's been fun to see some of you going back to read his oldies but goodies in the meantime. But here's a new one for you for today! Enjoy!

The Lawrence Arms at the Metro. Yes, I know I’m in the balcony, give me a break. Shows make me feel younger, not invincible, dammit.

It’s around 10:30 on a Saturday night and I’m at my third concert in my second city in roughly 30 hours. There’s a tinge in my lower back, a pang in the arch of my foot, and beads of sweat running down my face as I put one arm around my buddy, another around my wife, and scream along to the Lawrence Arms with what is left of my voice: “What’s left in the smoke and the falling debris?/It’s grownups like them and losers like meeeeeee!”

Now, I like to think that the loser line is simply some classic midwestern self-deprecation, but we certainly aren’t grownups. Grownups don’t go to two shows in Brooklyn on a Friday, fly to Chicago in the morning to be at another show by 8pm, a taco stand by midnight, and drunk on Old Style by 2. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I Don’t Want To Grow Up

The brain works in a funny way when you’re a kid. It doesn’t matter how old your parents actually are, they will forever seem ancient to you. At the time, it made perfect sense that my parents never went to concerts. Music is for young people and only young people, obviously. So I never really considered that concerts were a thing they would ever be into.

As far as I know, my parents went to two “rock shows” after I was born — the Chicago date of the Warped Tour in 1998 and the release party for the ska compilation Everything Off Beat Vol. 2 at Chicago’s Metro later that same year. They had a pretty good reason to attend those shows as my ska band, The Shuttlecocks, was playing both of them. Other than those and a Rolling Stones show I took my mom to in the 2000s, I’m pretty confident that they never went to another non-symphony concert, and I’d be hard-pressed to remember one of those.

Thus, I was trained to believe that concerts were something people “grew out of” as they got older. This concept was reinforced over years of going to punk shows and looking out at the crowd to see that I seemed to be the only one who had aged. Like with so many other things that I enjoy, I started to question whether I was suffering from arrested development or was immature. As I added mature elements to my routine, like taking a daily vitamin and drinking water before bed to avoid hangovers, I spent less of my free time on the periphery of the mosh pit.