Middle Daughter showed up for work bleary-eyed and deliriously happy this morning. She spent all day every day this past weekend at Lollapalooza (nights were spent at her cousin's downtown apartment).
She said, "It was the most fun I've ever had in my life. In fact, I didn't know it was possible to have that much fun. All of us [about seven women, all cousins] would coordinate in the morning about which bands we were going to see, and where and when we were going to meet, and it worked.
"And at first we were worried about running into people we didn't want to see -- like, people from high school -- but the only people I ran into were people I love. I ran into three friends from camp!"
Her voice was hoarse ("I was screaming the entire weekend"), but her grin was ear-to-ear. She sat at her desk outside my office -- a countertop, a computer, a bulletin board, a phone, looking up at me, a young woman at work on a Monday morning, like young women everywhere. Hair pulled back in a bun, slight and transitory bags under her eyes, cell phone at her side. She went on:
"Every hour of every day this weekend, I thought: 'This is the best hour of my life!' And then at night, we'd go back to [the cousin]'s apartment, and eat, and just collapse."
I don't think I've ever come close to having that much fun in my life, which has gone on more than twice as long as Middle Daughter's. It occurs to me that the concerts of my youth were alcohol- and barf-ridden affairs. I only attended maybe a half-dozen stadium concerts, and the sound was routinely awful and the marijuana made me paranoid and upset and got hungry and lonely and tired, and people seemed forever to be barfing on my jacket or on someone's shoes, and by and large I couldn't wait for those nights to be over.
Which they are.
--T.A.