All I Want is U2

Before Tuesday the last concert I had been to was in 1994. It was Depeche Mode. My friends and I drove nearly four hours to the Delta Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, and then drove back to Rexburg, Idaho, that night because it was mid-semester at Ricks College. We got home at 4 a.m. and I had to go to class and then work at Wendy's the next day.

I didn't wear a stitch of makeup because grunge was cool. I wore boys' jeans two sizes too big for the same reason.

The concert smelled like pot and the only lights in the audience were from cigarette lighters. Everyone in the audience was born in the 70s like me.

I liked this concert. I rocked out and had fun and didn't realize how much I took having fun for granted. But I had a burning desire to go to another one. I thought it would be totally rad to see U2 in concert one day. One. Beautiful Day.

So finally, fifteen years later, sporting sprouty gray hairs and child-bearing hips, I got to fulfill my dream. After my much-adored sister-in-law informed me that U2 was coming to my city and that I deserved to go I told Blake about it. He wasn't thrilled. I decided to go with or without him and recruited some besties to come with me.

It was a different experience entirely. I didn't have to leave the state to see this one although it was still a longish drive in side streets and the alleyway... I was with some of my favorite angel people, and I didn't have to drive (thanks, Sandy!) so I could just relax and be stuck in the moment. Sandy made these gift bags for us, complete with water bottles, snacks, and ear plugs.



Instead of going nakedface like I had at Depeche Mode I decided to get my eyebrows waxed and my makeup done for me for the first time ever. Brown eyeliner and mascara is the best I have ever come up with on my own. I needed help. I think I found the eye shadow I've been looking for.



(I had to take a picture so I can remember how my eyebrows are supposed to be shaped.)

My jeans fit me this time and were purchased in the women's department.

The concert smelled like pot like before. Again everyone in the audience had been born in the 70s. The lights that twinkled in the audience this time, though, were from cell phones. At the end Bono turned off the stage lights and requested that we shine those cell phone lights like a Milky Way galaxy and he serenaded us all from his spaceship. In this dreamlike surrounding I thought about the granola me that had gone to the Depeche Mode concert fifteen years ago- that she is still inside me craving fun like this, needing fun like this.

It was a bucket list moment. I'd have gone crazy if I wouldn't have gone tonight. I needed this bad! Sandy, Sara, Alisha: I'll remember this beautiful day forever.

(More pictures to come.)