peevish mama

I can’t be 100% sure, but I think Dave Brubeck was the first concert Doctor Dash and I went to as a newly married couple. Brubeck died last week at age 91 and hearing the news made me think of that night in some hotel lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dash and I had been to a bunch of concerts together before, but none like this. It was kind of a swanky scene. We sat at a cocktail table with a candle on it right up close to the the stage. We were 27, but it felt like we were playing at being grown ups. Cocktails, live jazz, plush chairs.

Brubeck seemed impossibly old and impossibly sweet. Also, impossibly talented. I remember we both loved it, but I don’t remember much else about the night. What strikes me now, in retrospect, is how little of an inkling I had about how much going to see music was going to be our thing. Like in our marriage. As a couple. It’s just something he and I have always done together, in every city we’ve lived in and in many different venues.

I do not take this for granted. I do not take it for granted that my man will scootch up behind me in a big hot crowd at a loud loud show and be as happy as me. I do not take it for granted that he’s always turning me on to new music. I do not take it for granted that he’ll humor my incessant need to put words to what I hear, to attempt to describe and compare in order to understand. I do not take it for granted that he’s willing to take a gamble on some band or some person just because I have a notion that it’ll be good – and vice versa – because it is good, better than good, 99% of the time and fully worth it 100% of the time.

And so it was on Friday night when we had tickets to see Solid Gold at First Ave. Putting aside a long, busy, tiring, under-the-weather week, we drank a cup of green tea, tucked in the kids, sealed up the house and stepped out into the brisk winter night at 10:40 pm. The band was awesome – dashing and cool, loud and swoon-inducing, but very graciously Minnesota and obviously beloved by the crowd. We danced and cheered and clapped and were filled up with beautiful, heady, music – I’m still thinking about the show three days later.

The shimmer.

And I don’t take that for granted.

Enjoy a little Dave Brubeck. Enjoy a little Solid Gold. Two stops on my musical romance with Doctor Dash.