A friend of mine recently asked what my all-time favorite concert was.  I struggled with the answer.

Growing up in a small town, I had zero access to any concerts, aside from the few annual Mule Days (yes, you read that correctly), Inyo County Fair and Bishop Rodeo concert acts that would come through town.  My family and I once saw Juice Newton at the fair.  You’ll need to Google her.  My point being – I didn’t see many concerts until I went off to college.  And, I’ve been making up for lost time ever since, seeing more concerts than I can count.

I finally gave my friend a rough list of my top 10 favorites.  I mentioned them all in no particular order. U2, Phil Collins, Janet Jackson, Madonna, Prince, Nickelback, (suck it, haters – yes, I’m a big fan, they’re really, really fun:)), Foo Fighters, Boys II Men, Maroon 5 and then I smiled as I remembered my first time seeing Stone Temple Pilots.

For a few years they were the headlining act for the Family Values Tour, a really great rock fest that typically featured three to four acts.

I think it was 2001 or 2002.  Chris and I got tickets to see them and then a good friend of mine that had many radio connections here in town got us backstage passes.  STP was playing with Staind and Linkin Park and set-up shop at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix.  Both Staind and Linkin Park were newer to the music scene but already very popular.  STP of course had been around for years and was a household name. All I could think about was getting to see frontman Scott Weiland.

Years and years of scandalous stories shrouded this man’s talent.  He was always in trouble for this and that, with the majority drug-related.  I remember reading about the time he and his then wife fought in the penthouse of the Hard Rock Hotel in Vegas and he never made it downstairs to the concert he was to perform that night at The Joint.  He was just a hot mess. But man was he a brilliant performer. Aren’t some of the best rock stars hot messes?  I mean, it seems to come with the territory so likely was inevitable for him.  He just could never get it together. He was in and out of rehab and some jail time for years. His craft rarely suffered though.  It likely got even better, sadly.

We made our way down to the depths of the old arena.  If you’re not familiar, this arena used to be where the Phoenix Suns played, prior to getting their fancy new facility in downtown Phoenix.  The years had not been kind to this place. I doubt it had had many renovations. I didn’t care though.  I hadn’t been backstage many times in my life so I was going to embrace it. I could see a man standing near a door and he waved. It was someone with the tour, that was there for fan meet and greets.  We appeared to be the only ones there other than him so no other fans. And we waited.

“A few of the guys from Staind and Linkin Park will be here in just a minute,” he said.  We smiled and said thanks. And sure enough, here they came. Frontman Aaron Lewis and one of the band members from Staind emerged from the door, along with Chester Bennington and another band member from Linkin Park. I have the photos somewhere to prove it. It was really fun and they were very nice, as you can imagine, embracing their fans with open arms. They told us to enjoy the show and disappeared back through the door. We stood there for what felt like five minutes and then I finally said, “So what about STP?  When will they be showing up?”

The man smiled and shook his head.

“Well, it’s hit or miss if Scott and the boys show for these things.  We never count on them.”

And in true rock star fashion, they never emerged from that door.  He apologized and sent us on our way back up to the concert.  It was going to start in a few minutes.  I felt defeated but I wasn’t going to let it ruin my good time.  I knew the concert would be awesome. And besides, we got to meet and take photos with a couple of really great bands.

Our tickets were right down in the pit, standing-room only.  When I say pit, it truly was a pit, complete with crazy moshers.  Even as “cut-a-bitch” as I was, even back then, I was never a mosher.  Chris and I stood way back against the wall of the area, safe and sound and away from the battle zone.

The concert kicked off with Staind, then Linkin Park and lastly STP.  None of them disappointed, especially Scott and the crew. He was every bit as good as his CDs, which is hard to come by.  Most musicians when they perform live aren’t quite as good as the studios can make them appear to sound on CD. But he was solid. At one point, he came down into the pit and literally was right above us, as a bunch of guys raised him up in the air, crowd-surfing style. And it was while he was singing what I feel is their all-time best song, Plush. I was smiling from ear to ear, singing along like the crazed fan that I was.  It was great.  And it didn’t matter that he blew us off for the meet and greet.  He gave us our money’s worth, all the way up to the very end of the show, when he came out on stage, wrapped up in a large American flag and one of the other band members ripped it away from him, like a towel, leaving him to stand there, naked in a fig leaf pose. The whole place cheered and screamed in shock and then he waved good-bye and ran off stage.

I saw him perform three more times, twice more with STP and once with Velvet Revolver.  He always put on a good show and sometimes was weirder than usual but again, I knew what I was getting into every time. The news outlets made sure to remind me of his recent antics. He always finished the show with the American flag bit. As a fan, I was trained to expect it and I know I would have been disappointed if he didn’t pull the repeated stunt.

I thank Scott for the great memories and entertaining me for years. Rock ‘n’ roll lost a legend this week and at 48 he was much too young and too talented to leave us so early. I hope he found peace and a new crowd to wear a flag for because he surely will be playing to sold-out shows in the afterlife.

I think often about my daughter finally figuring out that my husband and I are Santa’s elves. She’ll be 9 in March and I always thought some asshole kid at school would ruin it for her.  That’s usually the case.  But here she is, still believing, which is awesome.

I remember when I found out.  My parents also figured the jig would be up at school but no dice.  It all unraveled one Saturday night when we were barbecuing in our front yard.  I think I was 5 or 6.  My dad would barbecue anything and preferred his dinner grilled, as I learned to love our meats prepared that way too. We would barbecue out in our front yard most nights by our big picnic table when we still lived in San Bernardino, CA.

My second cousin, Kris, was staying with us at the time. He was 3 or 4. And it was the night before Easter. He was in the house somewhere, playing, out of ear shot.

My mom asked me if I wanted to help be the “Easter Bunny” for Kris and as the words fell from her mouth, I could see the color drain from her cheeks.  She realized too late what she had just uttered.

“Well, if I’m the Easter Bunny for Krissy, does that mean you and Pop are for me?” I questioned.

“Yes, kiddo, that’s right” she answered.  She and my dad looked at one another, realizing what was coming next.

“Well then, are you guys the Tooth Fairy too?” I asked, frowning.

“That’s right,” my mom said.

“Santa too?” I asked.

“Yes, we are Santa too,” she said.

Fuck. The truth.  I remember them telling me lots about believing in the magic and the usual conversation that you record over and over again in your head as a parent, about how you can break it to your kids gently.  But it still was harsh nonetheless.  I never cried though.  I was tough. And the news as tough as it was, it still was fine, knowing that my parents had been making sure to keep the charade up for a number of years and giving me lots of awesome gifts.

They laughed about all the late nights my dad spent putting together my trike, wagon and other hard-to-assemble products. Or when my mom had to beat off all the crazy women who wanted to buy my Cabbage Patch doll from her, as she ran for her life from our neighborhood Sears store.

I really wonder how my daughter will take the news when the day finally comes.  She’s getting older now so she should be a tough girl too about it but you never know.  My husband will be happy that we can finally take credit for all those awesome gifts Santa made sure she got from her Christmas list.  And, he can tell her the story of the time he purchased the wrong Barbie house and at 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve, as we were putting all the hundreds of pieces together and realize it, you just go with it.  Besides, he happily blamed the error on Santa when she called it out on Christmas Day.

Charlie Sheen announcing he’s HIV positive wasn’t really a huge shock.  It’s sad but in all honesty, as I told everyone I talked to about the news, it’s amazing it’s taken this long for something like this to happen to him.  The guy has rolled hard, lived dangerously, destroyed his body and done all of the above for a long, long time. Don’t get me wrong though – I still like him, even if he is a trainwreck.  He’s funny and always entertaining.

I’ve been a fan for years, clear back to his early career when he starred in movies like Lucas. (Yes, yes, I am dating myself.)  But you have to understand, I grew up in a really small town.  Like twin theater small, as in we were lucky if we got movies on opening weekend maybe a couple times a year but otherwise saw them a full month later than the rest of the country and in some cases they never showed up at all.  Because of said small town, there wasn’t a ton to do so I became a hard-core movie and TV buff, thus the start of my nerd-dom at an early age. And, if the twin theater didn’t get the movies, I was a card-carrying regular at our local video store.  From Wall Street to Young Guns, I rented everything Charlie was in, along with other celebs too.  I was Hollywood-crazy and I was never a harsh critic.  I could always find something good about even the crappiest of movies.  I just loved to be entertained and swept away into fictional settings for a couple of hours.

With all this in mind, you can imagine my surprise and delight when I read in our local newspaper that a movie would be filmed in my town.  Now, I can probably guarantee that ol’ Charlie doesn’t typically bring this alien B-movie up in interviews but I didn’t care.  It felt like we had our own little slice of Hollywood right in our backyard and the chance of maybe just maybe getting to see Charlie up close and personal while he was filming The Arrival made me giddy with excitment.

It was 1995, I was 16 and a junior in high school. The filming was going to take place over two weeks at a house in the downtown area and at our nearby radio observatory. (Fun fact: the movie Contact with Jodie Foster was also filmed at the observatory. ) Most of the filming happened during school hours and I was a painfully good student so never cut class.  Looking back, I should have played hooky at least once and hung out at the front fence of that house to see the movie magic.  I caught glimpses of the shoot on our local TV station each night since they were doing regular updates of the film progress.  But sadly the shoot was coming to a close and I still hadn’t rubbed elbows with Charlie.

Then, that final Saturday night, it happened.  My mom and I were driving downtown on Main Street.  Yes, that’s right, we really had a Main Street that went right down the center of town. We were on our way to see a movie at the twin theater and up ahead of our truck, we saw a really unusual car, especially unusual for our small town that mostly had trucks and ecomony-style cars.  We inched closer and I recognized that it was a convertible Rolls-Royce. The top was down and there was a guy driving and a girl in the passenger seat with her hair flowing in the wind.  I remember telling my mom who was driving that I had a feeling that had to be Charlie so she sped up to get right behind them.  It was then that we knew we’d finally found him because the license was a vanity plate, “MASHEEN”.  Such clever word-play. But at this point, we were in shock that we happened into seeing him and just kept driving, now effectively stalking him. He then turned into the parking lot of our nicest restaurant and bar. We felt satisfied that we’d seen enough, knowing he’d be mobbed inside so we’d pass on that action and still make it to our movie on time. It was an excellent night and I can’t even remember what movie we saw because it didn’t matter. We’d stalked Charlie Sheen.