Went to the Ani Difranco show this evening. It was intense and good. For all her fierce reputation, she put on a show filled with positivity and hope.
Amnesty International was in the lobby, with a couple of petitions against torture and indefinite detainment. We signed up.
The crowd was heavily biased towards women. The screaming of the crowd was higher pitched than I’ve heard before.
The opening act was a wild man who beat the living hell out of his guitar. He had the loudest guitar I’ve ever seen in my life. He had no band, just him and the (loud) guitar. At one point he commented that he had overheard a security guard saying that “the opening act wasn’t really very Christian.” He advised the man to leave before the headliner took the stage, and left it at that. At the end, he brought out his four year old to say ‘hi’ to the crowd. Then he did a song about how he was having to start to lie about doing crack cocaine and shacking up with three dominatrixes at a time.
Ani walked onstage, and once we had settled down a little bit, greeted us with: “Well fuck: Good work fellow voters!” She had to wait a couple of minutes for the crowd to settle down. She kept giggling things like “congressional inquiry” during her set.
She’s pregnant. Maybe 6 or 7 months. No hiding it. Made a few jokes about how the little girl was going to give her a talking to about this being on stage pre-birth thing, once she learned to talk.
She recited a poem that ended: Every tool is a weapon, if you hold it right. I dug that.
She had a lot of banter: I feel that I’m coming to the end of my long and storied series of songs about my trouble with monogamy. It’s a combination of true love and gettin’ old. I have to tell you though, I see the ads for Viagra on TV and I’m like ‘why! I’m just finally managing to be calm and find some peace and you want to go and make me horny again? I’m an asshole when I’m horny!
She played a bunch of older stuff including Little Plastic Castle, Not Done Looking
I should get out more. Concerts are fun.
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