October 3rd, the Loft at City Winery, and I'm finally committing myself to an indoor show in a small space where no one is masked. Do I freak out? Well, for a few minutes, but once I'm there, it's easy to forget what year this is. I'm with my longtime crew of Kinky/Jiggy friends, I'm at my old City Winery stomping grounds (well, um, they moved during the pandemic so it's actually a new place, but they've still got the City Cab on tap and great flatbread pizzas).
My friends are here for the opening act, Rogers & Butler, and they do a bang-up job. Really good band, and great songwriting, although since we are sitting at the edge of the stage we can only hear bass and drums and no lyrics. Erp. Because I am actually here for the headliner, one of my top Girl Songwriters of all time, Amy Rigby. I put her right up there with Jill Sobule, Aimee Mann, and Jenny Lewis in my pantheon of chicks who do the feminist thing with wit and irony and a whole lotta snark. And, being a Lyrics Girl, I really want to hear Amy Rigby's lyrics.
But then she pulls out this old acoustic number, from her 1998 album Middlescence (you can also find it on the excellent 18 Again: An Anthology), and I am a puddle of emotion.
Most of us have had a time like this, where even if you did have a job (or, as Amy puts it, a "j-o-b," as if it were something dirty and unmentionable), it was a dead-end job you didn't care about. When everything seemed possible and nothing seemed urgent; when your pleasure-to-obligation ratio was WAY skewed to the pleasure end of the equation.
It's a brilliant title, playing off on that old-fart trope ("ah, my wasted youth" or "youth is wasted on the young") with the truth of the matter, which is that they were also wasted most of the time, dropping acid, smoking pot all day, drinking cheap beers at the Polish bar. Still, was it wasted time? I beg to differ. She buys a guitar, though she hasn't yet learned to play it; she floods her brain with country music. Whatever music she'll eventually make is in there, gestating.
A sense of loss haunts every line, the realization that the freedom and fun of the summer of '83 has since vanished. Listening the other night, I was especially hit by that one line, almost a throwaway line: "the summer I believed in us" -- you know from the past tense that she's no longer with that guy, and only now can she see how much disillusion and heartbreak was lying in wait for her in the fall of '83.
Still, though you can't go back again (and would you really want to?), sometimes you can reconnect with who you used to be. Maybe it's because over the pandemic I went to my high school reunion and stirred up all those old memories; maybe it's because I'm zeroing in on the Medicare years and have a heightened sense of time passing. But this song flushes up so many feelings about one summer in Indianapolis -- not '83, but not much earlier -- and I realize I kinda miss the girl I was then.
Thank you, Amy Rigby, for giving her back to me.
