M and i caught the vienna teng concert at schuba’s last night. she was kind enough to put us on the guest list, which made me feel cool. i mean, schuba’s is a teeny tiny venue that holds about 100 people, so it’s not like i was on the guest list at house of blues (altho, come to think of it, BETTY put me on their list there once, too…), but my sorry ego will always get a kick out of being on a guest list just about anywhere.

anyway, the show was really solid and beautiful, and vienna’s percussionist played some pretty freakin’ weird awesome instruments, including this thing that i’ve looked all over the net for but can’t find a name for it. it basically looks like a big, brass top (the kind you’d spin), with lots of thin rods running up the outside of it. when you draw a bow across it, it makes that eerie, high-pitched horror-movie squeal you get just before something bad happens to the heroine. applied judiciously, and it’s spine-tingling. hopefully someone will comment this post and tell me what that is, or even better, send me a link with a better picture than what i can give in words here.

M, who later in the evening confessed to having been a full-on 80’s punk in his teens, and even now wears converses and a ramons t-shirt, gets points for accompanying me to a late show on a weekday night and only looking a *bit* drowsy at one point. and he did ask me to copy her CDs for him. but you should have seen his face when we walked into schuba’s and saw rows of chairs set up on the floor of a concert hall where i think he’s more accustomed to standing-room-only rocking out. “i told you it was adult-contemporary,” i said to him. he nodded and observed that as a straight white couple we were pretty far out of the room’s demographic. “lesbians, asian women, and the men who love them,” is i think how he characterized the room. which was accurate, but not complete. the audience spanned three generations and crossed gender, social, racial and intellectual boundaries in a way that made the room inclusive, rather than exclusive. sort of the way i think about new york city. i love the sense anonymity that i feel when i’m in new york, as if, no matter what i do/say/wear, i will never stand out or feel completely alone in a city as huge and diverse as new york. i really dig artists whose work can bring together a group of people across demographic boundaries that often prove divisive. live performance, whether it is theatre or music or something else, is compelling to me because it’s about the communion that takes place between audience and performer, and between the audience members themselves. a work of art was created, existed, was experienced, and, being ephemeral, will never exist in the same form again, and that shared experience is what makes live performance a profound thing: i was there. you were there. we experienced that moment in a way that will never exist again, and that is something we have in common from this point forward. from there we are punk rockers and lesbians, parents and children, lovers and loners, musicians and the musically-inept, artists, writers, teachers, professionals, black, white, asian. the couple sitting to my left were talking computer science QA blogs between sets; the woman to my right, seated close to her girlfriend, wore a t-shirt that said, “my boyfriend bought me a ford.”