Effervescence. THIS, turns out, is something that I chase. But it isn’t just effervescence on its own, I want to feel this WITH others. Loudly!!!!
I crave this feeling of being in a group experience, unified, connected, literally in harmony. Collective effervescence is the feeling of energy and harmony when people are engaged in a shared purpose. I love this mode of being. I want it to be something that I feel on the regular and folks, spoiler, that has not been my reality for a long, long while.
Singing at the top of my lungs (off key, let me be clear as I am not a talented singer) with others is, simply put, one of the human experiences that is most precious to me. And recently a dream I dared to dream at nine years old when I heard her for the first time came true: I spent two sacred, medicinal nights in a state of collective effervescence being led through the experience by my Queen, Madonna.
My kid + adolescent + twenty something selves are still in a state of shock. My middled aged self remembered SO much about myself, my embodied self, the paths I’ve traveled due to the time travel power of music and her music that is the soundtrack to so much of my last 4 decade of life. Somewhere in my soul, we are all exhausted from dancing together all night. We are hugging, laughing, crying, and singing very loudly, madly in love with each other.
Madonna’s music is not meant to be listened to in stillness. Her music WANTS you to move, to embody it. To be embodied in it. She meant to be a dancer, not a singer, and that tracks when you cannot not move when in the presence of her music. I dare you: pick a song and then try to be still. Just try.
So it makes sense, then, that the memories of my own lived, human experience would come rushing through muscles when I got lost in the flow of the collective effervescence that is her live show. It was like I was in a time machine, meeting myself on different stops along my life where her music kept me company as I navigated the map unfolding in front of me, choosing the next stretch of path to travel.
This show starts with her introducing you to her younger self, and welcoming her home. To herself. She thanks that young version of herself for keeping her safe, for doing what she needed to do, for being unapologetically who she was. And then she plays one her early punk songs, Burning Up, solo on an electric guitar with images from CBGB rolling behind her. I love this idea of thanking our younger selves. I owe mine a tremendous debt for being able to sniff out what wasn’t safe, who wasn’t safe, and for simply walking away when that was all that was left for me to do. That was hard. I did it. I might not be alive had I not.
Not giving a fuck. Something else she taught me. I stopped shaving my body hair a decades ago. I got tattoos, I get tattoos. I shaved my head. I didn’t go to college until I was in my late twenties. I converted to a religion that was not what, where I came from. I’ve lived lots, lots, lots of places. I hitchhiked from Guatemala to Texas, from Colorado to Oregon , and all over India. I love to travel alone. I love to be alone. I found, build companies when I feel that something that should be there, isn’t. I forgive. I love. I dance. I sing. I dream.
Madonna’s music taught me how to win. When I think of the early days of when Madonna was teaching me how to win, I am a 10 year old me hyping myself up before an important race, behind the blocks on a cold, late winter pool deck in Oklahoma. I set my first national record (100 backstroke) and her voice was in my head the whole time. Stroke by stroke, breath by breath. Open Your Heart set my pace for that race and it went exactly as I envisioned that it would. I nailed every turn, my start, and all the lengths in between. I got to stand on the medal podium for the first time in my life; I was hooked. She helped me to FEEL what it felt like to leave it all in the pool, she kept me company there, and I was so, so proud.
She showed us how to love people living with AIDS. She was one of the first celebrities to publicly show her physical affection for the men and women dying in the 1980’s. She championed them, their lives, their choices, long before it was trendy to do so. She fed them, cared for them, funded research and funerals. I remember learning so much about acceptance from her during this time in my young life. A friend of my mom’s, a gay man in our lives ( Renee, in Arkansas) died of AIDS when I was twelve years old. It was 1986, few people could truly see the entirety of the scope of the disappearance of an entire group of people. I remember my mom struggling to describe to us, her kids, what was happening. It was scary and Madonna showed us how to show up, love folks, and be an ally.
She played Vogue on acoustic guitar as the concert. It was slow, we all sang along. A shared experience of collective effervescence I won’t soon forget. What I felt during this song, this shared moment, was the power of taking something that you love and changing it. Not getting rid of it, not even modernizing it, just shifting it. It felt so good; in that moment there were muses floating through the air.
It seemed to me that the happiest, personal moments that Madonna shared with us during the show were when she shared the stage with her kids. Madonna as a mother. Not something I’d spent a lot of time thinking about before she was sharing her kids on stage with us, basking in the glow that we feel when we see our kids shining. She laughed with them, danced, sang, and honored their birth mothers. She also spent time reflecting on the space that she felt in her life with the absence of her own mother who died when Madonna was young. It seemed clear that motherhood for her, as it is for many of us, is medicine.
Sex was everywhere with zero shame and wild joy and pleasure. Erotic embodied. Like she has always reminded us: sex is for pleasure. Sex is power. Sex is art. Sex is play. Sex is self expression. A salient memory from my childhood is when my bonus Dad, Sam, brought on the Sex Book that Madonna produced in the early 1990’s. He sat us (me + my siblings, who were younger so we were all teens at the time) not to tell us not to look at this book but to show us how to handle art books. How to turn the pages without bending them. My parents did sex ed right with us, me and my sister, specifically. We were told repeatedly that our sexual pleasure was/is our. We were taught that sex is/was about joy, that the majority of sex that we will have in our lives is about pleasure (maybe some of it might be about making other humans) and so we should prioritize enjoying it. I am so grateful for this from both my parents and Madonna.
The show is Queer AF. Trans, gay, all of us seen, celebrated, loved. Bodies everywhere, all of the skin on every kind of body showing itself off. Tits out. The show was MC’d by Bob the Drag Queen so it has this super gay vibe right out of the gate. Rainbows everywhere. The laser light elements during Ray of Light are tattooed on my soul; it was the highest point for me, energetically, of the show without a doubt. I cried, not going to lie.
Something that this concert reminded me of is that separateness is a lie that falls away when we are with each other. When you are connected through the sharing of live music with other people, this feeling cannot be denied. And when that music is flowing out of the soul of a pop icon, sharing herself with us en masse with what could be for the last time, well, it makes the medicine we are sharing deeply sacred. The collective effervescence of it all, sharing her music with her fans like me are enamored with me art, I am still riding that high.
It was worth the 40 year wait.