The Weird Al Concert Was The Most Intense Concert Ever, I Will Die On This Hill

PLUS: webinar sign-ups, and Rider Strong has a Substack

A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day

Hi My Friend,

I have a lot to unpack about the Weird Al concert I went to last Sunday night.

It’s probable that you are not a Weird Al fan, and that’s totally fair. I’m not sure why my allegiance to this man has been as sticky as it has, but I’ve written a whole lot about him. Here’s a piece I published around the time my sister was going to give birth. An excerpt:

Weird Al’s “Behind The Music” was different. Nothing bad happened to Weird Al. His cooperative and loving parents bought him an accordion when a door-to-door accordion salesman came around pedaling them. He got into writing parodies, and people liked them! Coolio got mad at him for “Amish Paradise,” and Weird Al was kind of like, “That’s fair and I’m sorry. I thought you were cool with it, Coolio, but I can see that you’re not, and I wish I could apologize to you.” This seemed genuine. He had a lot of friends. He got enough sleep. And he never took anything too seriously.

From Dear Sophie, Love Sophie.

The silliness was, and is, important. He is also a vegan, and he’s on record as really loving his wife and daughter. I’ve seen him in concert a handful of times (though my memories of everything before I had my own daughter are hazy, as though they belong to a different person), and whether childish parodies are your thing or not, he is undeniably magnetic live. He utilizes multiple costume changes, video elements, and the same band he’s played with for nearly 50 years. I learned he was touring this summer, and I put the ticket sale date in my calendar with multiple reminders. Partly this was because I love Weird Al (established); and partly it was because I was excited to take both my daughter (my newest roommate), and my best friend from high school Jess (who lives across the street as of last year). Jess and I went to see Weird Al in 2005 with my sister Alexis and my then-boyfriend Ben. This could be a return-to-form.

Proof of this.

It’s becoming a growing consensus among my friends, though, that concerts hold less appeal now than they once did. This is aging, and I have to tell you, I promised myself up and down multiple times that I would never do it. But your body has other plans for you, no matter how much yoga you do, and over time, the prospect of standing up for eight hours into the middle of the night to hear someone play a bunch of songs you know has started to sound… bad.

And so while I was excited to see Weird Al at the Ravinia (a huge outdoor venue just outside Chicago with a robust summer concert series, often drawing crowds of up to 15,000 people), I also felt stressed about it. We were supposed to bring a picnic, and a blanket, and maybe even chairs. Board games, apparently. It was impossible to park, and impossible to take public transportation. (Ravinia will tell you that it is not impossible to do either of these things, but Reddit makes it clear that both are death-defying.) Bringing a toddler to a concert has its own challenges. A week before the show, I felt mostly nauseous and stressed about having to get all the moving pieces to fall neatly into place — but I trusted that after all was said and done, it would be a memorable chapter of our family’s little history.

I didn’t mean to be so right.

We found good parking. I bought $100 worth of dips and cookies from Trader Joes, and packed a knapsack cooler. The walk from the car to the venue was gorgeous, through a wooded trail. No one checked to make sure my daughter was two or under. We left on time, hit no traffic, remembered sunscreen and bug spray, and wore sensible shoes. It wasn’t until we got into the venue (Beautiful! Truly!) that it started to really rain.

The picnic, gathering rain.

It was kind of raining as we entered Highland Park; the kind of rain that makes you consider whether you should take an umbrella, but doesn’t compel you to open one. We had an umbrella in the car, so we brought it. (T had an umbrella too, which we also brought, but it was for a child and pretty much useless.) We found an acceptable lawn spot and spread out our waterproof picnic blanket, which immediately started gathering little pockets and pools of water as the rain started coming harder. A significant bummer whereas we’d arrived three hours early for our picnic. Picnics, unlike kissing, are not at all romantic in the rain.

Just before the opening act (Puddles the Clown, very compelling), the rain stopped, and the sun shone. In this light, I could really understand the appeal of the Ravinia: families with their tricked-out picnic setups, playing Uno, sitting under lap blankets, eating cheese plates. We walked up to see the stage while Puddles the Clown performed, and our daughter danced in loops down on the empty brick patio below. We’d gone through a harrowing time, with the wet picnic. We’d really earned our happy memory.

Puddles the Clown left the stage, and as though cued, it began to rain again. This time, the weather app was not optimistic about the rain letting up: it told us that precipitation would be in the area for at least an hour. T was a good sport; there were puddles (not to be confused with Puddles) and people splashing around, and she sat on her dad’s shoulders. Then it started raining harder. “When is Weird Al?” T asked.

When Weird Al appeared, it was glorious. The band was on stage, and you could hear him singing, and you could see him via video projection walking through hallways somewhere in real time, and it became clear he was going to come out some sneaky side way — and, it just so happened, this was right where we stood. So for a short while, I could have, if I had really wanted to, touched Weird Al Yankovic. Everyone screamed. T asked for headphones. (She got them!) As he moved to the stage, it started raining harder. Now, it was raining as hard as rain could possibly rain.

Summer storms are a kind of miraculous where you feel you will not get cold because it’s been so hot; like maybe some great mystery turned on a much-needed sprinkler system, and if you can just get over your preference for dryness, you will have a good time. (Oliver Burkeman writes about this phenomenon — the bracing against the rain and then realizing you are powerless against it and giving in — as a good metaphor for the ways in which we push against the inevitability of death.) We danced in the heavy rain to the music. Weird Al played a deep cut (“Everything You Know Is Wrong”) that Jess and I love; we sang every word, and the middle school boys all around us glared at us angrily because they did not know this one. (And also, they were getting so, so wet.)

Then it started raining harder. T, not yet a Weird Al fan, was beginning to lose patience. We started discussing if we should leave. After “Smells Like Nirvana,” it was decided. Besides, this, surely, was the absolute height of the rainstorm. There was no physical way it could rain any harder. It could only lighten up.

In the middle of “Smells Like Nirvana,” incredibly, the rain started coming down twice as hard. Now it was sheets of water, plus wind, plus thunder and lightning coming in quick succession. T looked cold, and scared. We ran to get our picnic and blanket and diaper bag, which were supersaturated with rain water and cumbersome to wield. All around us, people ran. The concert kept raging under the pavilion, though Weird Al stopped ignoring it and I could hear him saying something like, “Whoa, this is some really outrageous weather.”

Without a toddler, we could’ve probably leaned into it a little more; the sheer ridiculousness of this massive storm, torrenting down on this massive sea of people. But we were in service to the little human who is still learning what the world is. She trusted us to take her somewhere fun and safe. And now she was freezing, drenched, with no way to get warm or dry or to a place that was familiar. The beautiful woods we walked through to get to the concert became treacherous: an unlit path flash-flooded with mud and fallen branches. We tried to get under an awning or something, where we could discuss what to do next. Luke had all our stuff, and Jess and I held our bodies together around T, trying to create a kind of tent where she could warm up.

T is three. Three-year-olds have the capacity to be whiny, needy, and unreasonable. They can say, “But I want it NOW” or “I will NOT put on SOCKS you cannot MAKE ME DO THAT I will HIT YOU” in a way that makes pretty much every parent I know wonder, seriously, if their child might be a psychopath. What I’ve wondered is how my daughter would survive in a truly dangerous situation, where whining and screaming would have no power. Surely, many people wonder this.

A massively severe thunder and lightning storm in a field full of a small town’s worth of people is not definitely dangerous, but it does feel definitely dangerous. On some animal level, you feel threatened: this kind of weather asserts itself mercilessly, uninterested in who lives or dies. And my small daughter didn’t whine, or scream, or cry. She became smaller, quieter, paler. She curled in closer to us and barely said anything. The only thing I heard her say, and it was very quiet, was, “I’m scared.”

Luke had the idea of the bathroom. We’d all individually gone to the bathroom earlier, and had noted its cleanliness and hugeness. And indeed, the bathroom was kind of glorious: there was lots of room in there, and lots of people (including lots of children) sheltering against walls, looking not happy, but also not scared. The only thing was that it was air conditioned. T’s lips turned blue, and now that she was out of imminent danger, she started to softly cry.

I was trying to not take up too much space, which is my wont in times of emergency. And nevertheless, a little girl, probably eight years old, approached us. “Does she want to use our blanket? It’s a little bit damp, but she can use it if she wants.” Maybe my eyes popped out of my head.

“Really? Don’t you guys need it?”

“We’re OK.” And so I took the blue falsa blanket and wrapped it around my shivering daughter, and put my chin on the top of her head, and then I cried. Ultimately, it’s people’s kindness that tends to level me. I know you know what I mean. You expect to be alone in the dark, but then someone reaches out to you, venturing touch, understanding intrinsically that we belong to each other — perhaps especially in the absence of light.

Rain at a Weird Al concert is not a tragedy, but sometimes these moments are small, and I think it’s worth it to pull them into focus. Someone else brought T a cinnamon cookie. Some of the other kids gathered around us and we watched princess TikTok. (The other moms looked relieved that I sacrificed my own phone for the kids. Or maybe they were mad because they don’t let their kids watch TikTok, I don’t know, but if that was the case, they graciously said nothing in dissent and let us sit on the flooded floor discussing the makeup choices of a Moana impersonator.)

Sometimes, kindness is easy when everything else is hard. I believe that it’s in our wiring. And you can turn towards that impulse every day; strengthen the muscle in you that wants to grow. Let someone get in front of you at the grocery store. Say hi to people you pass on the street. Give money to a person who is asking for money. Pull weeds in a garden that’s not yours.

You might know this and you might not, but in 2004, Weird Al’s parents died in a particularly tragic way, of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning from their fireplace. Just a few hours after he learned this news — an event he would later call the worst thing that ever happened to him — he chose to go on with his concert in Appleton, Wisconsin. He said, “Since my music had helped many of my fans through tough times, maybe it would work for me as well.” It’s not the music; it’s the helping. It’s the knowing you have connected with someone else who you don’t actually know, but also you do, because you’re both just silly little humans, and that you shared something outside the space that language can reach.

Good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart.

Love,

Sophie

Housekeeping

• Due to a schedule snafu, I have to reschedule the “Birds In Colored Pencil” webinar, so our first webinar will take place on August 9, and will be about the Artist Toolbox. Here’s a link to all the webinars and their topics. Each one will take place on a Saturday from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. Central Time (CT). If that time doesn’t work for you live, not to worry! Videos of each webinar will be posted to a central web location. These are free to all paid subscribers; non-paid-tier subscribers can sign up for individual webinars for $25. (Or, you could become a paid subscriber and get access to all of them by clicking this link.)

• REGISTER FOR A SINGLE WEBINAR (or bundle a few) BY CLICKING HERE!

• Fact about fireflies:

• Cat Got Your Tongue is out now! If you have a friend who loves both cats and language, this is the perfect gift for them. Written by the internet’s beloved Kitten Lady Hannah Shaw, this book is illustrated by ME!

• And while we’re at it, please pre-order KIN: The Future of Family! More on that very, very soon.

Loose Thoughts:

• I’m writing this sentence on the Fourth of July, a holiday I like because it’s in the middle of summer and is a holiday. Mostly, holidays can be whatever you want them to be, so I’m celebrating: fireflies, zinnias, kind neighbors, and dissent.

• Rider Strong has a Substack now. I do wonder what it would be like to be Rider Strong, a person who has a bunch of women in their late thirties and early forties who are still nursing a crush on him from childhood. As a young teen, I did everything in my power to find Rider Strong’s poetry (it was sometimes possible to do this), and now here it is, readily available. I have thought way too much about what to do about Rider Strong’s Substack. I left one comment and am now telling all of you about it. Discuss.

  • Re: truthfully, I don’t fully agree with him about monoculture. (He says monoculture basically ended in the ‘90s.) I think that there are plenty of things that cut through the milieu and make it into our collective interest: Barbie / Oppenheimer summer, the Eras tour, and Beyonce all come to mind.

  • If you grew up in the 1990s: isn’t it wild that the way kids are thinking about the 1990s right now is the way we thought about the 1960s in the ‘90s? And then, that’s the way they thought about the 1930s? How much do you guys think about this?

• Very good tips for a road trip with a three-year-old last time; thank you! L. Jones recommended “Arnold Lobel reading the audio version of Frog and Toad. This is on Spotify, may also be on Libby”; Caroline wrote, “See if your library has read-a-long books these used to be picture books with a cd but now Wonderbooks and VoxBooks publish wonderful picture books with a little panel on the side with buttons that reads the book aloud and has a little sound so your child can follow along.”

  • The road trip to Indianapolis was literally perfect, the highlight of my year so far. We did see bison. We saw a lifer bird (blue grosbeak). We ate truly tremendous gluten. And we met nice people and chickens. And we rode a ferris wheel! If you’re considering a family vacation, consider Indianapolis, and stay here.