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player ready...Last weekend they had a concert at the Route 66 Raceway in Joliet, music capital of the world. It was called the B96 Summer Bash, B-Bash for those in the know, and it featured groups with names like Eiffel 65 and Sisqo and Destiny’s Child.
But for my money none of them topped the set by Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, who just lit up the Joliet night. When Springsteen ripped into Thunder Road, and let loose the mighty saxophonist Clarence Clemons on “Born to Run,” well, that was a bash.
It’s just a shame that most of the 65,000 kids at B-Bash didn’t get to hear the Springsteen set. Actually, none of them heard the Springsteen set.
He was playing on my car stereo in the muddy B-Bash Drop Off/Pick Up parking lot, where another father and I waited to collect eight 13-year-old girls (and one very smart 13-year-old boy) who were at the concert.
This was news to me, that concerts now have places to herd the chauffeuring parents while their kids rock on inside. The parents who couldn’t be bothered with driving hired real chauffeurs, so there was a line of white stretch limousines waiting to take the children home.
You couldn’t see inside the racetrack from the Drop Off/Pick Up parking lot, which was probably a good thing. But you could hear the music.
So all the parents outside heard their 13-year-olds inside let out a collective, giddy scream when somebody, I guess it was Sisqo, encouraged them to throw their thongs on the stage.
Thongs? Who is this guy? Who said anything about thongs?
It was about that time that several hundred parents in the Drop Off/Pick Up parking lot whipped out their cellular phones and frantically dialed the numbers of the cell phones that were supposedly in the clutches of the kids inside the racetrack.
How about that. There were 65,000 kids in one room and not one of them would pick up the phone.
Truth is, they couldn’t possibly have heard a cell phone ringing in there. That music was loud.
And so we all stood outside, the parents, with a little drizzle falling to make us think of Woodstock, waiting for the children to come out of the concert, not, it was hoped, clutching a souvenir thong.
The temptation is to say that parents of a certain age, that is, Baby Boomers, are discovering something parents never knew before, that raising teenagers is a very challenging business.
But of course that’s nothing new. Baby Boomers were once teenagers themselves, giving their parents fits. And it wasn’t that long ago that Baby Boomer parents were accused by their elders of acting like they invented parenthood, or at least acting like they were the first to discover its finer nuances.
Actually all we invented were those silly yellow Baby on Board signs that we slapped on the back windows of our first minivans. That convinced us the guy driving a semitractor trailer who had been popping Benzedrine for 13 hours would swerve and ram the next car over because it didn’t have a Baby on Board sign and we did.
So, no, there is nothing peculiar about our experience raising teenagers, except for the pagers and cell phones and now the special designated holding areas for parents at music festivals.
We’re going to try to guide them, we’re going to try to protect them, and sometimes we’re just going to hold our breath.
Eight hours after they went into the concert, they all came out, still dancing, and no worse for wear.
(Note to DCFS: They had a couple of chaperones.)
Still, it was tempting to give the kids a lecture once they were in the car and headed home. Something along the lines of: You don’t know how easy you have it! When we went to a Black Sabbath concert we walked, five miles each way. Through the snow. Uphill both ways . . .
But the opportunity was gone almost as soon as we pulled out of the Drop Off/Pick Up parking lot. It was late, and they’re only 13.
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They were asleep.
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E-mail: [email protected] (the e-mail address as published has been corrected in this text)