Holy comments Batman! I never expected such a huge turnout for some piddly camera. Just where are all you lurkers when I promise to show my boobs on the internet?

My ego is *crushed*. Sniff. Surely my goodies, flapjacks, beavertails or whatever you choose to call them are worth more than a brand spanking new digital camera.

Oh, all right. Maybe not. Let me have a second for self-delusion and then let’s move on, shall we?

(Takes a moment to imagine said boobs are rival to the mounds of boobiliciousness like Dolly Parton’s.)

Moving on. Ahem.

After reading everyone’s comments and emails about their favourite or most memorable concert moments, I realized I lied to you, my readers.

It wasn’t intentional. When I wrote about my deep and abiding love for Sir Elton I wasn’t exaggerating. I meant every word. In fact, if you are reading this dear Elton, please know I would willingly tattoo your name on my arse just for the privilege of knowing every time I sit I’d be sitting on you.

(Wow. Wayyyyy dirtier sounding when I type it than when I thought it.)

Still, after reading about everyone’s experience I realized there was one concert moment I will never, ever be able to forget. It’s branded into my grey matter and haunts me when I sleep. (Like the 80 year old women who walk around naked in the swimming pool’s change rooms, taunting me with images of my future self. Shudder.)

I was 27 and my sister invited me to a concert being held in a small watering hole downtown. (That is a fancy way of saying it was a remarkably scuzzy dive located on the corner where local hookers and drug dealers made their livings.) The invitation was a rare occurence as I spent most of my twenties making and raising babies while my darling sister spent her time going to school and shaking her booty at night clubs.

What made the concert even more thrilling than being able to escape diaper duty and house cleaning for a night was the fact that it was my brother, Stretch’s gig. He had been in a band for years and while I had heard his music many, many times (in fact, his music may be slightly responsible for my current hearing loss) I had never actually seen him perform.

My siblings, of course, are evil. Evil in a lovable way. They are much like me. But since neither of them had children at that point in their lives, they didn’t focus their laser beams of evil on their spawn like I like to do. No, they focused on me.

As I wandered around making a complete and utter jackass of myself, they grinned quietly into their beers and enjoyed the show I was inadvertently putting on.

That’s the finest example of sibling love my parents could ever hope for. Heh. But that’s not the only reason why this concert stands out like Richard Simmons at a country fair.

I was thrilled to be able to watch my brother perform live in front of an audience. It’s the concert where I met the love of his life, Stump, for the first time. And it was the first time I got to see my brother as not just the goober who would sit on me and fart but the man he grew into.

Although, I will admit it was freaking weird to watch other women toss their panties at him like he was a rock star or something. I mean, I know for a fact the dude has one single black chest hair sprouting from his left nipple. It’s not like he oozes sex appeal. (Admittedly, I may be slightly coloured in my sibling perception of him. Sorry Stump. I’m sure he is sexy to you. Ew. That sentence hurt to type.)

It was surreal to be standing on the dance floor watching people in leather collars with more metal in their bodies than are in the automobiles in the nearby parking lot, thrash around and pay homage to the cookie monster music my brother made.

It was surreal to realize my brother was actually talented. That the years of me having been forced to listen to him rip on his electric guitar in the basement actually morphed into music.

More surreal to the experience was the pig’s blood tossed around, the thump of the bass and the crazy drunkards who actually enjoyed the loud screams of the singer as my ears started to slightly bleed. I realized then what an actual fuddy duddy I had turned into during my years of raising babies.

Still, it was an event to be remembered. Maybe not repeated any time soon, but I could safely go to my grave knowing I had seen my brother strum his guitar and sing his anti-establishment songs that other’s seemed to genuinely enjoy.

Just when I thought the evening couldn’t get any stranger, a lone dancer on the dance floor caught my eye. She was a skinny, lanky woman wearing a leather collar and a shirt so short if she bent over her little hairs would peep out and wave hello. She tossed her stringy hair around like her life depended on it while alternately taking swigs from the beer bottle she tightly clenched in one hand.

She mesmerized the people sitting at the tables near the dance floor. I’m not sure if it was the over-sized tank top that kept slipping down her shoulder and exposing her left breasticle to everyone or just her bizarre chicken dancing skills. What ever it was, she had captured the audience’s attention with her antics and she knew it.

Just when I was about to look away and head to the bar where my brother was entertaining his fans during a break in his gig, she lowered the beer bottle to the floor and gently swayed her hips while swaying over the bottle.

For a split second, I was sure she was going to try and pee in the bottle. At that point in the evening, nothing would have surprised me. I was surrounded by, well, freaks. Freaks do freaky things. But she didn’t.

Instead, she jacked up her already short skirt (hello little hairs! It’s good to see one woman believes in going au naturel,) and started grinding her hips lower and lower towards the floor like some weird limbo dance, all the while making sure the bottle was directly center underneath her.

I watched, entranced with the woman who looked so frail she may actually break and wondered if my body could bend the way hers did. Not bloody likely I thought, just as she squatted over the bottle.

And then, as if time stood still, she did the unimaginable. (At least to my prim and pure imagination.) She lowered herself onto the beer bottle and picked it up with her vay-jay-jay. The crowd immediately hushed as everyone turned to watch this weirdo on the dance floor, grooving with a beer bottle stuck in her hoo-ha.

I was repulsed. Yet strangely fascinated. She twirled about and amazingly that damn bottle didn’t fly out of her cooter. I thought she was going to show off her limber technique to lower the bottle back to the floor (because I’m amazingly naive like that) when suddenly she reached down and grabbed the bottle from her nether regions.

(Must have started to slip.) Heh. Instead of putting the bottle back on the dance floor, she freaking took a swig from it. The ‘Ewwws‘ could be heard all the way down the noisy city block. Then she fell flat on her ass and crawled off the dance floor.

Who knew I’d get a concert and a sex show when I went to see Stretch perform?

It was one of those freakish things I had wished I had never seen nor will I ever forget.

That won’t ever stop me from wondering just how long I could hold a half-full bottle of beer in my tulip lips, though. Not that I’ve been tempted to try. But a girl can ponder can’t she?

It turned out to be a concert to remember. I walked away with a new found respect for my brother and a renewed pledge to work on my kegels.

What more could a girl ask for?

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Thanks to everyone who entered my concert. I must admit, I wish I had a camera to give to every person who entered. But there can only be one winner and after consulting the stars (or the random number generator) I found a winner.

Congratulations to the winner, Katie Jennings, who learned not to judge a book by it’s cover with her concert experience. Your spanky new camera is in the mail. Or will be later today, when I get my arse to the post office.

Stay tuned for my next big giveaway. I had so much fun with this one, I’ve decided to toss more freebies in my reader’s direction.

I was 17 and looking for a little bit of privacy to go squeeze the mountainous pimple that had suddenly erupted on my chin when I met her.

She was 15 and beautiful. She had long flowing blonde hair and eyes that sparkled with wisdom that belied her youthful appearance. She was sitting on the edge of the white porcelain sink in a small school bathroom, sobbing. Her nose was red and she looked heart broken.

My plan to plunder my pimple in privacy evaporated with one look at her saddened face. I briefly thought about backing out quietly and going to find another washroom, one that wasn’t filled with weeping teen girls but she looked up at me and caught my eyes with her tear filled gaze.

I don’t know why, but she beckoned to me. I introduced myself and asked if she was all right. I struggled to find the appropriate words to comfort her but in the end I floundered with inarticulate stammering.

I did the only thing I knew to do, something completely out of character for my reserved and bashful teenaged nature. I hugged her. And in those fleeting seconds we became fast friends, sharing the pain of rejection and humiliation and a myriad of other painful feelings teenaged girls are burdened with during their hormonal years.

I didn’t expect to see her again as I was two grades ahead of her and wandering the halls of thousands of other angst ridden teens, but our paths crossed again the next day. It was meant to be. Soon we were inseparable, seeking one another out during lunch hours and finding solace in the dark corners of the school’s drama room.

She didn’t mind that I had a raging crush on her older brother, and I didn’t mind that she was two years younger than me. We talked. We discussed everything from our parental woes, poetry and our futures that burned brightly before us.

We would go for long walks in the dark hours of the night, talking endlessly about everything and nothing with a great sense of self-importance as we wandered the city streets under the starry nights. Soon she had a car and our world opened up before us, the two of us driving down ribbons of pavement while listening to music pulsing from the speakers.

I went to my first coffee shop with her in the university area, surrounded by poets and musicians, while drinking cappuccinos and Oranginas. We would lose ourselves for hours in the tiny little used bookstores that speckled the district and laugh ourselves silly in the aisles of the music store.

She loved F. Scott Fitzgerald. She gave me my first copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. I gave her an old edition of Alice in Wonderland and a hologram image of the mad hatter’s tea party I caught her coveting once in a store. I shared my passion for Henry David Thoreau with her and she rewarded me with an ancient copy of his essay, Walking.

She ignited my imagination and fueled my hunger for the written word by surprising me with books I’d never thought to buy myself. “Here, you’ll enjoy this. Trust me,” she’d laugh as I looked at her dubiously with my eyebrow arched. William Faulkner’s Sanctuary and Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil. She was right. She knew me better than I had yet managed to know myself.

We grew older and apart, our nightly walks now limited to midnight pizza sessions at Boston Pizza where she would fill me in on her travels. She was an exotic jewel to my stable of friends, pushing my boundaries and stretching my intelligence.

She’d share her exploits and adventures of travel with me over coffee, while I would wish my life were half as exciting. She would laugh at my wistfulness and tell me not to worry, she knew I would one day see the wonders of the world myself. She would then fall silent and tell me she admired me. My strength of conviction and my complete assurance of what I wanted my future to look like. Hers was like water, she’d tell me, shifting depending on the tide from the moon.

She was the friend I held dearest in my heart and the only person I sought approval from. The day I had to tell her I was pregnant with my first child was the most nervous afternoon of my life. I worried I would break her heart, disappoint her with my choices.

She looked at me, with her long blonde hair pulled back haphazardly and smiled and said I would make an amazing mother. She surprised me days later with a beautiful edition of the Snow Queen and East O’ The Sun and West O’ The Moon. She smiled when she handed me the books and laughed that I had better make damn sure my baby was well read.

It didn’t matter if we saw each other frequently or not, our hearts reconnected instantly the moment we came into contact, no matter the time or distance that had separated us. She was one of those rare once in a lifetime friends. The type that convinces you it is perfectly acceptable to swallow the worm in the tequila bottle and then holds your hair back as you puke it back up in her parent’s bathroom.

I didn’t get enough time with my friend. She passed away too young, too suddenly while exploring the beauty of Cambodia. She died instantly and in a single heartbeat lives forever changed as her beauty and possibility was extinguished.

I carry her with me in my heart and nuzzle her memory close. She still inspires me to be the writer I dreamed of being and the mother she promised I could be.

Today is her birthday and while she celebrates it in the vast ethereal world, dancing in the wind while holding my son in her arms, I’m sitting on my couch in my cottage, writing for her, to her.

Happy birthday Sam, my sweet Samantha. Thank you for enriching my life so. Thank you for believing in me when I couldn’t believe in myself. One day I will have you over in my castle in the sky.

Until then, friend, know that I miss you.

I am not a people person. I know. You are shocked. Heh. Let me clarify. I love people. All people. Just not when you stick more than three of them in a room with me all at once.

Crowds freak me out. I start to sweat and twitch and my left eye develops a nervous tic. I generally end up standing alone in a dark corner, with my eyes squeezed shut and my arms hugging my body while rocking back and forth humming soothing lullabies to myself in order to block out the chaos.

I tend to be a LOT of fun at weddings and parties. Ask my husband. Heh. That’s me, the life of the party.

For this reason, I do my damndest to avoid large crowds. I don’t go to fairs, I don’t enjoy public sporting venues and parades? Well, they just freak me right the fack out with all the partying people and blow up balloons dancing in the streets.

There is one thing that can draw me out of my private little sanctuary and entice me to brave the crushing throng of a crowd and ignore the hordes of people around me.

That one thing is a good concert. Which is now only slightly ironic, since I’m technically half deaf and can’t hear the actual music over the din of roaring fans.

Still, music is a passion of mine and it’s the one thing guaranteed to pull me off my arse, off the couch and into a stadium.

Not that I’ve been to a lot of concerts. I have to be really enticed to get off said arse, shower, slap on the ole war paint and elbow my way through a packed stadium to pay disgusting amounts of money for the pleasure of being jostled, stepped on and hollered at to attend a concert.

There have been some memorable concerts though. The very first concert I ever attended was with my mother. It was a folk/country artist playing at a small venue. There was no screaming fans, no tossed panties. But the intimacy of being able to reach out and touch a live performer while he wove his magic with song and music for the audience charmed me and forever cemented my love for live music.

My first real rock concert didn’t happen until I was 14. My best friend and I twisted our parents arms into buying us tickets to watch Janet Jackson thrust her pelvis all over center stage. I don’t remember much about the actual concert, I just remember the intoxicating feeling of feeling grown up enough to sit in a packed stadium without our parents and watch this famous chick shake her little booty around the stage.

There have been other equally memorable concerts I had the pleasure of attending. Each one magical in their own way, each one knitting their magic into my subconscious and leaving behind sweet memories after the lights are turned up and the crowd slowly exits from the building.

One concert will always mean more to me than all the rest, one concert alone will always captivate and enthrall my memory. I had been waiting more than half my life to see this person live and in person and I began to despair that it would never happen.

Just when I was about to give up hope, life nudged me, winked and tossed me a bone.

Elton John was coming to town. I tend to be a laid back type of gal, but let me tell you, when I managed to get a hold of two tickets to his concert in a nearby city, I squealed like the young school girl I once was, discovering the magic of Tiny Dancer.

My parents were equal parts amused, ashamed and slightly horrified by my teenage crush on a flamboyant 70′s piano man. While other kids my age were rocking out to New Kids on the Block, I was sitting alone in my room belting out the chorus of Bennie and the Jets.

What can I say? Sequins, big glasses, small hands and a piano do it for me.

Dear Elton. I love you. In a totally inappropriate and probably slightly creepy way.

Since my discovery of Sir Elton, no other musician has been able to hold a Candle in the Wind next to him. (Sorry. Couldn’t help myself.)

His music has coloured the tapestry of my life like no other artist. So the excitement to see him perform just mere meters in front of me was well worth the annoyance of fighting the throng of traffic, getting raped for parking, having my feet stepped on, enduring the people behind me kicking my seat repeatedly and smelling the manly odour emanating from a rather large man sitting next to me who very obviously was unconcerned with the length of his ear and nose hairs.

It was a sweet moment in my life, those two hours and forty minutes I caterwauled along with the crowd while trying not to spill my beer. While it may not have been the flashiest concert I’ve attended, it will always be the best concert I had the privilege to attend.

The only thing that could have made the evening more enjoyable, other than Sir Elton gazing out into the audience, locking eyes with me and dedicating his entire play list to his number one fan Tanis, while beckoning for me to sprawl out on his piano as he pounded out the tunes, was if I had remembered to bring my damn camera.

(Hey. Everyone has a fantasy. Don’t knock mine.)

I own four freaking cameras. All very expensive cameras, including one highly coveted and worth more than my life, DSLR. Yet, did I remember to bring even my tiniest point and shoot?

No. Did I remember to even bring my damn camera cell phone along? No. I blame this on the panic attack I had shortly before leaving for the concert and realizing it wouldn’t just be me alone listening to the sweet crooning of my favourite piano man. Damn you other Elton fans for not allowing me the luxury of a private serenade. Daaaaammmmmn.

But because I am thoughtful, and I know people who know people, I want to make sure my blog readers never experience the same crushing disappoint from realizing they forgot to smuggle a camera past concert security thugs and come up empty handed when reaching for a camera to immortalize a magic moment for themselves.

While I can’t guarantee you will remember to bring the damn thing, I can provide you with one. Drop me a comment, tell me about your favorite concert moment or simply just say hi and you will be entered to win one brand spanking new, never been out of the box, Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS digital camera. Retail value approx. $199.00 USD.

*Accessories, battery and memory stick not included. Sorry folks. You’re on your own for that.*

Drop me a comment and this could be yours!

The contest will remain open until Midnight, mountain standard time, Sunday, September 21, 2008. After such time I will randomly draw a name out of a hat and ship the camera, which has been sitting on my coffee table for a week now, off to the lucky winner and out of my damn house.

Please note, I will not be held responsible for any dirty photos or badly angled shots exposing double chins or nose hairs taken with said camera.

But I wouldn’t mind if you showed them to me. Wink.

Good luck! And don’t forget to include your email address so I can contact the lucky winner!