laughing at our brushes with danger

nathan has been on leave since friday and i have to say it's been glorious. i love having vacation. we've done almost nothing productive!
my parents are finally back from greece. they've been gone for nearly a year. it's good to finally talk to them again. i have no idea when i'll actually get to see them though.
last night, nathan and i went to go see social distortion. they put on a fantastic show. the first opening band was the street dogs, who we saw last fall when they opened for flogging molly. i didn't really like them at the time, but later i downloaded one of their songs and really liked it. the punk show started playing it too, occasionally. they put on a good show last night, but they didn't play the song i wanted to hear. last fall, they played two old punk covers; my favorite clash song, and another old one i have on a compilation cd (thanks, kirsten), but this time, they didn't play any covers that i could recognize. so i was a little disappointed with them, but not as much as i was with the next band: the backyard babies. if anyone ever recommends them to you, don't just walk away...hit them in the face first. they belonged on the appetite for destruction tour. the only thing about them that could be called punk was that the lead singer had a huge ramones patch on his back. that was it. he also had an axl bandana on.
social d was awesome of course. nathan helped this girl steal the "no crowd-surfing or moshing" sign. her boyfriend took down the sign and ran, and nathan held her beer while she stuffed the sign down the front of her pants. it cracked me up. i wish i had stolen the sign.
we kept getting shoved around by the crowd, which doesn't sound too enjoyable, but under the right circumstances, it can be a lot of fun, because you get to shove back and no one cares that you just punched them, or elbowed them in the gut. anytime i'm at a show, and things start to look a little bit dangerous, i put up my dukes, basically to just be prepared to shove back. well, i saw a scuffle in the pit, so i was ready, but then it died down, so i dropped my guard. a minute later, nathan grabs me by my head and pulls me away protecting my face, and through a small gap, i could see three bouncers dragging out the trouble-maker. it was great. if nathan hadn't been quick on that one, i would have at least broken my glasses.
there were a lot of little kids there too. mike ness asked the crowd to point out the youngest kid there, and they all pointed to this little one in the balcony. mike ness had a little conversation about how cool that was, and told him to show on his fingers how old he was. he put up ten fingers and then this woman in the back holds up a little girl that couldn't be more than 4 years old. nathan said he saw her earlier and she was pregnant, too. that's the kind of mom i want to be if i ever breed. i'll put earplugs in their little ears, but my kids are coming to shows with me. i'll make them stay up in the balcony where it's safe.
i had gone to the bathroom in the middle of the backyard babies' set and ran into a teacher i used to work with at granby. it was weird. i had just told nathan that it was weird that i had never seen her again after i stopped working there, because she was my closest friend there and we used to hang out after school all the time and do stuff. then she got married and dropped off the face of the earth. we had all gone to see bad religion together that first spring i lived here and after all the other shows i've been to at the same place, i'd never seen her again until last night. and i'll probably never see her again anymore. i was just washing my hands, and i looked at the person at the next sink, and there she was...
anyways, i had a lot of fun and i can't wait to see the murphys and the casualties next month. it should be a great time.