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2001-02-05

My sister says she�s discovered something in Music, Madonna�s latest album, that she's starting to enjoy. But I don�t know. It still makes me nervous.

I was standing on the dance floor at Roseland, not too far from the front of stage right. Madonna, the world�s most famous flat-voiced singing showgirl, was performing four or five songs from Music at a �launch party� and my sister had gotten tickets through the music industry, in which she works. A lot of music industry people were there, and a lot of big fans who�d won tickets over radio, lots of boas, loads of glitter�and stars, of course.

Up in the balcony, with Donatella Versace (visible to me as processed nightmare) and Rosie O�Donnell (sight of whom I did not catch�Allah is merciful), soon-to-be-maid-of-honor Gwyneth Paltrow had been �presenting� (as they say on the nature documentaries) before the show; whenever enough people were pointing up at her she�d laugh and snap a crowd shot with her disposable camera, thus spoiling my impression that she was not quite as bad in person as on film.

(I pause here to pray for the serenity to accept that these stupid photographs of Gwyneth Paltrow�s will be exhibited in galleries, even museums, someday; that they will tour in exhibitions sponsored by cars and champagnes and billionaire dressmakers; and that, reproduced, they�ll be bound into expensive hardcover books with essays which will contain the phrases: �breathtakingly funny and candid,� �sly sardonic wit,� and �even Proustian.�)

But bing bang siss boom bah the show starts and there�s no one left in the world with a name but Madonna. There are �dancers,� there�s �us,� and there is �Madonna.� The sheer force of her fame expands the mind and liberates the spirit. As she takes the stage and her voice cracks and she leans forward to wave her breasts around, you realize that you don�t have to struggle anymore to make your own personal identity matter in life�because you never will. You�re not Madonna. So relax. Let go and enjoy. Scream and jump up and down. Pump your arms in the air and pretend to make Madonna muscles. Follow her bouncing bellybutton with your eyes. You have seen Madonna�you�re as interesting as you will ever get or need to be. The journey is over; all that remains is to tell people about it.

So I�m standing there in the middle of Roseland Ballroom and I have missed�by maybe, I don�t know, seven to twelve years�my personal best moment to see Madonna for the first time. I�m not getting the sense of sudden and complete psychic integration I might have had (say, had I heard her go a few rounds with Papa Don�t Preach) way back when, I�m not having the breakthrough realizations I would certainly have had about whom to fuck or how to end the novel�but so what? I�m out of the house. I�m being entertained�Hey Mister DJ may be a loathsome song with a bitter and sadistic beat but I can dance to it. I�m packed inside a crowd of happy people, jumping and swaying and waving their arms in the air, as they look towards the stage, at Madonna, who shakes her booty non-stop like a big old stripper and still gets respected. They are transfixed; I turn to look all around me, and see in every face the same gleaming glances, the same reflections of her midriff on wet teeth. I turn back to see what Madonna and the dancers are doing.

Madonna is looking down from the edge of the stage, over ten feet of crowd, right into my eyes.

Almost everyone within my close acquaintance has found occasion, during a nice comfortable course of opining about my personal problems, to tell me I�m too nice. I know they're right; I know it's fear. In this situation�which did not lack for horror�it is undeniable that I put Madonna�s feelings first. Aghast at my own rudeness I smiled in apology and gave a little nod to indicate that of course I wouldn't miss another word. With the briefest flicker of her famous visage Madonna acknowledged both my lapse and my submission. From time almost immemorial now, she�s picked the doubters from the crowd and very personally compelled belief. She danced off. I knew she could have hurt me.

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