Interlude: In Which My Wife and I Attend a Rock Concert with Our Students...

I should have realized that something was askew when, during a class discussion of The Catcher in the Rye, I found myself identifying more with Mr. Antolini, Holden Caulfield's schoolteacher, than with Holden himself. But that morning, I didn't yet comprehend that the past two years of teaching high school English had caused a subtle shift within me, leaving me on new, unfamiliar ground. So when one of my students, an amiable young woman who had also been in my class last year, asked if my wife and I would be interested in going to a concert with her and a few friends, I accepted. I was touched by the offer and moved by its meaning: To her, I was a human being, someone who transcended the one-dimensional realm of our classroom.

We discussed plans for the 12-hour music festival. My wife and I would make main course dishes, and my student and her friends would provide snacks, munchies, and blankets. We would meet them around noon. My wife and I are both 29 years old and in our second year of teaching. We find ourselves growing into a new phase of our lives: adulthood. It's a phase that gives us a frightening influence over people half our age, people who are growing up on the music of bands we first heard in college. On the drive down, we decided that we would shelve the Mr. and Mrs. routine for the day and just be Jim and Susan, two concert-goers enjoying music with our friends.

A little after noon, we found ourselves at a concert featuring every style of pop music: rap (Queen Latifah and Ice-T), heavy metal (the Charlatans UK and Steve Jones, formerly of the Sex Pistols), acoustic (Michelle Shocked and Indigo Girls), and punk (the Cramps and Iggy Pop). I began to realize that things on the music scene had changed since I last attended a concert when Lux Interior, lead singer of the Cramps, pulled off his pants and stood atop the stage in a leather jockstrap and lavender pumps, swigging from a bottle of wine and sucking on his microphone. I stood behind my student and her friends and watched them dance and laugh at the act, which they were obviously enjoying. Suddenly, my 29 years felt like many, many more. My own 14th year seemed distant and idyllic, a Wizard of Oz Kansas, where the closest things got to Lux Interior was when farmers peeled off their shirts to stand bare-chested in the sun. My despair gave way to confusion when I realized, like generations of adults before me, that I found this music offensive and unnecessarily obscene. Still, I clung to the thought that I was just another concert-goer. Between acts, we all reclined and enjoyed the beautiful Saturday unfolding around us. We talked with ease, shedding our roles of student and teacher and sharing the food we had all brought. The only time I felt briefly defined by my job was when one of the girls casually asked me when progress reports would be mailed.

But when the emcee announced the next band, things got more complex. My role changed from concert goer to observer of a culture that I could no longer rightfully claim as my own. It belonged to my students. After a pseudo-serious announcement that Ice-T could not come on because local censors had declared his show pornographic, the performer burst onto the stage with his intimidating-looking entourage. He proceeded to say that he would show the censors that being an American meant being able to do whatever you want. He went on to say that the idea of putting parental advisory stickers on record albums (uh oh, I date myself), I mean on CDs, was ridiculous. If parents were guiding their children the way they were supposed to, he said, there would be no need for stickers. Impressed by his stance, and doubly impressed that my kids were listening to such socially responsible performers, I got ready to enjoy the show.

Then, Ice-T unzipped his pants and sang the rest of the set with his bright white briefs shining like a shield. Periodically, he pulled up the sagging trousers but never zipped them. This seemed more stupid than anything else, He stopped near the end of his show to address the issue of parental and social censorship once more. "If your parents tell you you can't listen to or buy some piece of music because it's dirty", he told the audience, "you just tell your mom to 'Fuck off!'" The audience exploded with a wild roar of applause.

Completely stunned by this, I sat down with my wife. The night had settled upon us; it was time for dinner. With Ice-T's words still ringing in my ears, I retrieved my large container of pasta al pesto with artichoke hearts. In the gathering darkness, I could make out the students' incredulous looks as I doled it out. I suddenly realized that this was food I would have tried to slip to the dog when I was their age. They worked at it with gusto, however, secreting their paper plates off to the side, thinking I could not see the little oily artichoke hearts sitting there, abandoned.

Finally, the noise of the concert ended in a pulsating silence, leaving us to clean up our site and pack up the goods. I found myself worrying about these five 14- to 16-year-old girls whose parents had let them come to this concert alone. I thought back to how they had listened to Ice-T's obscenities while two lesbian women engaged in passionate, drunken sex about five feet from us. I worried that the girls' innocence was withering in my presence. And I was helpless to stop it. I felt like Holden Caulfield watching his little sister, Phoebe, reach for the golden ring on the merry-go-round, worrying that she would fall off. I wanted to be the damned catcher in the rye. I worried that these kids were growing up in a society where the poets of song have nothing instructive to say, where, as the hero of the movie Pump Up the Volume says, "All the great themes are gone; they've been turned into theme parks."