It's My TV….It's My Peanut Butter

The CBC Radio 3 Blog community was home to a discussion of superfans recently.  Normally, I would find the rabid superfan a little off-putting.  They tend to be louder, pushier….a lot of things ending in -er, most of them unpleasant.

But at tonight’s rodeo/Reba concert I got to watch a superfan who actually made my own concert experience better.

About 5-6 rows ahead of me tonight, there was a girl, who looked about 11, and her Dad.  The kid was sporting her “All The Women I Am” Reba shirt and a lot of barely contained excitement.  You could tell in one look at the kid that she was stoked about this.  Dad appeared to be patient and mildly amused.  I think I noticed them because it reminded me so much of my first Reba concert when I was 11–Dad took me, and displayed the same amused patience.  Throughout the rodeo, she was watching, paying attention–Dad was pointing things out and clearly explaining things–but radiated a kind of tense anticipation.

When Reba finally took to the stage, the entire Sprint Center stood for the first two songs, but after the rest of us had settled back in our seats, that kid was still on her feet, clapping and singing along.  She stood the entire concert (her seat position and her height prevented this from annoying anyone behind her–and the volume meant that her singing along could in no way offend anyone around her).  At one point I saw her glancing down at her palms, clearly contemplating whether the sting of all that clapping was worth it.  I suppose it must have been, because she shrugged and kept going.  She even sang along with the medley of older stuff.  And when I say older, I’m not talking about “Fancy” or anything from the 90s.  I’m talking “Can’t Even Get the Blues”…from 1982.  Her Dad was probably still in school when that one came out.

I actually found myself wishing I was seated next to her.  As it was, other than my empty seat, and the PDA couple directly in front of me (side note: there was also a Radio 3 Blog discussion of concert PDA), I was surrounded by un-impressively passive people my parents’ ages.  They totally didn’t get into the concert, which was physically painful, because in the stripped down and truncated version of the performance (rodeo concerts tend to be less elaborate), there were maybe 4 slower songs (1 of which was “Because of You” in which Reba turned the mic on the audience for large chunks).

How much nicer would it have been to have been along side the kid, bopping along with her?  To catch a little of that enthusiasm and feel like it’s totally okay to keep clapping and enjoying the hell out of the moment?  Even at a distance, I feel like I  got something out of seeing this girl watch the show, and I guess that’s enough.

I hope she enjoyed the concert as much as I did–though I strongly suspect she may have enjoyed it even more.

Before our hiatus last month I mentioned that my parents had an internet connection so slow it made me want to rip my hair out by the handfuls.  It would have been one thing if they were simply cheap and paying for dial up.  But they have DSL.  They’re paying for DSL.  And it takes five minutes to get a freaking email (one without images I note) to open.  That’s if it doesn’t time out before opening.

But the most frustrating thing about this problem?  My father refused to admit it existed. Why would he do such a thing?  Because I was the one who pointed it out to him.  Actually, my mother had mentioned it before I even got home.  And then my aunt also pointed it out.  Why would he disregard all of our voices?  Because there is no way we could possibly know anything about computers.  Not a single one of us has a penis.

Yes, for my father the women’s equality movement was largely something that happened to other people.

I don’t mean to imply that my father is a bad person.  He isn’t.  He’s simply the product of a small Texas town in the fifties. Then he spent twenty years as a pilot in the US Air Force.  I think the combination of these two environments simply conspired to indoctrinate him with attitudes about gender roles and aptitudes which are a couple hundred (thousand?) years old.

He’s the same way with cars.  In high school I once told him there was a problem with my car’s transmission.  He drove it one day and pronounced that it was absolutely fine—I was imagining things.  I was a seventeen year old girl and there is no way I could have possibly known anything about cars.  To heck with the fact that I drove it every day and drove it quite a bit since I had to drive twenty-five miles to work.  No, no.  In the fifteen minutes that he drove it he determined that I was just a silly woman who was overreacting to nothing.  The problem is that, of course, I was right.  There was a crack in my transmission and by the time I finally convinced my father it needed to be looked at the transmission problem had caused a radiator problem and I had to pay $1000 to get it all repaired.

But cars are one thing.  By my own admission I really don’t know anything about cars.  (He doesn’t either, for the record).  But in all honesty, I probably know more about computers than he does.  And my aunt works with computer networks for a living.  It is just possible that we know something about the speed at which a website should load.  Possibly.

Now as far as my father is concerned, I’m doubly stupid, because I’m a woman and I’m in a field of study that borders the humanities.  Which is why I was so annoyed when my brother told me that I needed to nudge my father towards getting a hearing aid.  My brother is (or at least should be) completely aware that my father thinks I’m an idiot.  My brother, on the other hand, being a male who studied computers (and nearly flunked out of college.  Twice) is clearly a genius.  But he’s not going to bring it up, because my brother is a champion avoider and if he pretends like my father isn’t deaf, his hearing will magically come back.

In all fairness to my father, I have to confess that my mother bears part of the blame for this.  My mother, an incredibly strong willed woman, decided that marital peace was best achieved by ignoring my father when he goes into chauvinist mode.  Which is not to say she lets him push her around—she simply rolls her eyes and does whatever she wants and he usually doesn’t notice.  I understand why she does this.  It’s probably much easier than fighting him on every little thing.  But what she doesn’t think about is all the other women that have to put up with him from time to time whose lives would be easier if she had beaten the archaic attitudes out of him years ago.