Went to see Noah Kahan at Emo's in Austin on 9/21/19 with Dawn, The Brook & the Bluff opening.

I haven't been to a lot of concerts in my time, a dozen maybe, and they've all been in stadiums or auditoriums or some performing venue with seats. This was my first time at a club style space with a stage at one end of a great open room edged by alcohol dispensing stations where the audience stood in a pulsing crowd for hours on end.

My social anxiety was dialed up from the moment we queued to get in, and the audience being heavily weighted towards young, college age women, served to heightened my sense of being ridiculously out of place.

The people watching part of me enamoringly observed:

• How the crowd interacted with each other and the performers
• How security and roadies sought to stay unobtrusive while doing their jobs
• How the different performers dealt with being the on stage object of hundreds of peoples attention.

The part of me which prefers to be hidden and unseen, however, was frantically aware I was very much neither, and fought tooth and nail as to whether and how I would be able to enjoy the experience. Will I dance? Sing along? If so, how loudly? Clap and holler? Take pictures and video like a fan boy?

I stayed deeply aware of my anxiety throughout the night, but each fight ended in at least a minor victory for acting in joy and joining with the rhythmic throng. The sense of community in singing together, moving together, riding the rhythm not merely of the music but of the experience we were sharing, was powerful and joyful.

Being old and broken, it was also painful. My back, knees, and feet had turned the entire lower half of me into a pillar of fire by the end of the night. The sense of community and joining isn't fully there, though, when everyone's seated and quietly observing, so while I'm not sure I'm physically up to doing concerts like this as often as I'd like, I am planning to attend at least a few more in the next couple of years. I mean, I always need more t-shirts.