Going, Going, Gaga

It starts with a dress.

Last summer I went to Northern California for the most glorious week of my life. I drank wine and ate chocolate with The Kiwi. I got to see old friends and their ridiculously cute offspring. I got car sick on the switchbacks on the coast highway. I became a Giants fan. Life-altering stuff.

The Kiwi and I spent part of my last day in San Francisco on Polk Street, which is a part of the city not mentioned in my guidebook. Our location for dinner, Capp's Corner in North Beach also doesn't appear in my guidebook either, but it does tell me that Cafe Trieste, where we had evening coffee before heading to the airport, may have been the location where Francis Ford Coppola wrote the script for The Godfather. But in general, my advice is throw out your guidebook.

But I digress.

On Polk Street are many delightful locations, including a Thai restaurant that is reasonably priced and delicious, an oyster bar that attracted a long queue of middle aged people in the middle of a Friday afternoon, the Good Vibrations retail store, and the best charity shop (their profits fund HIV testing and education) on the planet, a place called Out of the Closet.

At Out of the Closet I found a dress in the new arrivals section. Black polished cotton. Strapless. Lace-up, corset style back. Metal studs. In other words, the least practical dress I have ever owned.

I'm pretty sure that dress was previously owned by a drag queen-- or at least I hope it was. I'm also pretty sure I'm too old to wear it, and at the time I bought it, I hadn't lost quite enough weight to fit into it-- although I was working hard toward that goal because my doctor advised me at the beginning of 2010 that I needed to lose weight or go on blood pressure meds, and I chose door number one.

So I was close enough to being able to fit into this impractical dress that $4.00 seemed a reasonable gamble. At the very least, it had potential as a Halloween costume.

And by Halloween I was indeed able to fit into the impractical dress that I had taken to calling "The Gaga Dress" even though it's a bit conservative for Lady Gaga's tastes, I think. I considered, briefly, wearing it with impractical boots and a wig of some kind to the Rally to Restore Sanity, because that seemed like a reasonable occasion to wear such a thing.

But late October is a little chilly, even in D.C., for strapless, and you can't cover a lot of ground in impractical boots. So I left The Gaga Dress in my closet, to await another occasion.

That occasion was last night, when Gaga herownself played at the Garden in Boston. NayNay and I bought tickets months ago in a fit of impulse during a few moments of downtime at work, when we felt the need to cheer ourselves up and have something to look forward to.

To be honest, Lady Gaga doesn't necessarily fit my usual taste in music. I don't generally care for dance-pop candy, or at least, I won't admit to it in public. What I sometimes sing along with in the car or shower stays in the car or shower.

But I liked "Poker Face" as a guilty pleasure when it came out. And then I learned that she studied music at Julliard and took her name from a Queen song, even one of the lesser Queen songs. And the deal was sealed when I heard a story, I can't remember the source, that she once told a guy who dumped her that someday he wouldn't be able to go anywhere without seeing her face. I don't know if that's true, but I hope it is.

So I downloaded a few more songs. And I discovered that those songs seemed to make my workout time go much more smoothly. So I downloaded many more songs, and discovered that they also cheered me up on some dismal days. Music is like that sometimes.

So, I felt the least I could do was pay the exorbitant rates of StubHub to get a decent seat. And our seats were way better than decent, because when you're in your mid-30s, you may not be able to get away with glitter and spandex on a weeknight, but you are able to afford loge seating behind a fabulous dude (I named him Cameron, because he resembled Cameron from Modern Family, if Cameron decided to grow a goat)who bonded with NayNay and me because we were as excited as he was about Scissor Sisters and knew the words to their songs.

The tickets arrived a few days after NayNay and I placed our order, leading me to three months of abject and obsessive worry that my house might burn down or collapse, and the tickets would be destroyed. My homeowner's insurance doesn't cover concert tickets.

I also feared that my cat, who is part goat and enjoys eating paper, might destroy the tickets. These tickets have been a source of profound anxiety.

Clearly, this was an occasion to finally bring that dress out in public.

But, once again, I couldn't fit into the dress. Now it's too big-- and too big tends to be more of a problem when you're dealing with strapless, as you're running the very real risk of indecent exposure if you raise your arms over your head, or, in the parlance of the Gaga, put your paws up. And anyone who isn't putting their paws up at a Gaga concert is either dead inside or they are actually dead the from pure joy of being there.

The ironic twist in all of this is that the people responsible for my losing enough weight to make The Gaga Dress too big are Gaga herownself, her opening act (not an ironic twist, but a delicious coincidence and evidence of my good karma), Scissor Sisters, and the inventors of the Wii Fit Plus. Maybe a little of the credit goes to the people behind the iPod shuffle as well.

So there we were, among the fabulous masses of people-- all ages, all kinds-- wearing shiny things, slutty things, artsy things, things made out of beef. Okay, I didn't actually see anyone wearing meat, but there were 15,000 people there, so I'm sure I could have missed it. And I went with the standard jeans and black t-shirt and boots. That's right. I booted up.

NayNay said to me near the end of the show, commenting on Gaga's costume that included devices that shot actual sparks from the bust and crotchal areas of the suit, "Why don't I have sparks flying from my hoo?"

I said, "Well, you just don't have the proper accoutrement."

But that's okay. Gaga is all about people being who they are. Jeans and black t-shirt is who we are. But on the inside, somewhere near our nougaty centers, live drag queens wearing strapless studded dresses that fit perfectly.