Justin Bieber Killed!

There are precious few opportunities to bond with your children before they get old enough to know better than to hang around with their parents. I recently had one such opportunity, when I lost a bet with my wife, Debbie, and brought my 11-year-old daughter to see Justin Bieber in concert.

Debbie and I secretly bought a pair of tickets when they went on sale and decided we’d surprise Amanda on the day of the concert. When I explained why I was home early from work, Amanda’s reaction almost warranted a visit from the local ambulance corps. That would have resulted in our selling the tickets to the sold out show to some lucky last-minute kid whose reaction would undoubtedly also have required the services of the paramedics, and so on… creating a nightmarish domino-effect of tween death thanks to Justin Bieber. I can see the headlines now: Justin Bieber killed!

I’ve always enjoyed walking around and people watching in the venue before a concert. This time was no different, except that I was with Amanda, who A) has an unparalleled passion for shopping, and B) was clearly in cahoots with the merchandising crew. We fought our way to the front of the line, which was abuzz with overexcited tweens and parents willingly forking over too much money for t-shirts, stickers, posters and anything else on which you could print a teen idol’s likeness.

Being a strict parent, I set a spending limit for Amanda. After telling the tattooed gent with the aggressive facial hair that she wanted the “cute” t-shirt ($35), she used coercion tactics on par with those utilized by Scotland Yard, to persuade me to buy her tattoos ($10, purchased solely so the guy helping us wouldn’t think I was judging him), a useless wand that flashes a variety of colors ($12, and slightly more useless today), and a few other costly trinkets. Confident that she had successfully extracted every last nickel from my very tight pocket before the show even began, we found our seats.

Inside the arena, I and a bunch of other poor saps who lost rock, paper, scissors matches with their spouses sat playing with our collective iPhones while our girls discussed important topics like which Justin Bieber song was the best and whether or not he’d play it tonight (he would). They also each argued that he’d definitely notice them because they were his biggest fans ever, and he would know (he wouldn’t, and he wouldn’t).

As the lights dimmed, a countdown timer starting at two minutes appeared on the screens. The crowd screamed louder with every passing second. By the time the clock reached one minute, my earplugs were doing as much good as if I had chosen to leave them back home in the box instead. At 30 seconds, I wondered how the 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora could still be listed as the loudest sound ever heard by humans. It’s a miracle nobody was bleeding to death from his or her ears (headline: Justin Bieber killed!). At 10 seconds, the entire arena began counting down together, all the way to zero, when in an explosive climax, appearing right there on the screen for all to see was… a three-minute commercial for Xbox 360. It was about as big a letdown as a seventh-night Hanukkah gift.

As an aside, if you’ve never been treated to the sound of thousands of pre-teen girls screaming together in an enclosed space, here’s a handy reader service tip: you’d probably be more comfortable removing a splinter with a belt sander.

During the opening notes of the first song, Amanda pulled my shoulder down to proclaim, “This is my favorite Justin Bieber song!” She would issue the same declaration to me during the opening notes of every song performed that night.

Immediately following an on-screen close-up of Bieber in which he smiled and flicked his head and famous hairdo almost imperceptibly, causing a frenzy of screaming and tears one would only expect to see in newsreel footage of the Beatles invading America, I decided it was time for my eardrums to take a break. On my way out, I noticed that all the dads in attendance had the pale blue light of a smart phone illuminating their faces as they checked email, played games and updated Facebook statuses – a totally appropriate sign of the times for a concert starring a kid who was discovered on YouTube.

The loudest screams of the night happened after I returned, when Bieber floated over the crowd in a steel-framed heart and declared, “I think I just saw my special girl.” The teen to whom he was referring was brought to the stage in a heap of tears, serenaded and presented with a bouquet of roses. She will have an amazing story to tell for the next two or three years, when her feelings about the experience magically transform from unmitigated elation to severe embarrassment about having been there in the first place.

In fairness, Bieber is a jack-of-all-trades. In addition to singing and dancing, he played drums, guitar and piano. And we were treated to a four-minute video montage of him singing at various stages of childhood. In the interest of political correctness I'll only say that he was as good then as he is now.

Even after drawing the short straw and occupying a seat at this concert, I’ve managed to draw a few conclusions:

1. It doesn't take much to make 10,000 tween girls scream like Daniel Stern in the movie Home Alone,
2. After this concert I could probably realize significant benefits from a cochlear implant,
3. Despite my reluctance to attend the concert at first, I would happily do it again thanks to the joy I witnessed through my daughter’s eyes, and
4. If you were a young girl in the right target demographic, Justin Bieber did in fact kill.

Ig-pay Atin-lay and the Resurgence of a Guy Named Erno

There has been a recent proliferation of events that suggest that the 80s may not quite be over yet. Or enough time has passed that people have forgotten what a colossally bad decade it was. As far as I remember it, the 80s pretty much sucked until some dude with a ridiculously large top hat and the name of a frequently used punctuation mark brought rock n’ roll back from the dead.

Growing up in 1980s Greenlawn, NY, about as far from the San Fernando Valley as is humanly possible, the local girls frequently asked to be gagged with kitchen utensils, they used words like tubular (which coincidentally inspired a musician named Mike Oldfield – later known to the rest of the world as Slash – to compose some ‘tubular’ music I’m sure I’d know if I heard it, and they all wanted to date Nicolas Cage. My point is, for as bad as they were, the fads in the 80s were infectious. Which leads to breaking news in 2007….

“Alpharetta teen takes 2nd at world Rubik's Cube contest.” Or so reported the Atlanta Journal Constitution on October 12. 2007! I can’t fault the newspaper for running this spectacular news, though it has seemingly gotten trapped in a space/time continuum.

For all the ridicule Georgia takes about its level of sophistication, no other state can lay claim to 18-year-old Chattahoochee High School senior Andrew Kang (eat it, Arkansas!). Kang, it was reported, had just returned from the World Rubik's Cube Championship in Budapest, Hungary, where he managed to solve a Rubik’s Cube in 10.88 seconds. In fact, this Apharettan overachiever gets frustrated when it takes him more than 15 seconds to solve the Cube. For reference, I still have an original Rubik’s Cube that was given to me on August 30, 1982. My quickest solve time: 25 years and counting.

About two years into my cube-solving fury, I became enamored of another 80s fad. Everyone within three years of my age wanted to be able to breakdance like Turbo and Ozone in the classically bad movie Breakin’. Well hold onto your backspins, folks: breakdancing is back! A video posted on Newsday’s website documents the grueling 'Breakdancing Battle of the Year' competition held in Braunschweig, Germany this past Saturday night. Not surprisingly, South Korea took the title again with “an athletic display that appeared to defy the laws of gravity.”

I don’t doubt it takes a lot of talent, but shouldn’t this have happened two decades ago? That’s when I was heavily into breakdancing. I was a white, middle-class Long Island kid with no ability whatsoever to dance (though I am still really good at the "White Boy Overbite," a dance move I proudly displayed at a friend’s recent wedding), donning parachute pants and a listening to a cassette tape called Electric Breakdance, which featured such urban rhapsodies as “Jam On It” and “White Lines.”

According to my only black friend at the time, Anthony Burrows, these were the songs with the beats that could get me to move. And because breakdancing required erratic moves, I thought it was right in my wheelhouse. Unfortunately, my moves were considered more eccentric than erratic.

While Greenlawn was no South Bronx, I still managed to do my part in embarrassing myself in front of anyone who would watch. Decked out in my black and gray parachute pants (zippers fully open, drawing attention like a peacock displaying its tail feathers), I invited our paperboy into the house to see me do the world’s fastest backspin after school one day. Using the paperboy as my conduit, I figured word would spread quickly through town once he saw my awesome talent.

I figured that the best way to maximize my spin speed on the hardwood floor was to use a good deck of KEM playing cards… the expensive plastic ones that come in their own hard-shell case. Cards strewn across the living room floor, I proceeded to backspin my way to local stardom, until five seconds later when I began to drift on the surprisingly slick cards and the side of my head slammed into the corner of the coffee table. Danny laughed.

This triumphant injury was trumped only weeks later by my friend Justin Silverstein. While wearing parachute pants and a red-and-black, Michael Jackson "Thriller" leather jacket, he broke his nose while showing the entire neighborhood how well he could do ‘the worm.’

Nevertheless, my plan worked. Danny spread the word about my miracle backspin to everyone. But by the time I was through being grounded for destroying my mom’s good canasta cards, breakdancing was out and big hair was in.

The one thing that I haven’t seen covered in the news yet is the resurgence of Pig Latin. Here in Atlanta, teenagers have suddenly started speaking Pig Latin at an alarming rate. Whenever I find myself near a group of teenagers, I hear them working hard to obfuscate their words to commoners in a tongue that barely qualifies as non-English. If they want to exclude me, they’d do better to speak Standard English with a Southern drawl.

But since I’m now officially a resident of the greater Atlanta region, I might as well do my best to fit in with the local population. I offer the final paragraph of this column to the local teenage set in a language they can understand.

Ow-nay at-thay e-thay eighties-ay are-ay ack-bay, I-ay ully-fay expect-ay it-ay oo-tay e-bay ont-fray age-pay ews-nay en-whay I-ay olve-say y-may ubik’s-Ray ube-Cay. Once-way I’m-ay inished-fay, I’ll-ay imp-pray y-may eanie-Bay aby-Bay ollection-cay, et-gay a-ay acky-Hay ack-Say and-ay ake-may ure-shay y-may ation-stay agon-way is-ay operly-pray outfitted-ay ith-way a-ay iamond-day aped-shay aby-Bay on-ay oard-Bay ign-say. Y’all.