You know male Moist fans have the best hair in the world? We went to Montreal this weekend to see Moist, who have recently reunited after a 12 year hiatus. David Usher, the lead singer, had the most amazing hair of the nineties. For real. So the first thing I noticed at the show was how amazing and well kept the manes were of the male fans. Like David was their first hair role model and they kept it up long after the band faded away. They all had homage helmets to David.

It’s an odd experience seeing a band you once were a die hard, creepy, super fan of. Especially about 15 years after you were that intense, weird, stalker fan. When I was in grade 8 I changed my name, on everything I wrote, to Angie Usher. Because that’s what a) teenagers do and b) creepy super fans do. I was Moistgal. I vowed, one day, that I would indeed marry David Usher. I memorized his bio and the lyrics to every song. To this day I still feel like I know much too much personal information about the man. Did you know we both have political science degrees? He was once bitten by a shark? His Mom is Thai? But I can’t remember things like who I have Christmas presents for. Seriously.

One of the best Moist concerts I attended was at a summer festival in Ottawa. (This was the same concert where I met the band afterward and cried like a crazy person. Ahh teenage emotions.) I had just bought a Sum 41 shirt to add to my growing collection of band t-shirts and was proudly showing it off before we made our way to the mosh pit before Moist started. We were old hands at this. My friend Jes and I spent a huge part of our down time from grade 8, through high school, in mosh pits. People getting thrown around, people falling, being forced to move with the crowd and being were sandwiched, hard, in between a million people you didn’t know. We were having a ball when a dude somehow failed his crowd diving and came crashing feet first at me. His one leg went down the front of my shirt as he fell and ripped my new t-shirt right off of me. My new shirt was fucked. We had been in mosh pits in upstate New York where someone had been taken out by ambulance. We had been to mosh pits where we had started drowning in the sea of people and had people pull us out as we feared for our lives. But we loved it. So that’s why, 15 years later at this Moist concert, it all felt a bit different.

When they hit the stage I took a good look at all of them. I was shocked to see that they had aged. The keyboardist looked alcoholic puffy, the guitarist looked cocaine thin and the bassist just looked obviously older then everyone else. Like he may have possibly had grandchildren. And David. Oh David. What can I say. That feeling I used to get when I saw you wasn’t quite there. And then you told everyone your daughter was there for her first Moist show and I immediately envisioned him at home having a family conference about whether she was old enough to see what her Daddy does for a living. He had changed diapers, he had bags under his eyes, he was a Dad, he was a family man. Rachelle leaned over and asked if I still had the desire to sleep with him. It took me listening to six more songs before I said yes, but I knew our relationship that only ever existed in my head would never be the same. We had grown up. He had become old.

I was on the floor, trying to move myself into the crowd to get the perfect pit position. But there was no mosh pit. This was a grown up concert. It was replaced by weird, adult semi dancing. The kind where you are moving your body, mainly your legs, but never your feet. Your body is saying yeah, I’m enjoying the music but not committing to enjoying it enough to actually move my feet and dance. Or start a mosh pit. I felt like a major part of the show was missing. The slamming together of sweaty people losing their minds to the music and just letting go. And it seemed to be mainly couples there too. I was there with my friend Rachelle but sometimes she would tour off during the show, for important things, like checking our coats just so she could hit on the coat check guy. Or getting us water at the bar, so she could hit on the bartender guy. So I moved my legs a lot, semi dancing to Moist while trying not to sing every word to every song. It was three quarters through the show when I looked at Rachelle after I had awkwardly tried to pretend I was looking at something on the floor. I stood up and told Rachelle I was actually stretching, my back was fucking killing me. Her eyes widened as she told me her back had been killing her too and she actually had gone to sit down for awhile. This was it. This is what we had become. Sore backed Grannies at a show. Imagine if there had been a mosh pit! We had sore back from STANDING for god’s sake. Imagine getting bashed around, people falling on you and jumping up and down? We probably would have broken bones.

After the show we were going to try and find after parties! Go clubbing! Meet the band! But instead we took a cab back to the hotel, ordered a pizza and watched SNL in bed.