The Danielle-Madonna Connection

Today, Madonna turns 60 years old. Danielle turns 42. I have gone to two Madonna concerts with Danielle. I have seen a Madonna concert with a Danielle three times. Actually I have no idea how old Other Danielle is. (*checks Facebook* -- oh wait, scratch that: she's 37. Whatever. Nobody cares. That's not what this is about!) Just incidentally, I also happened to meet Danielle for the first time in the month of August -- in 1987. I couldn't tell you exactly which day; I can only say which date was the first I mentioned her in my journal (November 7). We met 31 years ago this month. She also came with me the first time I went to see a Madonna concert. For Madonna's 1990 Blonde Ambition and 1993 The Girlie Show world tours, she didn't bother coming anywhere close to the Pacific Northwest -- and I lived in Spokane and would have had no means to get even to Seattle to see her anyway. She then did not tour for 8 years, and in 2001's Drowned World tour she didn't come anywhere near me either. So, I booked a trip to San Francisco so I could see her in Oakland, and Danielle came with me. I bought a tour package to do that, and both the pre-party in San Francisco near our hotel and the concert in Oakland itself are detailed in this first-person account I published in the Seattle Gay Standard soon after. (Interesting observation all these years later: my article was printed in the edition that also addressed the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which occurred 3 days after we flew home. Had that trip happened only a few days later, we could have wound up stranded in San Francisco for a few days while all of the nation's flights were grounded.) Re-reading that piece now, I feel a little shitty now about my constant digs at Oakland, a city I had never actually visited and dismissed outright only for it being the ugly stepchild to neighboring San Francisco -- movies that came out this year, including both Sorry to Bother You and Blindspotting, make clear how many people have a deep, if complicated, love for that city, something to which I should have opened my mind to much earlier. If there were any tour to be my first to see Madonna live, it would be this one. She was touring to support both 1998's Ray of Light ("Drowned World" being the opening track) and 2000's Music, her two best albums in over a decade; this was also her first tour after taking voice lessons for Evita, which had given her singing an unprecedented strength. Madonna was 43 years old that year. Danielle and I were both 25. It was a spectacular trip, the first one Danielle and I ever took just the two of us, and it's a memory I have always treasured. When Madonna went on her MDNA Tour in 2012, finally, for the first time since the eighties, she returned to the Pacific Northwest -- and to Seattle specifically! I got to see her at Key Arena, and after seeing her in three other tours in between (traveling to Las Vegas in all three cases), Danielle came with me again. It was a great time, and nice not to have to leave town in order to do it. To my moderate surprise, when Madonna toured again in 2015 for Rebel Heart, she returned to the Pacific Northwest -- just going to both Vancouver, B.C. and Portland, Oregon instead and skipping Seattle this go-round. So, Danielle and I made a plan to see that, and this was when her other friend Danielle expressed an interest in joining us. We made a plan for all three of us to go. This proved, unfortunately, to be a case of terrible timing: Danielle's dad, Reg, passed away right around the same time, and she needed to be in Spokane on the day of the concert. One of the many things that sucks about that even now is that it's looped Madonna into a permanent association with a family tragedy for Danielle. Thinking about that concert she missed just makes her sad -- she even struggled slightly with it when we coordinated a viewing party of the DVD of the concert I purchased, so Danielle could see what she missed, and Other Danielle and Andrea (the friend Other Danielle took along when the rest of us went ahead with the planned overnight trip to Vancouver) joined us to relive it. Gabriel told me once that had he known I had an available ticket, he would have come. I still have my doubts as to how easily he could have made that work at the last minute -- not to mention how comfortable Other Danielle, who has never met him, would have been comfortable with going with this guy she didn't know. She didn't know me either, of course, but I am one of Danielle's best friends and Other Danielle trusted her judgment. I even surprised myself with how easily I fell into having a fun overnight trip with these two women who were also basically strangers to me. That trip really illuminated for me how far I have come from my previous life of introversion, which was never truly real, just a long lasting effect of childhood trauma now being fully shed. In any case, the next time Madonna tours, I will see if Gabriel will go with me. We'll see if he still feels the same way. He once reacted to her 2012 Super Bowl performance as "jumping the shark," after all; and if Madonna doesn't put out another album until late this year at the soonest, her soonest tour will be 2019, and by the time I see her perform again she'll be 61. Whatever, though: I honestly trust she will put on spectacular shows until the day she dies. It's a funny thing, getting older -- and watching others get older at the same time. Sometimes I think about how I'll react when Madonna finally does die. It may indeed be the first celebrity death that genuinely makes me cry. (To date, the saddest I got at one was Prince's death.) This is a little crass I suppose, but I'm a little annoyed that Aretha Franklin had to die today and steal Madonna's 60th birthday thunder. I can still remember the first time I learned Danielle and Madonna share a birthday. Danielle had written it on a wall calendar: Danielle's birthday, and the day Elvis Presley Died. Well, now it's also the day Aretha Franklin died. (It's Hadley's birthday too, although it's exceedingly rare for me to hear from her at all anymore.) August 16 just wants all the stuff. [posted 12:34 pm]