11:30 AM : Got to work with the blond dye job after having a toast-and-coffee breakfast, watering the parched plants on my windowsill and doing the laundry. Yosh! Combed half the bottle of acrid red-brown goo onto my head, steeling myself for the unknown outcome. An extreme color experiment in Roland Orzabal's honor! Decided to wait the full thirty minutes of developing time.
12:30 PM : Showered, shampooed and conditioned. Nervously dried hair in front of fan. What the????? I want my money back! I'm nowhere near blond at all!
Sunday, May 2, 8 AM : Sent confirmation message to Vicky, Effie, Gay and Renny re 6PM dinner at the Gateway Pizza Hut Bistro. Got out of bed to make breakfast and get my concert equipment together: special sun-and-moon pendant, black shirt, short skirt, sneakers, binoculars and fully-charged camera. Stereo plays TFF cd in continuous loop all morning.
12:30 PM : Headed for Escaler to have lunch. Mother asks whether I am coming with them to attend the Noynoy rally on Edsa. My apologetic grin immediately followed by excited twittering about the concert that I wouldn't miss for absolutely anything. Cousin Iam drops by to try to convince me again to change my mind about accompanying her on a free trip to Boracay. I declined, and gamely tried to think of other people she could invite, but by then half of me was already flying over the Araneta Center.
2:30 PM : Killed time by watching "Death Note 2". Had a drink of genmai-cha to calm my jumpy stomach.
5:00 PM : Renny arrives. I brush my teeth, change into my concert clothes, and walk into a fresh spray of cologne. "Death Note 2" viewing left unfinished. We drive off to Cubao.
5:30 PM : Guards holding "FULL" signs in front of all the Gateway and Coliseum parking entrances. Lines of cars idling at the ticket booths. Quickly decided to get valet parking, never mind the cost. We got out of the car at the drop-off, and the affable head valet attendant handed me a ticket.
VALET: "Ma'am, matatagalan tayo mamaya ha, pagkuha ninyo ng kotse. Ang dami kasing nagpapa-valet simula kaninang twelve pa.
BECKS: "Hmm? E bakit?"
VALET (giving me a funny look) : "Ma'am hindi ba kayo manonood ng concert?"
BECKS: "Ay, okey lang yun. E di magkakape nalang muna kami."
VALET: "Hehe, ma'am baka yun din ang gawin nung iba."
Oh, all right, so it was pretty obvious that I belonged to the aging generation that waited twenty five years to finally see this band perform live. I took the valet's arrow out of my chest,
and we hotfooted it to the restaurant.
6:30 PM: Vicky arrives just as Renny and I are about to dig into our Carbonara pan pizza. She orders a pasta dish, and then gives us pasalubong chocolates from her trip to Kuala Lumpur. I saved my stash for later while Renny (always with most abysmal EQ when it comes to chocolate) dug right into hers after polishing off her pizza.
7:10 PM: Simultaneous arrival of Gay and Effie. Prohibited from ordering any dinner as it would make us late for the show.
BECKS: Hey Gay, are you Roland, or are you Curt?
GAY: Ah, which one is which ba? (guffaws from the Diwatas)
BECKS: The cute one is Curt. Roland is the sexy one.
GAY: Si Roland yung kulot ang buhok, diba? Kay Curt ako.
Why am I the only one who thinks Roland is hot? What is WRONG with you all? ("What's wrong with YOU?" Effie says back (she used to sign her notes "Effie Smith" back in high school). Absolutely nothing. Curt might have had the pretty face, but Roland's was infinitely more interesting. And the boy could dance! Boing!
7:40 PM: Fought our way through crowds of people in their thirties to get to our seats in Upper Box 321. Everyone saw someone they knew from high school, and the atmosphere in the Coliseum was like a giant class reunion. Squirmed, whined and fidgeted in my seat. Come on, I'm dying here! Start the show! Cute guy squeezes past us with his date and I wasn't completely out of my mind not to notice that he was rather a dish (and can he possibly be OUR age?), but unfortunately (for him, that is) I was saving my attention for some other man that night.
8:15 PM: Sandwich takes the stage. I guess they won the coin toss with Pupil as to which band would perform first. Raimund Marasigan manages to get the audience on its feet with excellent covers of Cure hits. Ely Buendia comes out to sing "Alapaap" and gets a rise out of the crowd, but by the time his own band Pupil starts their set, nobody's listening anymore. Disadvantageous position made even worse by their singing songs from their new album, which no one cared to listen to that night. In a likely fit of frustration, drummer tosses drumsticks on the floor after a tom-tom duet with the second guitarist, and second guitar guy kicks his drum over at the end of the song. Who cares? Bring out Roland and Curt!
Sometime way past 9 PM (I was too far gone to remember) : After the eternity that the TFF crew took to set up the instruments, the house lights were finally turned down. The arena was packed right up to the rafters, and the whoop that rang through the place when the boys finally appeared was probably loud enough to be heard as far as Tawi-tawi. They open with a short portion of Mad World and segue into Everybody Wants to Rule the World, and every single soul in the audience sings along with them. (I got my hands on a video taken by a friend's friend who was sitting in the patron box, and the look on Roland's face is priceless. We gave them the exact same reception they would have gotten from us twenty-five years ago when they were at the height of their popularity.)
Was I the chick shrieking "aaaah! I love you, I love you!" in the background of this video? I honestly do not know. Might have been me, might have been any of my friends. I lost control of myself the second I heard Roland sing. Oh, that voice! That voice! I can't be held responsible for anything I did that night that was beyond the limits of propriety or sanity.
They sang a great selection of songs from almost all the TFF albums (even the ones where Curt was no longer part of the band). Memories Fade, Sowing the Seeds of Love, Break it Down Again (Roland saluted whenever the military drum roll sounded off -- oh so adorable), Raoul and the Kings of Spain, Pale Shelter, Head Over Heels. They performed quite a number of tunes from their reunion albums, all of which I proudly knew - Floating Down the River, Call Me Mellow, Secret World. Went nuts when Roland did that thing he does when he gets to the refrain of "Secret World" -- swings his hips while he strums that red guitar. Holy mother of g...I thought I was going to pass out.
Effie nudged me while I was watching him on the Jumbotron, and yelled into my ear: "Look! Roland has man-boobs!" Aaarghh, the nerve of this woman! He does NOT! Those are pecs, I tell you! Pecs!! Fine, so his Royal Hotness seems a bit chunky now, but in my head he'll always be the cool dancing Roland in the Change and Mad World videos, and the grinning dish in Everybody WTRTW. To borrow a line from another Ro fan, Roland is my dog. But wait a second, it's not like Curt hasn't fallen victim to gravity himself. Man-boobs he has not, but gray hair and wrinkles he does. But does it matter, really, how badly they've aged, when they sound just as good as they used to back in the day?
The first song of the encore was "Woman in Chains", and the person who did the female vocals
was a man with an astoundingly high-pitched voice, and he sounded exactly like Oleta Adams. The last song of the night, which came much to soon, was "Shout". The audience did just exactly that, and by the time the last note was struck, Roland had his hands over his ears, and a great big smile on his face.
Rumors are floating around that they might come back soon for a second show. Damn right they should, so they can give us all those songs we didn't hear. Suffer the Children. Mothers Talk. Advice for the Young at Heart. I Believe (ooh! with a shirtless Ro singing slouched on chair?). Broken. Last Days on Earth. Famous Last Words. The Hurting. Watch Me Bleed. The Working Hour. The Year of the Knife. Start of the Breakdown. The Way You Are. Change (ooh! so we can dance the Roland-with-the-woman-in-the-japanese-mask dance!)!
I didn't want to leave, even when the house lights were turned back on. Two hours, nineteen songs. If they had gone on for nineteen more until the wee hours of May 3, I would have stayed. No need to think hard for a Tears song that applies to a moment like this.
All for freedom and for pleasure, nothing ever lasts forever.
(SIGH). See you soon, Roland and Curt! What a great show.
