This afternoon, I had to listen to REM's great rock song, "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?", and inevitably Julia was full of questions about it - all unanswerable, because the song makes awfully little sense. In particular, Julia wanted to know about "the man who was singing," so I showed her a picture of Michael Stipe, which led in turn to a discussion of how he was the singer for a band, which had a different name than his, and this led to her asking if I had ever seen REM play. I said I had, but when she found out this event predated even "Mama being pregnant with me," she lost interest.
At dinner, I was telling Shannon about this, and she made her "Honey, you are so crazy" look. (May she never give you this look: it's soulcrushing.) She verily sneered, "I never saw REM with you. I saw REM in Minneapolis on March 8, 1989." I looked back. "You can remember the exact date that you saw REM in high school, but you don't remember seeing them with me at the Rosemont Horizon in 1995?" She looked back. "Oh, yeah. I had just forgotten about that." As she herself might say on her own blog, "People, we were engaged then. I had just moved to Chicago to be live with her, literally the day after graduating from Mac."
Sigh.
Not only could she not remember that great show or attending it with her beloved, but she couldn't remember the opening act, the name of which some underutilized neuron in my brain had been storing since that night. (It's the one-hit wonders Luscious Jackson. Naming them earned me a second blast of the look.)
(P.S. Can I just say that the website that lists every REM performance from 1980 to the present is a sight to behold?)
(P.P.S. The story behind "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" is even stranger than the song.)