One night at the now defunct club The Quest (opened by none other than Prince himself in 1992) while watching a Bad Religion show, I made it backstage because the drummer from the opening band Pennywise happened to walk by me. I gave him a "great show" and he waived me on back. I ended up getting a bunch of autographs and got into a conversation with Greg Graffin (the singer of Bad Religion). About who knows what, that's not the point. It was probably smart stuff I'm sure, as he was much older than me, and had his PhD (and happens to currently be a professor at Cornell University). Anyway, at some point during the conversation he asked me what I was doing later.
I was surprised by this question for three reasons:
1) I was supremely naive.
2) This had never happened to me before.
3) He was thirty-six*, and I was probably 23 years old.
So I laughed -- typical Kady -- and said, "Why would YOU want to hang out with ME?" and sort of rolled my eyes. We continued chit-chatting for a little bit. Later he said to me, "and THAT'S why people want to hang out with you Kady. Because you have a beautiful smile and a great personality and blah blah blah." He went on for a while about my amazing qualities and I thought the whole exchange was SO weird, because I had forgotten that I made that comment. Then I shrugged my shoulders and went home.
I didn't get it until the next day, when I realized that Greg Graffin from Bad Religion asked me what I was doing later and I said, "why would YOU want to hang out with ME?", which he clearly took to mean that I was a depressed little punk rock kid saying something more along the lines of, "why would anybody want to hang out with me?" And he was trying to make me FEEL BETTER.
It still gives me a case of the LOLs. I actually meant, "aren't you a little OLD to be asking little girls what they're doing later?"
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| "Jeez kid, I was just trying to be nice." |
*oh Gawd, I'm almost thirty-six. Is this how my twenty-three-year-old friends see me?
* Yup.
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