Smells like...Never mind

RantWoman wishes to weigh in peculiarly on the 15th anniversary of Nirvana, the grunge band lead singer Kurt Cobain's suicide. This entry has been simmering for a few days. Tonight RantWoman is seizing the occasion of her annual spring allergies transforming themselves into a sudden spring cold to finish a couple smell-related items.

RantWoman does not actually have that much to say about Kurt Cobain exactly except for one funny and one sad moment from his last big venue show in Seattle, but she is going to take advantage of the situation to ramble on the fantasms of youth, fates of poet-songwriters, the signature popular culture bards of various places she has lived or visited, and perhaps one or two other topics besides the issue of just how aggravating suicides can be sometimes.

When RantWoman moved to Seattle a couple years before Cobain's passing, she had no idea who Nirvana was. RantWoman tends not to swim in the widest currents of popular culture so this is not necessarily surprising. RantWoman was broke, awaiting the arrival of her last pre-Seattle paycheck but she did see acts she wanted to see listed in the local ads of an upcoming community festival. RantWoman coincidentally also saw a job posting seeking "Event Staff" for the very upcoming event she wanted to attend. The wages were fabulous (not!). This MIGHT be one reason RantWoman was able to pester the employer daily for like a week and parley her vast experience handing out symphony programs in high school and deterring the main act from leaving her coffee cup on the soundboard during a break at another event and a few other similar moments into a gig as "Event Staff."

At the time of RantWoman's Event Staff career, the crews included one guy in a wheelchair, another preternaturally skinny but very agile guy and of course RantWoman in her wacky eyeglasses. In terms of income, RantWoman is glad that other circumstances allowed her to keep the "Event Staff" gig in the category of hobby rather than sole means of support, the situation for a few of RantWoman's Event Staff colleagues.

Being Event Staff is not a particularly good way to be guaranteed of seeing one's dream acts. Event Staff sometimes wind up being busy searching bags, counting patrons with handclickers, checking names on the performers' guest lists, giving directions to the bathroom or pay phone, and assorted other unglamorous duties, sometimes well-removed from the main act. Or Event Staff wind up close enough to key equipment to need earplugs. Or sometimes the main act turns out to be so ear-splitting that the Event Staff wind up needing earplugs just to monitor the venue exits.

True, over RantWoman's Event Staff career, she did wind up seeing some fun up-and-coming acts. Barenaked Ladies when they were younger anyone? Sleater Kinney ? RantWoman saw some visiting Pipe and Drum corps who turned out to be really good and watched a crowd of nice clean-cut college students from out of town try to get it going with a Christian rap group called dc Talk.

RantWoman got to see the The Grateful Dead without even too much Deadhead experience, seeing the Grateful Dead while working as Event Staff being of course the epitome of irony in the first place, though possibly no worse than the group's business dude who went about the entire two-show gig in a wig with a very obvious fake ponytail over his cropped hair.

One time RantWoman got dispatched to a travel node where her task was to point the "head-banging Symphony musicians" to their venue and to make sure the rock show crowd found its proper entry. RantWoman was not upset to get to hear the scheduled oratorio, Handel's Judas Maccabaeus) instead of the rock show. RantWoman abandoned this career after seeing the Rolling Stones, but that was a few months after the Nirvana gig.

Event Staff do not wear white gloves or look like protodebutantes. In RantWoman's experience they wear yellow jackets or yellow company-issue T-shirts. The clothing has numbers on it and there is a mind-numbing check out/ check in process to make sure none of these pinnacles of fashion get diverted for any kind of malfeasance. Size is an advantage for some parts of the job, so there was never a shortage of clothing that would fit RantWoman, though alas for health reasons RantWoman always had to demur from one occasionally confrontational role where size was one consideration. Some of the time the Event Staff were low-level crowd control. Some of the time, the Event Staff were, cough, proto-cops.

For example, the yellow costumes were either supposed to help the staff doing search find prohibited weapons and illicit substances or deter the masses of concertgoers from breaking out the illicit substances in the presence of the Event Staff. RantWoman was tolerably competent with the metal detector wand though her colleagues tended to be more successful about ferreting out the prohibited items and routing them without fuss or muss or further legal bother to the ever-present trash cans mext to the Search cordons on the way into venues.

RantWoman on numerous occasions reflected on sundry issues which might come to mind over the role described here. RantWoman found herself reflecting on numerous stories, on the demands of music promoters, insurance companies and other threads of planet capitalism. RantWoman does not regret these experiences; she also does not regret not doing this forever.

Despite the volume of materials finding the way into the trash cans before concerts clouds and clouds of evidence of illicit substances nearly always wafted forth almost as soon as the concert started. The Nirvana show RantWoman worked a few months before Cobain's demise was no exception. That night RantWoman was working the VIP entry. This was sort of comical. If RantWoman hardly knew who Nirvana were, unlike one or two awestruck colleagues, she certainly did not recognize players in other major local groups either.

Perhaps this obliviousness was an advantage. RantWoman had only to look slightly motherly and be courteous about looking up the guests' names on the official list before letting them pass undisturbed into the show. Sometimes there would be a pair of Event Staff on this duty. Sometimes there might be an actual uniformed cop. The night of the Nirvana show, there was a cop. At some point, the clouds of illicit substances got particularly difficult to ignore. The nice police officer went off to see if said clouds were emanating from the men's room. When he came back, it was RantWoman's job to check out the women's room.

Based on odor distribution, RantWoman has no particular reason to think said clouds were emanating from the women's room. If they had been, RantWoman's fabulous yellow jacket should have clued in even the most addled concertgoer and of course RantWoman did not find anything. So she went back to her station amid the clouds of smoke.

Here I digress. RantWoman's personal experience with illicit substances has a lot in common with her lack of experience with alcohol. RantWoman has personal experience with deliberate rather than occupational ingestion of illicit substances. RantWoman has enough single experiences to have had one or two really pleasant encounters, but RantWoman's general experience has usually tended toward "Why bother?"

This was certainly the case standing with the cop at the VIP gate at the Nirvana show. Why bother, except that RantWoman also noticed one well-known effect of the main illicit substance in use: RantWoman noticed she was getting hungry. RantWoman eventually excused herself to go inspect the wretched offerings at the nearby concession stand. RantWoman remembers standing there waiting for another customer, listening to the lyrics, and thinking "Wow, that is one depressed dude." Then she bought a bag of peanuts, went back to her station, and shared the peanuts with the cop who also seemed to be suffering the same appetite issue. He looked RantWoman and the bag of peanuts up and down to make sure RantWoman was not offering him God knows what before accepting the offered snack.

RantWoman would certainly not have minded in the least being wrong about the lead singer's monster case of depression, but to this day the whole story is stamped with the smell of weed and the taste of peanuts.

With that, we return Kurt Cobain to RantWoman's thematic list of bards, suicidal poets, and people whose family entourage also undoubtedly deserves kind thoughts:

John Denver always summoned images of RantWoman's elementary school years in Colorado, to the point that RantWoman never knows whether to cry or throw up when she hears one of his hits.

RantWoman went to college in New Jersey and developed a taste for Bruce Springsteen, who mercifully survives unlike another singer RantWoman knew much more intimately who does not.

Grad school in IN implanted John Cougar Mellancamp in RantWoman's library of earworms.

Even RantWoman's study abroad trip to Russia implanted a new set of bards and earworms. There was a Perestroika-era documentary about the memorial for Soviet-era bard Bulat Okudzhava. Okudzhava's career had its ups and downs both with the Soviet state and with alcoholism, but he had the temerity to go and die in late middle age in Moscow, just before the 1980 Olympics. The documentary was all about all the different zigs and zags involved in having a public memorial and getting it all out of sight before people showed up, or in the case of the US didn't show up for the Olympics. Dear Readers, you can go Wikipedia Okudzhava yourselves, but in keeping with this poetic memorial RantWoman found a wonderful clear-voiced clip of a tune called Molitva, Prayer about remembering no matter what.

RantWoman also remembers appreciating Neil Young's audio remembrance from one old poet to a younger one, and now RantWoman thinks of every kid anywhere trying to stretch his or her wings past the limits of the place they grew up....