music is my savior 1: robin zander showed me the light.

when i was in 7th grade, i was lost. i only had 2 really good friends (they're still my friends), i was terrible at sports, terrible in school and uncomfortable in my own skin. extremely uncomfortable. my mom put me in guitar lessons and they were awful! i was also terrible at guitar. i didn't like it. i was in drama. i liked acting, but i didn't really feel it. it was an extremely awkward entrance to puberty.

at the end of the school year, i went to miami to visit my father. my stepmother was due to have my first sibling. when i got there, i found out that i had to go to summer school. that fucking sucked! i went to summer school in miami beach. my sister, nicole, was born in june. i was very happy to have a sister, but i hated going to school there. i missed my mom and texas. i still felt weird and i didn't have any friends at summer school. i still felt uncomfortable being me. it was such a drag!

later in the summer, my father had some venezuelan clients who had come to miami with their families for vacation and to shop for the approaching back-to-school time. they had teenaged kids and each one got to bring a friend with them. there were two very hot 16 year-old girls. i had a crush on one of them. her name was maria.

on my last week of school and summer and miami, they invited me to see cheap trick with them at the sunrise musical theater in hollywood, florida. i was excited because i was going to get to go out with other people and especially maria. we took our seats in the auditorium. we sat through acts like "axe" and "krokus" i think. terrible. all terrible.

then the lights went down. the opening of "hello there" started. just like my "live at budakan" album i had cherished for years. the lights came up and there they were, CHEAP FUCKING TRICK! the drummer who looked like my uncle chuck's boss (complete with glasses, a tie, mustache and the ever-present, dangling cigarette), the spazzed-out nerdy guitar player and the cute bass player (brand new at the time). then, out walked robin zander. "hello there ladies and getlemen/hello there ladies gents/ are you ready to rock?/ready or not?" fuck me! i was rendered speechless. for the whole show! i couldn't take my eyes off of robin. i'm convinced that everything i do onstage was learned in that hour and 15 minutes of my life.

when the show was over, i was high. not just from the weed people smoked in the sunrise musical theater, but from what i had just experienced. it was a BAND! It was a lifestyle like i had seen in the beatles movies and cartoons. they looked like friends. they traveled together. i imagined them hanging out and picking up chicks together. it was four guys with thousands of people in the palm of their hands. the joke was, they were having fucking FUN! i was a huge cheap trick fan going into it, but as of that moment, i drank the fucking kool-aide. now i was a Fan! i had always loved rock and roll, but i finally understood it.

i had gone to tons of concerts and shows with my mom. i had hung around tons of musicians and backstage, but that concert was a life-changing experience. after that concert, i felt better about myself than i ever had. why? how in the world do they do that? i was blown away. however, walking to the car after the show is where my life really changed...

maria said, "mmmm. that robin zander... i would do it with him." "you would?", i said. then maria said something that changed my life forever, "i love guys that play guitar. it's so sexy." then, i said it and it was true, "i play guitar." even though nothing happened with maria, my life was infinitely better from that moment forward.