From the Editor's Desk

September 9th, 2001

It's Sunday evening and I'm sitting on the Blue Line in Chicago on my way  to catch my American Airlines flight to Boston's Logan Airport. It's empty, save a few flight attendants and some Mexicans holding grocery bags filled with clothes, linens, and God-knows-what-else.

The Mexicans -- I assume they're Mexicans because a) they speak Spanish, and b) they have in their grocery bags those coarse woven blankets you buy on spring break in Mexico -- talk among themselves in phrases I can't understand; their voices rise with with what sounds like optimism, or excitement, or at least happiness as we near the airport, and I absently wonder if they're taking a vacation. I look again at the grocery bags and feel bad.

The sun is going down behind the row houses we shuttle past -- metaphoric for the summer and maybe more. My birthday will be in a few weeks.

The night before, I stood next to the stage as the B-52s calculatedly coaxed several thousand of Chicago's party set into a frenzy fueled by an open bar, quirky beats, and a feeling foreign to thousands of the attendees: nostalgia.

Each year, the Green Tie Ball beckons several thousand of the city's arrivistes to don black tie and convene in an ambiguous building that is part warehouse, part circus tent, and absolutely no part concert hall. This year, the new-millennium mating ritual was in full swing -- but the Perry Ellis and Prada collided with "Planet Claire" and Kate's day-glow plant-print pants to form an atmosphere so anachronistic that I stood slack-jawed.

For the people nearing 30, the B's kicked out the tracks we grew up with, drank our first keg beer to, scored our first make-out during... For the people barely 21, the band served more as a living icon -- a call to throw down in the tradition of all the sorority sisters and collegiate lacrosse teams that came before them. For a couple of hours, one band was all things to all people, and everyone hovered in a state of bliss you might not imagine if you didn't spend your 20s in the raging 90s...

Afterward

In October, after the U.S. sent the first sortie of bombers across Afghanistan, I approached the B-52s' publicist, Bradford Cobb, for an interview with Fred Schneider and/or Kate Pierson about the irony of the band's name given the state of world affairs. No one in the band wanted to talk, and frankly I didn't really feel like writing.

The story languished until the spring of '02, when I started to feel better and latched on to the concept again. Cobb arranged an interview with Kate at a book show in Manhattan where she was doing a guest appearance. The setting was appropriate, and we met in New York. The book show was frenetic, and after the usual pleasantries I suggested we schedule the interview for another time. I never connected with Kate again, and maybe it was just as well.

Now

I returned to the Green Tie Ball again this year. In lieu of a headliner, the organizers opted for three cover bands delivering perfectly exquisite renditions of The Police, R.E.M., and U2 -- but despite the variety and the late-80s/early-90s theme, none could recreate the collision between present-day euphoria and sweet nostalgia that the B's conjured on 9/9/01.

Three years is a long time for anyone between the ages of 22 and 32 to hold on to a specific feeling, a snapshot in emotional time. But to forget this one is simply wrong, so remember it. We need it to motivate the work we have left to do, and besides, it may be a very long time before anyone feels that way again.

R A Miller

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