Melissa Etheridge in Montréal

On Saturday night Melissa Etheridge played at Place des Arts in Montréal. The venue really hampered the audience from audience--the sit down chairs and the theatre setting discouraged people from standing up and dancing, and in my particular section of the balcony people in the back yelled at people in the front who stood up to dance so that dampened spirits even more--but Melissa was great. It was the first time that I've seen her play, and I was not disappointed. I'd heard that she had a good following in Montréal and Vermont--northern liberalness, posited one friend--but I was surprised at how many straight couples and how many francophones were in the audience. Apparently she appeals to more than just dykes and she can even break the language barrier.

Melissa was very political throughout the show, which was a really pleasant surprise. She opened up with "Lucky", although surprisingly didn't sing her even bigger hit "Breathe" from that same album. Not long into the show, Melissa started talking about how great Canada was--which made the crowd go wild--because of our approach to gay rights. She talked about how she, like many others, considered moving to Canada after ol' Georgie boy got relected in 2004. She pointed out that she could actually get married if she lived here (this after an earlier reference, in response to an audience compliment, that her "wife" [Tammy Lynn Michaels] spiked her hair for her), and then she went into a series of her most political gay rights songs: "Silent Legacy" about being closeted; "Scarecrow" about Matthew Shepard's murder; "Tuesday Morning" about Mark Bingham, a gay man among the four people believed to have taken down United Flight 93 (although see the Loose Change post below for other theories on 9/11); and (after "The Letting Go") "Yes I Am", the title song on her first album following her coming out at Bill Clinton's inaugural ball. "Tuesday Morning" was really interesting because not only did she talk about how the partners of gays who died on September 11th weren't eligible for survivor's benefits, and therefore how having a gay hero created an ideological problem for the country, but she also modified the lyrics. Normally the chorus goes, "Stand up America / Wake up America", but that didn't really make much sense for a Canadian audience, so she replaced those lines, and changed the pronouns from "Can you live with yourself in the land of the free?" to "Can they live with themselves". It was nice of her to be so gracious about Canada.

She praised us again when she sang another political song, "I Need To Wake Up", which is the closing credit song on Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth. She talked about global warming and encouraged everyone to see the film, not just as a commercial plug but because of the urgency to convince people to do something. And of course she couldn't resist joking that with global warming Canada is looking better and better every day. (It wasn't entirely praise though, as she wryly pointed out that despite living in the home of Dubya, she thought that we "still have some business to take care of" ourselves, i.e., Stephen Harper, aka Dubya's mini-me.

She also talked about having gotten breast cancer (which forced her to cancel her last scheduled show in Montréal a couple years ago) and did two songs that she wrote after surviving the chemo: "I Run for Life" and "This Is Not Goodbye".

So gay rights, the environment, and cancer all in one show, and quite prominently at that. I was very impressed!

Other highlights were the highly romantic "Baby, You Can Sleep While I Drive", which always makes me want to take my girl on a cross-country road trip, and "The Letting Go" for which a grand piano was wheeled on stage and which she played poignantly, a nice change from the rocking guitar. For an encore, she did a very long version of "Like The Way I Do", which I'd read was her closer that she draws out much, much longer than on the album, and which turned out to be true, and then she did Joplin's "Piece of My Heart", the same song that sung at the 2005 Grammy's when she was fresh out of chemo and still completely bald. It wasn't as utterly amazing as that performance, which I doubt anything could top, but it was still quite an awesome closer.

On top of the endless Canada praise, she was also very gracious to the audience and interacted a lot with the front row. Had I have been lucky enough to have gotten seats there, I'm sure that I would noticed electricity in the air. She chatted with people in the front row, and several times she apologized because of a techincal screw-up with Place des Arts that meant that the people in the first row were really the people in the third row. Apparently, PdA had raised the orchestra bowl in order to bring some of her equipment on stage, and it got stuck there, so the first two rows of seats disappeared and those people had to squeeze over to the two ends of the stage instead of getting the seats they were supposed to. She apologized to them at least three or four times during the show, and she made a point of singing at the front of the stage / orchestra bowl, even though the stage and all of the set decor was placed about 6 feet further back where it was supposed to be. She really made a point of maintaining contact with the audience even though there was an extra 6 feet of stage where there wasn't supposed to be.

Move over Margaret Mead Made Me Gay. Melissa Etheridge made me a dyke, and I sure am grateful!

Saturday was also the last day of the 1st ever Outgames here in Montréal (as opposed to the Gay Games which moved to Chicago after a bitch fight between our local organizers and their powers that be) and Sunday was the last day of Divers/Cité, our pride festival. It was really amazing to walk down the streets and see people wearing the blue Outgames necklace-keychain-nametag holders, and even their Outgames medals. It was enough to give one whiplash from turning around identifying everyone as "Gay!", "Gay!", Gay!". The city was overrun with queers, and it was fabulous! Well, except for the fact that there were so many queerst that there was a line-up to get into the 7-floor Drugstore bar, which was completely ridiculous! Still, having to find another bar is a small price to pay for having more than a week when it feels like queers make up the majority of the city--how refreshing!