Tori stories

Eighteen years ago, I sat with my two best friends in the back row of the Rosemont Theater and screamed. Tori Amos walked onto the stage far below and I could not contain that screaming. The underpinnings of my emotional life as a preteen were based on Tori and those friendships, and I felt then that something essential and important was happening. In retrospect, I was falling in love with live music, and I was already deeply connected to my friends. Last week, the three of us got to recreate this moment at the Chicago Theater, but with better seats and less crying. And wine.

#unrepentantselfie

I walked to Venture as a 12-year-old to buy my first Tori album. It was a toss up between spending my babysitting money on her album “Under the Pink” or the Stone Temple Pilots’ “Purple.” 

I chose correctly.

At home, I lay with my cheek on the mauve bedroom carpet, flipping the tape in the boom box over and over again. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t sure what the songs were about, precisely. The controlled beauty and anger of Tori's voice and the versatility of her piano playing were nothing like the jingles I had been pounding out on our family’s upright in the living room. These songs were gorgeous and about things that mattered, things I wanted to understand.

Christina and Jenny and I kept a friendship notebook around the same time as our first Tori show. This summer, Christina unearthed it at her parents’ house in a memory box, the torn cover pasted with ransom-note-style headlines cut out from Seventeen magazines and filled with missives about boys and boys and boys. We were so self-assured, so in love with our friendship, so insecure but certain that we were veiling those vulnerabilities with humor and anger.

It is so transparent to me now, reading those cringeworthy pages. Makes me wonder what will be transparent to me 20 years from now. Fewer things, or just as many?

In junior high, it was crucially important to me that others understood we were a trio of best friends. I feared getting squeezed out, especially because I was last at everything that mattered then (mostly boys and puberty). As a safeguard, I wanted to find us three-part best friendship necklaces instead of the readily available gold heart split in two. Such an oddity was unavailable at Claire’s, so we settled on rainbow sets of beads that looked like gummy bears, swapping the strands that mismatched nicely with our flannels and band t-shirts.

Standing in a parking lot before a Tori meet and greet. Why aren't we wearing shoes in this parking lot?

Back then, I thought it was Tori shows, the notebook, necklaces, and a shared, rotating wardrobe of baggy men's clothes that made our friendship important. Of course the real things that have kept us close seemed mundane and happened in between. The sleepovers and watching the same four movies with the longhaired men of the ‘90s on repeat (Daniel, Brad and, embarrassingly, Mel). The time spent visiting each other at our first jobs, lingering in lobbies and coffee shops. And later, trips to see each other when we moved away, standing up in weddings and visiting each other's families.

After a few sangrias last week, sitting in the fifth row, I watched Tori take the stage. She wore a red satiny kimono and cat-eye glasses which, in addition to being Elton-John-awesome, she needs in order to see. Tori has not mellowed over the decades, her voice is as strong as ever. But her pauses, her emphasis on certain lyrics, have shifted. And the things that I needed to hear about at 14—sex, questioning religion, what it means to be a girl, a woman, a daughter—are just as resonant now.

Tori looks like she's on fire! I need a new camera phone.

When she sang ‘Winter,’ there was the added dimension of her own motherhood: “When you gonna make up your mind?/When you gonna love you as much as I do?” And when she implores, “Don’t make me come to Vegas/don’t make me pull you out of his bed,” well. We know now what it means to help your friend exit a terrible relationship, whether you're 13 or 33. These songs realign, snap into place with experience. My teenage anger has aged into something more productive, more soundly feminist, and Tori’s lyrics still stoke it, “Why does there/gotta be a sacrifice?” I feel more fiercely protective of my friends, more in awe of them as ever.

Female friendships are hard, I’ve learned, until they aren’t. There is something so satisfying about still being able to make these women laugh, to fall easily into deep conversations, into kindness and old stories, and to recognize how essentially the same the three of us are. How, when tested, we flex strength and humor in the same places that we did as kids. Sometimes reacting more tenderly here, a little more confidently there, but wholly the same girls. 

Certainly, more fearless. Last week we were taking turns with that fifth-row seat, the other pair of tickets being about 10 rows farther back. But as soon as Tori started "Cornflake Girl" before the first encore, my phone buzzed with Jenny's text. "Get your asses down here." Christina and I nonchalantly rushed the stage with the other crazy fans and the three of us danced in the aisle together for the rest of the show. Fourteen-year-old me would be impressed.