Keane Came to Royal Oak

The Royal Oak Farmer’s Market was right next to the 44^th District Court. Laura pulled into a parking spot right in front of the austere building, made of sandstone and dotted with gold letters. Next to it, the Farmer’s Market looked small and old. There were a few stalls out there, with Russian-looking fur caps and a few old men.

We got out of the car and hurried towards the Market. I pulled my thin white jacket closer to myself, stuffing my fingers in the pockets. Michigan was cold and gloomy. The sky was a bluish white.

Inside, there were stalls full of old things—recycled things—a garage sale. I had been expecting Saint George’s Market in America, full of jewelry and original ware and food. “Where will we find Sarah?” Laura asked.

“We’ll find her,” I said. The market was only so large, after all.

We passed a man selling caramel popcorn. “The best caramel popcorn in the world!” he said, giving Laura and I eat a taste.

“The secret is, it’s baked, so the flavor goes right into the corn,” the man said. Laura bought a back, and I slowly sucked on the kernels he had given me.

“There she is,” Laura said, the first to see Dirty Girl Farms. There was a small table full of soaps, little rectangular blocks with different color spirals in them, and then lotions smelling of Lavender, Olive Oil, Hemp, Cucumber. Next to that stall was honey. I thought immediately of Chalice and the school Laura and Sarah have been talking about opening.

Sarah was with a customer, so Laura and I poked around the stall. It was crunched next to a man selling jewelry, also recycled; he was on the phone. I looked at the different perfumes—Bohemian Rose, Good Karma, Fairy Dust, and my favorite, Black Magic.  One entire wall was filled up with herbs and things I had never heard of; natural medicines and flavoring and bits and pieces. There were a few pieces of tea, to make your own loose-leaf at home.

Sarah talked to me about the different types of perfumes, and what was in them (because, as a Bath & Body Works associate, I find this very fascinating), and then I went and haggled over a set of ruby red goblets for her. By then the market was set to close; we had been later than we thought. Laura and I followed Sarah’s car to her house, down a bunch of side-streets to a duplex full of colonial-looking buildings, red bricked and white columned. Then we were off to Royal Oak again, in Sarah’s car, the TARDIS, to The Yellow Door and other little cute shops. My sister’s 18^th birthday is this Friday, and I wanted to find her something special. We wandered through all sorts of artwork, barrettes and rocks decorated to look human, picking up rings and books and stuffed animals. One of the stores we went to even had a ginger cat, asleep in a box full of random trinkets.

Stores close early on Sundays, especially the ones run independently, and so by six we found ourselves at Noodles & Company for dinner. I always get American Buttered Noodles, but after four months of eating very little but buttered noodles, I was finding that it was a little bland and tasteless. Sarah and Laura opted for more original, colorful dinners. I sipped my Izzie and stared at people as they passed by the window. Outside, all of the trees were wrapped with blue Christmas lights. I was glad they hadn’t been taken down yet. There weren’t many Christmas lights in Belfast, not the way we do it in America, and it was nice to see them still up and shining cheerfully in January. 

 Barnes & Noble, as a big corporation, was still open when we finished eating, and so we loitered there for awhile, picking up huge copies of Moby Dick, comparing Sherlock volumes, and making Laura promise to buy us copies this summer when she studies at King’s College London. She’s decided to take a summer class there on Jane Austen, so she’ll get to visit Bath. Most likely she will get to see the London Eye and Baker street to, and so the rest of us Sherlock fangirls are secretly pouting. 

 We got to the concert early and decided to stand on the periphery. Sarah’s boss from Dirty Girl Farms was there with her husband, and they kept popping in, making sure we were doing all right. All of the lights were blue, except for the ceiling, which was red, and I keep feeling like I was underwater. 

By the time the concert started there were a lot of people—I really don’t know how many. The opening act was Youngbloode Hawk, whose singer came on with long curly hair and a black and white polka dotted shirt that looked like it was made of that flimsy, static-y fabric. For a very long time I questioned his fashion sense, but he and the drummer were really good at beating the life out of the drums, so that I could feel the musical vibrations pulsing in my legs and in my heart—when the beating of your heart echoes the beating of the drums—and I got into it, bobbing slowly. 

Sarah and Laura, getting ready for Keane!

 Of course, we really came to see Keane, a British band made popular by “Somewhere Only We Know” and “Is It Any Wonder?” They came to promote their newest album, Strangeland. I loved the title. It reminded me of 30 Seconds to Mars--a stranger in a strange land. They were strangers in a strange land; it was their first time in Royal Oak. Everyone was really excited to see their Strangers; their British strangers.

Laura had said earlier, “I’m just so excited to be breathing air from British lungs!” and I did not think that I would be so emotional during the concert. I’m not afraid of Eoghann, Madonna’s resident Brit and basketball player extraordinaire (this is probably a very illustrious title. I am not sure he deserves it. I do not understand basketball enough, but Laura and others have assured me Eoghann is good at basketball).  Americans tend to be very enthralled with the British, but I think we’re really similar in a lot of ways—and they tend to lose their glamour when they drape themselves over you reaching for a crisp, sing songs about strawberry jam, get off of the bus three stops early and walk in the rain because you accidentally hit the ‘stop’ button, and ask you what you thought of Jonathan Swift’s feminine aversion in Gulliver’s Travels (answer: Jonathan Swift was beginning his swift (hehe, a pun) into madness, including but not limited to hatred of sex, gender, and sexuality, especially women and their bodies, and natural things like going to the restroom. Gulliver’s Travels is not a children’s book or even a book that can be looked at from a feminist standpoint; IT IS A BOOK ABOUT A MAN WHO WANTED TO BECOME A HORSE.)

In other words, I have stopped seeing the British people as a race of demi-gods.

However, during the concert I realized just how much I missed accents, and the way different people talk. It was so nice to hear Keane’s accents and imagine myself back in Belfast; and for a long moment I actually could see myself back in the U.K., wandering through the streets. I had to pull myself back and listen to the music. Sarah and Laura kept looking around, making sure I wasn't wandering off (I have the tendency of doing that, especially when I'm interested in something). 

Keane was really a great concert. The singer was brilliant, and he had a good voice live, and the other members were fantastic. I loved their lights show; it wasn’t repetitive and it was beautiful. At the end they had lights come up like little dots, and wild, mixed metaphors ran around my head: rice being thrown at a wedding, fireflies, dandelion seeds.

When we left the theatre, there was at least an inch of snow on the ground, and the weather was even colder. I pulled my gloves out of my purse and put them on, shivering and sliding on the slush. The roads were bad, and Laura decided it would be safest to stay the night at Sarah’s.

Sarah has a beautiful house. It’s covered with arts pieces, funny magnets, and tons of books. She pulled out two mattresses from gosh-knows-where, and we went to sleep. I was thinking of robots and dandelion seeds when I dropped off to sleep.

It was still sleeting in the morning, but the roads had at least been plowed. Laura and I rescued the car from its blanket of ice and snow, and took the perilous road back to Madonna. From there, I ran to get changed and ready and meet Hannah and Professor Andonian, who sent us to Northern Ireland. She still needed to get her present, and she wanted to ask us about our Experience and then interview us a little bit. She’s going to have us each interview each other about what happened, and then use it to send others abroad.

Only one other person is interested in going to Queen’s: Twizzler.

Anyway, the Keane concert was brilliant, and I had a great time. Sarah and Laura were great concert buddies, and no mosh pits were formed and few people were drinking in front of me! So the puritan in me was happy, and so was the hippy. Now I’m busy all this week—it’s hard work promoting feminism in a campus where everyone is “equal” already, and then we’re trying to get the Sociology group out from the underground, and I had to write a paper about Unions and Michigan and Right to Work, and then I have a fifteen minute presentation on Proto-Indo-European languages with a focus on Germanic that’s due………….soon.

And the printer stopped working.

And I think my new hand lotion is giving me a headache. That, or it’s bedtime for this chick.

Busy, busy, busy bee. 

Ag, headache.