Moving to Music
By MJ Ubando
People always look skeptical when I tell them I’ve crowd-surfed. I don’t necessarily blame them. These days, and for most of my life, I’ve always been a bit of a grandma. At 32 years old, I love acrylic sweaters, a cup of warm tea, and will spout out Golden Girls quotes at any given opportunity.
Still, every person needs an alternative life, and I used to spend mine as a wannabe rock star. Like many misguided and middle class repressed high schoolers in the early 2000’s, I went through an emo phase. I rocked band shirts, black Converses, and I recoiled at anything that was pink. Though most of my style came off like an ill-fitted costume, I like to believe my music gave me some street cred. In high school, music was my whole world. Any money I acquired, I spent mostly on CDs I bought from Tower Records. Any money that was left, I saved up to attend any concerts Reno was lucky enough to book.
When I was a junior, a boy who wore cool t-shirts over his large biceps hoisted my tiny 4’11 frame onto his shoulders during a Story of the Year concert. Inside a sweaty and dingy room at the New Oasis, I swayed above the audience, pumping my fists in the air to the rhythm of the bass drum. Before I knew it, bicep boy leaned his whole body backwards and let me go. My body tossed through the crowd supported by waves of hands and arms I did not know but who did not let me fall.
The concerts I loved most were loud like an earthquake. I avoided shows that forced you to sit down and keep still. I wanted to be by the stage or the speakers where the music was so boisterous, it literally vibrated through you. Music that made you move so much, you had no choice but to feel alive.
Though I outgrew emo, it took me longer to outgrow music. Even though my tastes expanded, I still loved concerts. I saw Santana a little after the Hilton became the GSR, danced with Dia Frampton at Cargo, bowed to the goddess who is Sara Bareilles when she sang atop a piano inside of the Knitting Factory. It was in the rhythm of live music that I often forgot whoever I was trying to be and danced myself into becoming whoever I was. It is one of the things I miss most about the person I am today.
Last February, a few weeks or so before COVID-19 hit, I was walking in midtown and passed The Saint. A band I didn’t know played music good enough to make me move but not enough to move inside. I had somewhere and someone else to be.
Whenever normal returns, one of the first things on my list is to return to myself through live music. I pray that our local venues survive long enough for me to find my way back into them, moving to music I do not know but feels familiar anyway.
MJ Ubando is a Filipina-American who teaches English and Creative Writing at Sparks High School. She was raised in Reno and is adulting in Sparks. She graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno, in 2011 and earned her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction from Sierra Nevada University in 2019.
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