As a white, middle aged, middle class woman living in a new build
in suburbia, I sometimes long to escape and live another life, somewhere else...and if I could try out anyone's life for a day, I’d be Rihanna. We have nothing in common, I don't really know much about her or her life save her great music fabulous figure, desire to legalise cannabis and an apparent predilection for bad boys. But that's the point - our lives are so different - so what else do I need to know?
As I write this blog my daughter is asking where her clean
jeans are, and my husband is yelling at the Aussies while wrestling bravely to
bring home the Ashes singlehandedly from the sofa. The cats want feeding, there’s
washing in the basket, my eczema’s started up, my blood pressure’s high and the
bloody dishwasher has packed in again. So apart from the bad boys and the weed (tried it once, threw up everywhere), who can blame me for wanting the life
and thighs of a beautiful, rich, young woman with the world at her feet and
a future stretching before her like an infinity pool?Last week I went to see Rihanna on her Diamonds world tour in Manchester with Lesley my BFF. And when she got on that stage and shouted 'Hello Manchester' we yelled as loudly as those twentysomethings. She is so enigmatic, so confident and so damn good! I agree we may not be her target audience and according to my teenage daughter our attendance at the Rihanna concert was; ‘weird, bordering on creepy.’ My husband added his concerns that Rihanna’s ‘moves’ were and I quote, ‘vaginally based’ and therefore improper for fortysomething women to try and emulate. Ignoring his advice to wear a cardi, embrace middle age and buy two tickets for Michael Bublé instead, I told him there was spag bol in the freezer, cricket on the telly and I was off to ‘see my bitches’. For one night only at The Manchester Evening News Arena - Les and I were gonna be ‘Rude Girls,’ and we didn’t care what anyone else thought.
Back up north at Mum’s for the night I wasn't spag-bol-freezing wife and jean-washing mother - I was a dangerous daughter again. And like old (ok very old) times, Mum
made our tea and Lesley’s Dad drove us to the venue... yeah baby I'm a rock star!
Lesley and I warming up pre gig just drinking and getting our swag on ...
Once at the arena Lesley ‘FaceBooked’ us and I texted my
daughter in my own version of Rihanna-speak saying; ‘check out FB we is all over dat shit!’ The textual silence
was deafening, she later claimed post traumatic stress and told me never to speak like that again because it was wholly inappropriate for someone of my advancing years. She's 14....
Back at Rihannaworld, the set was amazing, all fire and
smoke and glitz, Rhi Rhi was on fire and after several bottles of profanely priced
rosé wine, so was I. The wine and the music enabled me to abandon that suburban wife back home with her dodgy dishwasher and I was there, dropping it like it was hot...one of Rihanna's bitches.
I hesitate to mention it but - there was a moment ... a mere moment as we swayed to the music, singing along to Rude Boy like coked-up backing singers, when the ‘mother’ part of me cringed slightly. Rhi Rhi, so young (enough to be my daughter) and so pretty addressed the audience as ‘crazy shit.’ That cute little mouth then talked up a beautiful ballad as being about ‘fucked up love.’ Oh dear, I thought, in my mother’s voice, but sipped at my rosé and brushed soap-in-that-mouth thoughts away to continue with the task in hand - accompanying Rihanna on the Manchester leg of her tour.
I hesitate to mention it but - there was a moment ... a mere moment as we swayed to the music, singing along to Rude Boy like coked-up backing singers, when the ‘mother’ part of me cringed slightly. Rhi Rhi, so young (enough to be my daughter) and so pretty addressed the audience as ‘crazy shit.’ That cute little mouth then talked up a beautiful ballad as being about ‘fucked up love.’ Oh dear, I thought, in my mother’s voice, but sipped at my rosé and brushed soap-in-that-mouth thoughts away to continue with the task in hand - accompanying Rihanna on the Manchester leg of her tour.
So for the next hour and a half I sang along animatedly about shooting ‘niggas,’ while urging men to ‘give it to me,’ quite hard and inviting them to ‘ride
my pony.’ God only knows what I was requesting
and back in the cold light of day I can only assure you there is none of that going on in my Barratt Show Home thank you very much! Me and ma ho Rihanna is different bitches in different shit... and that's why it's so liberating to imagine being someone else in such a different life - as a writer I do it all the time.
Ma girrrrrl Rihanna bustin the moves... Les and I mirrored this move from our seats
So after Rihanna, Les and I had sung our last song, we wandered into the hot night, infused
with wine and freedom, imagining our own thighs as twirly and firm as Rihanna's. It was probably the heat, but the daughter part of me suddenly felt a frisson of rebellion. Waiting for our lift home in the
steaming streets of Manchester I was
sixteen again and asked Lesley what she thought her 85-year-old Dad's reaction would be if in the car I started talking about ‘hoes and weed and shit?’
“He’ll think you’re talking about gardening and offer you some 'Weed and feed,'” she said without missing a beat.
So my forty-something teen rebellion may go unnoticed... for now. But watch this space...
