I write for a music news website. In August 2016, I covered a music festival in Athens for this website. This was the first time I’d ever been to this festival. Why did I wait so long? Social anxiety prevented me from attending as a fan. However, attending as a journalist was a special opportunity I wasn’t going to miss.
My social anxiety was a beast at the time. Sometimes I think I hide it well, but that just means I internalize it, which makes things worse for me in the long run. I battled it constantly, so that every day left me both exhilarated by the music and drained by the sheer amount of energy it took to stay focused on the task at hand and keep my mental shit together.
Maybe all this tension and turmoil was karma’s way of biting me on the ass. You see, I once did something at a music festival that some might consider socially unacceptable.
I thought back on this time in my life, and I had to ask myself, “Have I actually attended this festival before?” I know this sounds like a strange question, but my life up to this point has been pretty strange, and I don’t expect things to change anytime soon.
The year was 2000. I was a 28-year-old, as-yet-undiagnosed manic depressive. I was supremely happy. I was also experiencing my first manic episode… I just didn’t know it.
There was a music festival that summer in Athens at the 40 Watt Club. I spent most of my time backstage, interacting with a whole lot of people. I was babbling a steady stream of manic-speak, but I somehow managed to avoid getting kicked out.
At one point, there was a lull between bands. At the time, it seemed like a good idea to walk onstage and share my joy with everyone. So, through the backstage door I emerged. It was my first (and only) time onstage at the 40 Watt. I had a very specific image in mind: a scene from the movie Sixteen Candles. In this moment, lines of perception were blurred, and I tried like mad to project to the audience what I saw in my mind’s eye. I didn’t dare speak for fear I wouldn’t be able to stop.
I was wearing a long green dress, which helped to facilitate my next move. I stood in front of the crowd and discreetly shimmied my Redneck GReece Deluxe promotional underpants down my hips to my ankles, delicately stepping out of them (like a lady), at which point I did a little dance on top of them.
It was then that a young man came from behind the stage and gently returned me to the backstage area. I left the underwear onstage. Things probably would have made a little more sense if I had held up my underwear—an homage to another scene in Sixteen Candles—for the crowd to see. They were white, but not plain. On the front was a black screen-print of Greg Reece’s face, complete with cowboy hat. On the back was a red screen-print of the admonition, “Kiss My Redneck Ass.”
At the time—and I think this was the right decision—it seemed smarter to forsake my “performance art” and leave the stage when asked.
God bless Greg Reece—he came up with a sincerely hilarious pair of panties, and he sold the shit out of them at his shows that year. I think what finally convinced me to just buy the damn things was how he promoted them from the stage like a carnival barker, even going so far as to point out that they were made by a company called Dixie Belle Lingerie and were of very high quality.
So, there’s my confession: I once misbehaved at an Athens, GA music festival when I was in my 20s. I am much older now, and hopefully a little wiser. And, basically, I no longer have the stamina to misbehave—at least not too much. But as long as I still have the energy and the inspiration to write, I’ll keep on plugging away! Music is love.
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