Mosh!

Wuhhhh. Someone please tell me exactly when I became a child of Satan. Unless you’ve been living in a cocoon, you know that last night brought the Pitch Music Awards showcase to Westport. It was my goal to stay sane through the night, but this morning, my head hurts, my ears feel like they’ve recently received surgery, and my favorite short-sleeved button-up shirt has a button torn off.

That sartorial injury was incurred at the night’s climax — namely, the Architects show at the Beaumont. I was down front and so was a woman who wanted to see my chest, evidently. Already pumped by a killer set from the Roman Numerals, we were ready to throw down — I mean, I’ve never seen a mosh pit like that before in this town. I don’t make a habit of going to many shows where seething pits of flailing humanity are likely to spring up, and I don’t think many of the people who were in the pit last night do, either. Basically, they looked like a dinner crowd from McCoy’s that had been given a side of Adderall with their Skillet Dip, kidnapped half the waitstaff and taken them down the street. This includes the brunette who spontaneously reached over and tried to rip open my shirt about a third of the way into the performance. Fortunately, I had my wits about me enough to see that the detached button was still sitting inside the hole, so I immediately slipped it into the crack pocket of my jeans and continued rocking.

And by the way, this was after my unsuccessful stage dive. Print this page and highlight and underline “unsuccessful” and draw arrows pointing to it to get the full meaning of the word. It was all the more disappointing because it was my first attempt at such a stunt, ever. Fairly early into the Architects’ set (which, by the way, was preceded by an ass-kicking set from the Roman Numerals) — before my near disrobing — I was standing in front of the Volkswagen-sized stack of speakers on the floor, stage left, letting the gusts of sound dry the beer off my crotch, when I turned to my friend Annie and said, “Hey, you think I should crowd surf?” She said “sure” because she, too, is an offspring of Lucifer, so I cleared the myriad cups and bottles off the top of the speaker stack in front of me, climbed atop, signaled to the crowd below (their heads at about ankle-level to me) my intention, and, after about three people responded by raising their hands, I flung myself downward.

How you say…oof?

Most of the motherfuckers simply moved out of the way (NICE), but luckily there were enough sympathetic audience members to break my fall so that I didn’t crack my skull. Or maybe I was just ragdoll-ified by the two giant margaritas I’d consumed at the Beach Club. In any case, I survived and continued to fling myself about to the awesome show, albeit not from such great heights.

And that was only a small snippet from the wondrous evening — pick up next week’s Pitch for the Wayward Son’s full report of the evening.

Oh, and if the woman who ripped open my shirt is reading this, um… call me?