The Adams Family
My first Dead show with mom takes me on a long, strange trip to Bryan Adams
My life is derailed
In the end, there’s a song
Every culture has right-of-passage rituals. The Amazonean Satere-Mawe tribe requires young boys to wear gloves filled with bullet ants. In Indonesia, there’s a Balinese-Hindu ceremony that involves the filing of the upper canine teeth so their points become blunted. There are innumerable rituals related to initiation and coming of age, such as sweat lodges, intoxications, circumcision, scarification, and other symbolic ordeals signifying the passage from adolescence to adulthood. I was thirteen when Mom sat me down for the talk. She asked me to await her in the kitchen of our one-story home in Folsom, beside her impressionist landscape paintings on the easel. The gravity of her demeanor outmatched the whole birds-and-bees conversation — which was more or less a library book passed across the kitchen counter when I was in the 2nd grade. The seriousness of her tone was just shy of her divorce announcement from my Dad. So, there I was in a Y2K wings haircut, Led Zeppelin t-shirt, and …