...aye mardom, mordam!...

Oh, heavens. Last night just took my breath away. Farnam, Ellie, their mom and I went to see Googoosh at the ACC. This was my first time seeing her live, the last couple of times I had been out of Toronto and missed both shows. I can't even describe what it did to me. With all due respect to concert goers everywhere, but you have not seen a concert until you have seen someone comparable to her perform.

She is more than a singer - Googoosh represents something charming and beautiful and free for an entire generation of people, and their children. She was in my parents time not mine, but I swear when she got on that stage, spread her arms and sang "Beshno, hamsafar-e man!"¹, I had tears in my eyes, and a hand over my heart. You knew she was about to embark on a journey into the past, and she was taking you with her. She was completely taking us over.

Several times during the show, Farnam and I actually went into raptures, singing along, with all her dramatic hand movements, reaching for something she was offering: Man Amadeam, Kavir - oh when she sang all the "khodaia"'s in Kavir I thought my heart would explode -, Hamsafar... all these wonderful classics. She even sang many of the songs Shamaizadeh wrote for her, despite the copyright lawsuit they are in. She strung most of them into remixed medley's which I thought brilliant because I think it got her around the lawsuit, and she just has *so* many classics that if she sang them all in full we would have been there all night.

The only thing I would wish would have been for her to end with a breathtaking showstopper, one of her special songs, one of *those* songs. I didn't know the last song she performed with Mehrdad, it was something new and shad, which is fine but I went last night to remember. It didn't matter though, the finale in my head was amazing as the whole show ran through my ming and I sang my own "khodaia"'s all the way to the subway...


1. Listen, my fellow traveller.