The Thing About Weather (It's Ordinary)

by L RAGLAND on may 27, 2012

There’s a reason I know how the guy standing in another corner of Grant Park felt like on August 7, 2011. We like to joke about the banality of conversations geared towards the state of the weather and how sunshine is the preferred state of things…and I can tell you that we had our fair share of sun--but rain was our hero in 2011.

After driving in from Ohio, I shared a first kiss with my (now) husband under the inflatable yellow moon during Pearl Jam’s 2007 performance, shared a late-night bus ride with a group of giddy transports as thousands of Lolla-goers epically poured out on to Michigan Avenue in 2008 and in 2011, I shared a plot of grass with a complete stranger only to nap away the entire Crystal Castles set (I still heard the music in my dreams). But those are all scattered and singular moments that only a few can recall the same as me.

The fantastic and simple thing about the storms that washed over Grant Park on Sunday was that we ALL experienced the anticipation, the downpour and the aftermath. After a weekend of consulting schedules, sending texts to scattered friends and choosing sometimes painstakingly which bands to see over others, it ceased to matter what we had planned for the day. Clothes, soaked. Makeup, washed away since the first wave of rain. There was no choice but to be in the moment and know exactly why you were standing in front of that stage, or dancing under that tent.

I’d like to point out that in this next scene, someone was standing ankle-deep in mud, on crutches with a foot cast. “F**k! You can’t even see the skyline.”, exclaimed a guy behind us during the Foo Fighters set. We turned around and watched the storm approach one more time, take over the crowd and then take over the stage. In that moment, I felt lucky to be sharing it with so many people I didn’t know, including the band who had us trying to out-drown the sound of the storm with our lungs, screaming THERE GOES MY HERO as water filled our mouths and our eyes. Where were you during that last downpour? Rain was the one show that none of us missed at Lollapalooza 2011, and I love that it was something so ordinary.

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