High school musical

the night before the rihanna concert in singapore, i stood in front of my full-length mirror at home, held a picture of rihanna in my mind, and decided that my concert attire of wide-legged pants and tiny tee was just too 1999. after all, glamor si rihanna diba?

still i could not get over the niggling thought that i just might need to be ready to run from a riot/be crushed by the masses/get sticky and sweaty/jump over barricades/elbow crowds... in short, i could not completely dispel my years of watching concerts in manila. naman! sinabayan ko lahat ng jologs na tumalon from the general admission section to the php700 section in the bon jovi concert of 199...3? 4? and i had to trudge out in the mud, in the pouring rain, after the concert was stopped after two or three songs.

still, the next day, i dressed up my utilitarian basics of jeans, tank top and chocolate brown flats with a vintage rose necklace and lace bolero. at buti na lang! dahil pagdating ko sa singapore indoor stadium, para akong pumasok sa embassy na prom na ewan! girls were dressed to club, in little glittery miniskirts, backless tops and stilettos, and guys in this oddly justin timberlake fedora-vest-and-tie uniform. when i entered the stadium i saw why.


ang ayos diba? why can i see clearly defined rows and spaces between the seats? where's the pandemonium? the frenzied excitement? the jologs?

by some stroke of luck (probably because we came early, and they didn't sell out the venue), our seats were upgraded. an usher simply took our tickets, scratched out the seat numbers and scribbled down new ones. so we ended up here. much, much closer to the stage than we had paid to sit. my sister wasn't as lucky.


when i sat down, i found myself sitting with a pair of white giggly tween girls... and their mother. i looked around to find parents everywhere. i swear i saw more parents than i have ever seen at any kind of parent gathering at my high school. pashminas, pleated pants and floral silk blouses are the last things i would have expected to see at a rihanna concert. hello, it's singapore, moms and dads! this is the last place where you need to be chaperoning your kids to a concert!

and yes the tween level was off the scale. this is why i used the word "prom", above. if you've never heard seven thousand tween girls singing "umbrella", i can send you my recording. as i scanned the audience, i murmured to marlon, "why do i have a feeling that when the audience starts screaming, it will be extremely high pitched?"

and kids. my god. like five-to-seven year olds. i couldn't explain it, except maybe if all the moms had actually bought the tickets for their kids, thinking rihanna's last name was montana.

"eeew, so many parents," i whispered to marlon. "shush," he cautioned. "to these kids we probably look like parents too."


so the lights dimmed and the lambs tweens began screaming kasi umapir na ang lola n'yo.


winner sana ang hydraulic-assisted entrance from the ceiling. sana nga lang gumagana yung mike niya. sound crew = epic fail.


as soon as she got down from her post, she went to the side of the stage and made very big angry gestures to some invisible cowering p.a.'s. her anger couldn't have been more obvious than if she'd spelled out "what the f*ck?!" with her butt.

anyway, she got a new mike, apologized, and went on with the rest of the show -- which was, from what i hear, the same set she did in manila except without chris brown. the outfit was the same as the manila outfit too, except she kept her pants on in singapore. oh, and she wore flat boots, which i thought was nice.

i liked her makeup too -- the silver eyeliner on the lower lids. and for a black girl, she had surprisingly white kilikili.


as for the music -- it was good. perfect for the people who like their live concerts to sound exactly like the cd, or else they feel ripped off. i like a bit more variation in a live performance, like alicia keys when she came over for singfest. even if she did do this weird mariachi-ish arrangement for one of her slow songs, talagang nag-effort si bakla. you just knew she was going home completely hoarse.

si rihanna parang hindi masyadong nagpagod. pero sige lang. she did change into a skimpier, rocker burlesque kind of outfit for her last few songs. so that's something.


the concert ended after 45 minutes. which was a bit of a letdown for me -- not to mention for my sister, who drove three hours from KL.

so we went out after and had black pepper crab at jumbo, which was fun, as all the kiddies went home with their mommies and daddies.