Tonight at Chesapeake Energy Arena, top-selling country artist Shania Twain will perform for thousands of devoted fans. These fans have waited over a decade to see her, and she claims this is her last time on the road. She turns 50 in a few weeks, hasn’t made a new album since 2002, and yet, she is still the one. (First of many Shania lyric references.)
I will not be there, and my 9-year-old self is pretty devastated. I’m not entirely sure how her 1997 album, Come on Over, started whirring around in my Discman with skip protection, but once it was there it changed my life. My parents loved country music, but I think they might have been the first to pretentiously utter “I like country music, but, like, the old stuff.” And Shania is definitely not the old stuff. She pretty much created, if not perfected, pop country. Yes, that genre of music that’s somehow obnoxious and infectious all at the same time.
According to recent reviews of her Rock This Country tour, she’s sure to bring that satisfying mix of twang and rhythm to the over 19,000 seats at the arena tonight.
My mom went back to work when I went into the third grade. That apparently was also when I was old enough to watch my little brother Collin while she was at work. In the summer, we would wake up at about 10:30 a.m. and immediately call her. When would she be home? What were we supposed to eat? Can we walk to Blockbuster with the neighbor? She would quickly answer all of the questions and then tersely ask us not to call again.
“The more time I spend on the phone, the longer it takes me to get home!” she would remind, or possibly threaten, the two of us.
I would pour my brother and myself a bowl of Cookie Crisp, and he would ask for two more, both of us convinced she wouldn’t notice we ate an entire box of cereal by ourselves in one sitting. His childhood obesity, unfortunately, would later give us away.
We watched a lot of MTV and made a lot of messes in the name of performance art. For every 30 minutes he played “school” with me, I agreed to watch a VHS detailing the uses of various construction vehicles. A second call would be made to our mom. We were hungry again. How do we fix this? Will you bring us Taco Bueno? When will you be home?
After a lunch of every frozen, bite-sized food we could safely heat in our oven, we were ready to kill each other. I should point out we had an older brother, Clay, there the whole time. But he was 14 and only bothered after we had called our mom a third time.
I probably wanted to go to the neighbor’s house and didn’t want my little brother to join me. Or he had broken his arm. Whatever it was, she didn’t have time for it. And what the hell was Clay doing?
Our mother never worked very late — maybe 3 or 4 at the latest — but those days seemed to drag on and on. Phone call after phone call I asked when she would return, waiting for her to say the magic words of “just one more hour.” At this time, I would insert Shania’s CD, which guaranteed me one hour of music on the back of the case, into our desktop computer (superior speakers). If we could all just keep it together from “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” to “You Got a Way” then our mom would be home and we could finally show her all the evidence that the other sibling was trying to destroy us.
That first summer of watching my brother was my first taste of responsibility. I went into fourth grade with a bit more pride. And Shania was a huge part of that. In the music class talent show, I sang a duet of “From This Moment” with my friend Shayna McCaskill. The music teacher asked the art teacher to come in and watch it — not to observe our overwhelming talent, but to have someone to laugh with.
“Why did you choose that song?” the art teacher asked in a snotty tone that had made me cry several times before. “Don’t you know a man is supposed to sing it with a woman?”
“It’s a good song!” I barked back at her, unsuccessfully holding back tears in front of the whole class.
“We just love Shania and we wanted to sing a duet,” Shayna said. She had my back, and she also had very little respect for authority.
I didn’t care that I was singing the man’s part of the song. Because when it came to Shania, it didn’t matter what I was doing — she made me feel like a woman.
For those of seeing the Queen of Pop Country tonight, blow her a kiss for me, preferably while she rides the mechanical bull over the crowd.
