We knew, I guess from Lucy's site that there would be an MC tonight and a comedian. These folks are mostly used to "warm the crowd up". Snort. If we were any more warm with desire to see Lucy, we'd have spontaneously combusted. For most of us, all we ever need is Lucy. But I guess the usual thing at a club is to have an MC and another performer. So there they were.

The MC was a young woman friend of Lucy's. She came out and told us she never wears dresses. Then she said she'd been to the Pleasure Chest, an L.A. sex shop, with Lucy. She said some other things, but I can't remember what they were.

The comedian came out. Her name was Tig something. She used to be I think it was a receptionist at Rennaissance Pictures--someone said that, I'm not sure now who it was--maybe Lucy at the con? And now Tig's a stand-up comic and I think someone saaid she has been on HBO?

As I'm groping (mentally that is) to remember this stuff, it is painfully obvious to me that notes are indeed my friend--and I miss having them to read over. To overcome the elbow sticking out problem, I could have bent my arm in an up position,, rather than a side position and written on the the front of my shirt. Or heck, on the back of the shirt of the person in front of me. They'd never notice in all that excitement of watching Lucy. And then I could get my friend with a picture cell phone to get a picture of her shirt for me to refer to. I'll keep that in mind for next time.

Tig was funny. She had a quiet, wry, deadpan delivery. She was the type of comedian who makes droll commentary on daily life rather then doing a set of disconnected jokes.

I took advantage of this time to walk around and keep the blood flowing in my legs. A lot of us um, more mature fans were concerned about having to stand up for 90 or more minutes. I wandered over and checked out the bathrooms. And the first thing I thought was, "Hmmm. 350 women. And three stalls. 116 and 2/3's women per toilet. Should be fun when the concert ends and we all try to hit the potty at the same time. We might well win the 'Most people stuffed in one toilet stall' award. And/or the Darwin award.

I think that it was during Tig's performance that there was a flurry of excitement and thrilled applause. Someone in the crowd around me said, "Renee just came in." People had been taking pictures of the folks in the VVIP section all along. But when Renee arrived, so many cameras went off that the whole section suddenly lit up like London under the blitz. I wonder how long it took those guys to get their vision back after that barrage.

Finally, the moment we all were waiting for--someone (maybe a disembodied voice over the PA system?) introduced Lucy. At first, the curtain remained closed and we just hheard her singing from backstage. The instant the first note was caressed out, the entire crowd stilled. Many sucked in a little breath, producing teensy, quiet, air intake sounds for a nano-second. And then huge HUGE grins blossomed all over the hall. Followed by a nova of rapturous cheering and applause.

Finally the curtains swung back and Lucy charged out into the welcoming roar, continuing her song. She was grinning hugely too, moving across the whole stage, looking around into every section of the audience. She was wearing jeans with black leather chaps over them and a white tee-shirt and I'm told boots--heads hid her feet from me. She had a small band and three back-up singers, two women and one man.

Knowing now from what she said at the con that she planned these songs to celebrate the shared relationship between herself and her fans, the first song was very appropriately, "Jump Into My Fire".

Now there are few people as lively as Lucy when Lucy is feeling lively. She was way up tonight, practically stratospheric. As she sang each song, she rocked and rolled, shook her shoulders, bucked her hips and shimmied her butt, moving across the entire stage area. She also jack-hammered into head banging, flinging her head around with such fierce abandon that I was just waiting for her hair extensions to go flying off into the wings. Or out into the audience-and wouldn’t THAT be a real souvenir score?

In between singing she talked and joked with us. Very early on, she looked down at the first few rows, pointed to a person and said something like, "She's wondering who the hell I am." She bent over a bit talking to the person. "I'm Xena." She looked up at us and said, "She doesn't recognize me." Lucy put her palm on her scalp with the fingers facing forward, draped over her forehead to imitate bangs, while saying something like, "See-it's me!" And then she straightened up, pushed her bottom lip out and blew her breath up her face. As she blew, she rippled her fingers one after the other, her fingers imitating bangs being blown off a forehead. I found that hilarious. (So THAT'S what those pictures of Lucy looking like she's wearing a squid on her head are all about.)

The first night the band was overly loud as has been noted. But as long as I knew the song, I could still make out most of Lucy's singing, though I did miss some stuff.

At one point she said that the band had played before many other people’s fans but she had told them that they hadn’t seen anything yet, until they had played before us and saw us in full appreciative mode. And we heard later that she was right--they totally agreed with her. As did the staff at the club-they'd said they never seen anything like this. Their benchmark bbefore was Bruce Springsteen's fans. And we left them in the dust.

The grrl just never stopped moving when she sang.
Here’s a picture a friend of mine sent me. Multiple Choice Question: In this picture Lucy is, A: A gyroscope. B: A live model of the planetary system showing the movement of each separate planet and their moons in their individual orbits AT the speed they move through space or C, Lucy is having a Tina Turner moment.


After a while, she introduced her main back-up singer, Sharlotte, whom she'd met during her stint on Celebrity Duets. As Sharlotte sang, Lucy stood to the side and raised her arm up in the air and kind of pointed down at Sharlotte grooving away, moving her hand in time with the music. (Like she did in Duets with I think it was Dionne Warwick.)

After a number of songs and patter, Lucy went off to take a break while Sharlotte sang solo for us. She sang a song about Billy coming home and this guy in military fatigues came out and she gave him a kiss at the end. I couldn't hear too many of the words but it was fun to watch.

Then Lucy came back out. She was wearing her white with silvery shimmers dress from Duets, which covered about a third or so of her body. She ramped right up into "What'd I Say?" And suddenly Renee came hurtling out onstage behind her, wearing a blue shimmery dress, gyrating and shimmying along with Luce. This was a really cool surprise. Again, cheers, screams and huge grins from the audience. Lucy thrust the mike at Renee to let her get in a one-syllable oooh and/or ahhh at the end of some of the sentences.

Renee participated in one number and then, like a little Arctic blue fox in a snowy night, she disappeared,leaving the stage to Lucy again. (Purple prose--my stock in trade.) What a kewl surprise it was to have Renee participate--way sweet.

Lucy sang a few more songs after Renee left. Then she left the stage while we all screamed and applauded and roared. Happily, she came back out for an encore.

At the end of the show, she began to toss shirts and CD’s out into the audience. And I heard the next day from a friend that at least one CD had landed up among the lights. And she added darkly, “So, if the Roxy burns down during the night, we’ll know why.”

On her site, Lucy had warned us that she might be throwing her own self into the audience also-so only people who could handle a 150 pound woman jumping onto them should be in front. She says lots of things on her site. Grin. We were ready though. I figured if she jumped into the audience, then she was ours to do what we wanted with. I thought that since she's so generous with giving us autographs, I'd return the favor. I was going to sign her rump. And heck, we could have easily carried her out to the bus and taken her home with us. There was plenty of room on the bus for a 150 pound woman.

Man, it was a fabulous night. Lucy was incandescent. Her delight in what she was doing was a fire roaring through the club igniting us all. The excitement and the joy were palpable. Things were so hot at the club that a straight chick was hitting on me. No joke! Fat old broad that I am--can you tell things were WAY charged up? The walls practically vibrated right along with us. Talk about being in the presentt. If she and we were anymore present, we’d still be there.

We carried that excitement out into the night with us. We were way jazzed as we left the club, almost as up as Lucy had been. At first there was lots of loud excited talking on the bus as we got settled into our seats. Folks talked about how Daisy had been boogeying in the aisle while her mother was singing. A male friend of mine said he was in the bathroom when Rob Tapert was in there. (LOTS of empty space and unused stalls in the men's room I'm betting.) He said Rob had a huge grin on his face and just couldn’t seem to stop smiling. From his description, I imagined the grin not going just from ear to ear but starting way at the back of his neck, totally circling his head and returning to the starting point. Liz Friedman had also been there. And of course, lots of folks were really jazzed that Renee had not only come to see Lucy but had been part of the show.

However once the lights were out and we pulled away from the curb, the noise level fell quite a bit. It got quieter and quieter as folks began to just chat with their seat mates. Eventually, a number of us actually fell asleep on the way home. While visions of sugar plum warriors wearing white shimmy dresses danced in our heads. Damn, we ARE a lot older than we used to be! But I'm betting that even as old as some of us are, we wouldn't have fallen asleep if Lucy had dove into the crowd and we had hustled her on the bus with us. Unh-unh.

Once things quieted down, as I sat and watched the quiet streets go by the window, it struck me that Lucy is like a comet, searing across the sky, trailing many of us in her wake, as we follow wherever she goes and performs. In whatever.

We all woke up refreshed when we hit the hotel. And many of us immediately reclaimed our joy and excitement and stormed into the hotel. Where we "took the bar".