all that glitters is gold

you might have been driving for ten hours and you’re tired and sweaty, but it doesn’t matter.
you might have been waiting outside in the line, and now you’re sitting in the theatre and still waiting, and still it doesn’t matter.
and those 40 minutes could have even been longer but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because when the lights go off and smoke starts filling the stage, you know it’s going to be exactly as you’ve always imagined.

grumpy old man sang and shone for more than two hours in a raw, even though time was not a factor inside that room.
and it's time time time…

and again i’m not a writer, so i’m sure i’m not easily going to find words to describe his stroboscopic hat rotating and shining all over the place, and his sweet and kind of clumsy way of clapping hands, always trying to trick the audience out of rhythm, and his voice on the megaphone...
nor the fact that throughout the concert i had the feeling his voice was somehow large, bigger than anything i've ever heard. huge. if a voice can possibly be large, or big, or huge.
everything could fit in that sound…

at some point he starts telling some stories about the lost luggage storage in milan, and his trips around europe, where he recommends always to take an attorney along - wasn’t it in the US that you could get sued for anything? anyway...
so he’s sitting at the piano telling stories and you’re trying to catch his irony about drinking fishes and smoking monkeys and you don’t realise it, you couldn’t possibly realise it until you hear the words “wasted and wounded” and you would have never ever thought he would sit there at the piano and be singing tom traubert’s blues, for real, with the bass playing along, just a few meters away…

and it's nothing but shivers running down the spine and skin curling, this one is really the part i’ve always imagined. and it’s true. and i’m also dying to go downstairs and approach the stage and shoot a great photo, but anyway i don’t have a huge lens able to catch those few light rays reflecting from his face, and i’m not that good anyway, so i’d better just sit here and enjoy this trembling feeling in my arms.

and you might be a little sad when he’s singing make it rain and shiny glitter is actually raining on him, because you know it’s going to be over in a few minutes, but still you’re not sad, because that shivering sensation feels like it's gone now, but it’s not. it’s all over, but it’s not. some of the glitter's still there.
even when you go out and look at the weird combination of humans coming out of the theatre, even when you stare at the full moon shining, even when you think there’s a whole switzerland to cross tomorrow, five hours (or hopefully less!) where all the world is green...
even then, the glitter’s not gone.


tom waits - glitter and doom tour
teatro degli arcimboldi, milano, 19th July 2008