It was over 35 years ago that I took my 12 year old daughter to a concert and she was thrilled. I had secretly bought tickets to a rock concert that was so dreadfully wicked and controversial: Yes, I bought tickets to see Alice Cooper and my 12 year old daughter was beyond excited. She could not believe that HER mother had done something so outrageous, so exciting, so thrilling and so amazing.
I was deemed the best mother in the world. In fact, I had even bought her a new dress for the occasion. Her friends were going to be green with envy and it was going to be the best night of her life.
From my point of view, I was dreading it. Two hours drive to the entertainment centre, an hour wandering around buying T-shirts and seeing my daughter wide-eyed and bushy tailed and soooo in love with Alice Cooper! Oh, give me strength to endure the evening.
My daughter was in love. Head over heels in love with the image of Alice Cooper.
So, who is Alice Cooper? Hell, he was only a few years older than me, her mother.
Alice Cooper is the stage name of Vincent Damon Furnier, an American singer, songwriter, and actor who gained fame for his theatrical and shock rock performances. He was born on February 4, 1948, in Detroit, Michigan. He is known for his distinctive voice, dark and macabre stage presence, and a series of hit rock songs.
Alice Cooper's live shows were renowned for their shock value, featuring guillotines, electric chairs, and other elaborate stage props. The character Alice Cooper, with his androgynous makeup and outrageous costumes, became an emblem of rebellious rock performance during the 1970s.
Hell, he even got a guest spot in Wayne's World.
We were beside a man who was there with his daughter. - probably about the same age as my girl.
He looked like a cross between a bushie and a biker. Long hair, tied back in a ponytail and he was wearing quite a few pieces of jewellery that I had not seen before. He smiled at me and offered me a lolly ( Australian speak for candy ) which I graciously accepted.
As I was about to pop it into my mouth, my daughter grabbed my arm. She whispered in my ear " Mum, it could be drugs! You know what happens at concerts like this! "
I took the lolly out of my mouth and bowed to her superior knowledge on such matters. After all, she was 12 years old and I was just a Mum. What did I know?!
By the way, it was just a lolly.
I sat there waiting for the show to start and wondered what had brought me here to this Alice Cooper concert. After all, I had taken her to a live show of "The Rocky Horror " show earlier that year and even poor Redhead attended when my then husband was unavoidably playing squash. Though quite who he was squashing I have no idea.
Maybe we created the cause and the symptom back then?
The show commenced and all I saw was an older man, much like my husband, dressed up in makeup and having fun. It was not sexual. It was not wicked. It was a pantomime that clearly delighted the young girls and kept their parents buying tickets.
As I said, that was over 35 years ago. So, it comes as no surprise to me that Alice Cooper has come out and said
" I find it wrong when you’ve got a six-year-old kid who has no idea. He just wants to play, and you’re confusing him telling him, ‘Yeah, you’re a boy, but you could be a girl if you want to be.’”
“I think that’s so confusing to a kid. It’s even confusing to a teenager,” Cooper continued. “You’re still trying to find your identity, and yet here’s this thing going on, saying, ‘Yeah, but you can be anything you want. You can be a cat if you want to be.’ I mean, if you identify as a tree. … And I’m going, ‘Come on! What are we in, a Kurt Vonnegut novel?’ It’s so absurd, that it’s gone now to the point of absurdity.”
He went on to say
“Who’s making the rules? Is there a building somewhere in New York where people sit down every day and say, ‘Okay, we can’t say ‘mother’ now. We have to say ‘birthing person.’ Get that out on the wire right now’?” …
Cooper called the woke movement “laughable” at this point, noting that few people agree with the extreme ideas that woke people support.
We have come to a pretty state of affairs when a guy famous for wearing eye makeup who calls himself Alice is the voice of sanity on gender issues:
Alice Cooper, the eye-liner wearing “Godfather of Shock Rock,” was dumped by a cosmetics company after the singer questioned the rush to perform trans surgeries on kids and said that transitioning genders was a “fad.”
I think it is important to remember that I walked out of that concert, having enjoyed a piece of entertainment and never for one moment felt that my daughter was being threatened, indoctrinated, or groomed. It was a piece of theatre. The man who sat next to me, the one with the ponytail and a bag of lollies who looked like a biker said to me " Thank God that's over. But we love them and we do our best to keep them happy. "
I smiled and shook his hand.
We love our children and I have to say, as a fierce mother, I never felt threatened at the Alice Cooper concert. In fact, it was a show that shocked the kids but not the parents.
Alice was and is a class act in my opinion.
He is a Christian and simply played a role that delighted, horrified and excited young girls all around the world with theatre. Not sex. Not drugs. But, yes, a bit of rock and roll.
I wonder if he, like me, did not realise what it meant all those years ago.
When makeup and stagecraft were merely entertainment. Today it seems it is poison.
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