pregnant! at the music festival

I started bugging out a third of the way through Lady Gaga's weekend 2 Coachella set, somewhere around "Perfect Celebrity" and "Disease," because I was thinking about giving birth. Oh, that's gonna be so weird. Dangerous, even. And then they hand you the baby and you're supposed to keep them alive? [Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan voice] Jesus Christ, man.

It makes sense to get anxious about giving birth at Lady Gaga's set because giving birth to things is a key component of the Lady Gaga lore. The "Born This Way" themes and imagery, the 2011 Grammys red carpet egg emergence. Even the "Marry The Night" video—my single favorite Gaga creation—depicts a mental breakdown that ends with her nude in a bathtub, covered in Cheerios...just like a baby.

But I'm not just ambiently thinking about giving birth. I'm five months pregnant! We recently got a heart ultrasound for the baby, who is a girl, and the doctor said her heart was "photogenic." Photogenic Heart feels a little more Marina of a sentiment than Lady Gaga, or maybe Ava Max, but I'll take it.

The Coachella crowd was kind of lukewarm on the Mayhem stuff, which was disappointing. I understand everyone is on their own journey, but something that bugs me across the board at concerts is people standing like scarecrows for the new-to-them music. Do you have ears? Can you not hear a beat? Even if you can't hear, you can feel the vibrations with a good sound system, which Coachella has thanks to the audio wizardry of Dave Rat. Do you have it in your heart to at least experimentally move your hips to "Killah"? Don't leave Gaga hanging.

This was my first sober Coachella. I loved it so much. Being around a bunch of people on drugs feels like being on drugs, and I awoke every morning with a good appetite and no hangover. My version of uppers was a lavender yerba mate iced tea, consumed at 8pm. And instead of Red Bull vodkas...desserts. Why do people complain about food and drink prices at this festival? You are in the desert, and someone has brought a full food service / heating / refrigeration system out here, and they are serving you hot and cold foods at your convenience. This is the only situation where $12 for an ice cream bar makes sense.

The druggiest crowd was obviously Charli XCX's. Maybe it was the clarity of sobriety, but I watched substance-fueled minidramas from all angles at my spot at the B3 light tower. Girls in spangled dresses cheersed each other with fat psychedelic champignons and then filmed each other dancing to "365," one by one taking their turn. A grown woman sobbed in the arms of a shirtless gay man, overcome by Brat power. So many poppers!! I kept my mask on to be safe.

Crowd etiquette has taken a dive over the years at this festival—the amount of times people pushed past me to get further into a crowd, only to hop on their phones, get bored, and push right back out, good lord—but there was plenty of atomized pleasantness to be found. A marked increase in rave sprouts, the little plastic plant clips that you can bestow on others in the name of PLUR. Two ladies sticking strangers with stickers that say HOT, the kind you'd find on a rotisserie chicken in the grocery store. A lady dressed like a cross between the Easter Bunny and the Playboy Bunny, handing out taffy at the pedestrian exit on Sunday night.

I tried to keep the good energy flowing. I complimented comic-accurate Lady Gaga costumes. We lent an extra shade tarp to a first timer camping neighbor who had brought no sun protection to their site. At one point I spent a good five minutes trying to explain the flavor of an Aperol Spritz to a stranger who'd never tried one and wanted intel before ordering. "I've asked like twenty people today, and you're the only one who gave me a real answer." Now that made me feel like I was on drugs. It's...citrus-y? Bitter but refreshing? It actually tastes like cold medicine I took when I was a kid that has since been discontinued (Orange Triaminic Syrup) but I didn't tell her that.

I love a full send, I love to do the most. When my husband and I had our wedding, we did events for it three days straight. On the fourth day, the Sunday of that weekend, I asked Chris to join me at an A-Trak "block party" at the ginormous Brooklyn Mirage venue. Tickets were cheap and I wanted to wear my white Adidas wedding afterparty tracksuit again. When our Covid-rescheduled Chromatica Ball date coincided with a friend's wedding weekend across the country, we booked a hotel near the Stadium and flew to Oakland early in the morning after bathing in the heat of Gaga's pyrotechnics. I have been blessed with generally good health and lots of energy, and I like to expend it in great bursts. No sleep, bus, club, another club, another club.

Now things are going to slow down a lot with incoming baby. That's cool with me. Fewer full sends, at least for a few years, but the full send will be simply be the having of the baby. No sleep, bottle, crib, another crib...

Brat resonated with me a lot last year. I was further along in my "do I want a kid" journey than Charli, but the process of getting pregnant was taking much longer than I was hoping for, and so I found myself suspended in this awful limbo: hoping for a change in physical status that would subsequently change everything else about my life, pulling out all the stops to make it happen, waiting what felt like forever to just wait a little more.

On "I think about it all the time," something about Charli's deadpan delivery of the lyrics about seeing her friend who's a new mom for the first time—"How sublime / What a joy / Oh my, oh my / Same old clothes she wore before, holding her child."—really got me. Her delivery sounded like I felt. I wanted to be excited, and I hoped someday I'd have a reason to be, but until then...how sublime. What a joy.

This is the longest period of time I haven't consumed alcohol or drugs since I was a teenager. I miss weed a bit (I Enjoy Music [Stoned]) but it turns out I don't actually need alcohol in order to throw my ass in a circle to the pop hits of my youth. I kept cracking myself up as I was dancing, thinking about the baby in there like 👁👄👁 as T-Pain went from "Low" to "Snap Ya Fingaz" to "Buy U A Drank."

The pregnancy app I've been using told me my daughter just developed...ears? She can hear now. I imagine she is mostly hearing gurgling these days, and probably was not able to discern Lady Gaga from Charli XCX from Kneecap, but I hope the sound got to her one way or another. I keep thinking about how so many of my childhood memories are related to music. Dancing around the family room with my dad and sisters to the Emerson, Lake & Palmer version of "Fanfare for the Common Man." Watching my mom jog on the treadmill to Janet Jackson's "Black Cat." Trying to hear as much of Casey Kasem's American Top 40 as possible. What will this baby remember, what will she like to listen to? Chris and I will need to crush the parental b2b set. I'm excited!!

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