The Mer Girl and Me

An inspring and healing evening with the art and life of Madonna

Photo by Kevin Mazur/Wireimage

“Art keeps me alive. “ — Madonna Ciccone

This past Thursday I had recovered enough from Norovirus and my MS difficulties to see Madonna at Chicago’s United Center. Because my illness hit the week before and my friend Katie and I unexpectedly had our nosebleed seats upgraded to a section near the stage, I think the universe, angels, saints or karma worked in my favor. To be honest even if I still felt like I did the week before, it would not have stopped me. Madonna’s Celebration Tour conceives and narrates her forty years of life as a singer-songwriter, artist and woman and provides great dance music on top of her signature ballads.

Katie and me right after our nosebleed seats were upgraded to ones near the stage. While not a huge Madonna fan like me, Katie is a connoisseur or rock music and joined me. Katie has always had respect for Madonna as a self-made woman and woman artist..

At age 14, I became a fan of Madonna after hearing “Live to Tell.” She wrote the ballad with her frequent collaborator Patrick Leonard in the mid 1980s, shifting her songwriting from pop to plaintive and resonant poetry. “Live to Tell” reveals Madonna’s vulnerability that the death of her mother when she was only five-years old ingrained — a vulnerability a lot of people don’t know about or believe she has.

Even she has said her vulnerability is all over her work. The early deaths of her dance teacher and mentor Christopher Flynn and friends to AIDS and her lover Jean-Michel Basquiat impacted her humanity and art. This Celebration Tour performance of “Live to Tell” displays scrims with the photos of not only people she knew who died of AIDS but those of artists like the late actor Anthony Perkins and other men, women and non-binary people who fell to the virus. This showcases not only her vulnerability, empathy and giving but her resilience.