My 25th Anniversary...

... of the time I discovered Twisted Sister, was marked by the most amazing day.

Some background: I had grown up on an island on the west coast of Canada, in a small town where anybody even slightly unique was singled out and beaten down by their peers. Fit in or get lost.

Well, I didn't fit in. I never did. To top it off, I was an ugly kid -- ugly, weird, socially inept. I hit some kind of jackpot, it seems.

My family and I were on vacation off the island in July of 1983; I was 14, the time when even perfect kids feel like their feet are too big and their teeth are too long. I had found a very cool metal magazine called Creem at a store and bought it; inside was an article about a band called Twisted Sister.

The picture was taken at an outdoor festival in England where they had played on stage with Motorhead. To this day, it was the most godawful picture of them that has ever been published.

They were bizarre. They were weird. And that name!

It was love at first sight.

I HAD to find out more about this band. I didn't even care what they sounded like. I HAD to see them, hear them, anything. They were my new folk heroes. Their stage dress thumbed the collective nose at everything trendy and cool at the time; New Wave was big and Duran Duran ruled the airwaves. These guys resembled a New Wave band the way a tank resembles a Pinto. I loved that.

Remember, these were the days before the internet. Top-loading VCR's were all the rage and most of us still had Hi-Fi stereos and party lines on the (dial) phone. Al Gore hadn't invented the internet yet. (snicker) Finding information on anything obscure was tricky.

I took myself over to the nearest big city and scoured the head shops for metal stuff, and lo and behold, a Twisted Sister patch with a photo of them from their first album, Under the Blade. I wore it on my back pocket around school and REALLY got picked on -- "What the hell is that on yer ass?" "Can't you look normal for a change?" "You're such a loser! Why don't you wear something cool like ZZ Top?"

I found their new album, You Can't Stop Rock And Roll, shortly thereafter. Once I heard it, I was hooked forever.

I loved Twisted all through every phase of their success. Their anthems, their look, everything about them resonated with us oddball kids who felt very alone. Sometimes their music was all that kept me going.

(I won't get into my childhood on a public blog. Suffice to say the first 30 years of my childhood sucked. Bad.)

I loved them even after they'd broken up in the late '80's. I loved them all through the '90's. I wished dearly they would reunite.

In 1998 we had gotten our first computer and I was able to find a bit of info here and there about the various members of Twisted Sister! Yay! I had the idea to do a webpage for Eddie Ojeda, one of the guitarists for the band. I had seen quite a few people asking about him on message boards, wondering what he was up to, and his current webpage was not updating very often.

So, I emailed him through his page to see how he would feel about me doing a page for him.

He emailed me back (and I almost dropped dead when I saw his name in my Inbox) and said Sure, why not?

Next step: I ran to the computer store to buy a book on HTML. What do I know about webpages? I couldn't even arrange my inbox into folders. (still can't...)

I taught myself HTML, did the page, talked to him on the phone frequently even though I was trying so hard not to make an ass of myself that I really probably did.

After a couple of years I had to let the page go; I had returned back to school, it was getting increasingly hard to get a hold of him, and my server went tits-up. The time that it would take to reload everything onto another server was time I didn't have, so I had to let it go.

Fast forward to July 2005, and Twisted Sister had since reunited and was coming to a city north of me. O.M.G. Of course I made plans to go.

And, I had emailed Eddie again, thanking him for coming to my province so the fans here could see them.

He emailed me back, saying he would get me backstage! I WAS GOING TO MEET TWISTED SISTER!!!!

I did meet them that day, but this blog is getting long, and I can't find the digital photos of that day, so I'll save it for another time. This post is supposed to be about their most recent concert. In short, I said to my husband after the meeting, "I can dig a hole in the ground and live there for the rest of my life. There's nothing else in the world that I want!"

Fast forward again to July 13, 2008, and Twisted Sister was coming to my very own city! Eddie emailed me his cell phone number and told me to call him when we got there and he'd get us backstage.

Boy, was I a bundle of nerves. Again.



After talking with Eddie for awhile he had to zip into the trailer to get something, so I talked to Mark "The Animal" Mendoza for awhile. What a cool guy! Very funny, very friendly, easy to talk to. In this pic he was crouching down so he didn't look like such a monster next to me.



There's Eddie, out of the trailer and posing with us. He is awesome. He's very kind and gracious, which sounds a bit over the top, but there it is. He really is nice. And that hair! That is all his own hair. I asked, and he showed me.



Up here we have a pic of me and Eddie with A.J. Pero, the talented drummer. We talked tattoos for awhile -- another funny, easy-to-talk to person.

I only saw the other guitarist, J.J. French, very briefly, and didn't get a pic with him this time. The singer Dee Snider doesn't like to meet with people before the show so I didn't see him either. However, they did all sign my jacket when Eddie took it around for autographs.

They are all wonderful to talk to and they really put me at ease. Their appreciation for their fans is clear in the way they treat them, and in their amazing performances. Even though they usually perform for tens of thousands of fans, they gave the same high-energy show to the tiny 700 of us at the nightclub that night. Tiny stage, tiny (but packed) crowd, and the show went on full bore.

My husband and I were right against the stage, front and center. I am not exaggerating when I say that Dee's hair hit me in the face several times -- I could have played "Name that Shampoo". The guitarists often did their solos right in front of us. They were within arms reach for the whole show. Wow.

Plus, my enormous strong husband kept all the moshers off me and I got to enjoy the show unmolested. Well, except for the drunk who told me I reminded him of the mother from the Brady Bunch. But I've heard worse.



This is a shot of Eddie and Jay Jay, and











This is a shot of Dee. I have more, but Blogger only let me upload these five. And it took half the night.

So to Twisted Sister: You have no idea what you do for people through your music. So many people have been influenced by you, so many people have been made to feel as though they matter, because of you. The mania that you inspire at your shows is due to the gratitude that people feel toward you. And the kindness that you showed to me will always be remembered.

Thank you.

(I'd also like to add a plug to Etsy shop Grenade for making the cool skully clutch I'm, er, clutching.)