Twenty-three years ago I became a woman, in a way. This advent of femininity did not happen in a decorated ballroom or at a presentation about “protection” presented by the school nurse; it happened at a hockey arena on Hempstead Turnpike in Uniondale, New York, during the first rock concert of my lifetime.

Because during this night—on which Warrant and Mötley Crüe played—I got to see Tommy Lee’s butt for the first time.

In the context of 2012, seeing a celebrity’s bare ass isn’t all that exciting; it happens daily, hourly even, on gossip blogs. And the rear end of Mötley Crüe’s drummer should hold less of a mystique, thanks to his sex tape, the Methods Of Mayhem video mocking said sex tape, and the genitalia chronicles gleefully laid down in the Crüe bio The Dirt, which I read in about two hours flat while splayed out in front of a Maine lake and which put me off egg burritos for the rest of my natural life. But December of 1989 was a more innocent time; I mean, the giant illustration behind Warrant, of a comely waitress dropping a cherry pie right in front of her crotch, didn’t really faze me either.

The run-up to the show was fraught in the way that suburban outings are. We made the beginner’s mistake of using the phone to get tickets, meaning that busy signals foiled us until only seats in the far-off Section 309 were left. My friends and I were all 14, too young for the learner’s permit that would have allowed us to drive ourselves to the show, so we had to get dropped off and picked up by a parent. [...]