Teenage girls can't stop the rock!

Took LegoGuy and Sport to see their first "rock concert" last night -- MuggleFest in Norman was featuring Harry and the Potters. The show opened with Draco and the Malfoys. (No word yet on appearances by Ron and the Weasleys, Hermione and the Grangers, or Dumble and the Doors.) There was an annoying costume contest in which the audience was invited to cheer and applaud for their favorites.

Did I mention there were a lot of teeny-bopper girls in the audience? And when they cheer, it's really more like screaming -- a double octave, high C kind of scream? I thought my eardrums were bleeding.

When Draco and the Malfoys started thrashing across the stage, a large group of these girls rushed up and jostled about for the next hour and a half. No boys their age were brave enough to join the fray. LegoGuy wasn't about to do it -- he was too cool. Sport might have gone up to check out the drum set, but I was afraid he'd get crushed under the mass of gyrating, prepubescent bodies. Then Harry and the Potters got up to belt out an earsplitting blend of punk rock, thrash, and magic. The girls went wild when one of the Harrys jumped into the audience and started dancing. Hormones oozed out of pores and onto the floor.

Watching these girls took me back to my own middle school days. Not long after Elvis died, our school was visited by a local Elvis impersonator. We were all transfixed by the groundswell of public grief over the King's passing, watching memorial shows on TV and old broadcasts of Elvis in his glory days. So once the impersonator hit the stage, we girls knew what to do. We impersonated the Elvis fans of the 1950s with an eerie authenticity. We screamed, we danced, we emitted fake sobs, we reached up to grab at his leg. He threw silk scarves at us. My sister even tossed him her comb. He pulled it through his greasy pompadour, then threw it back to her. Later, she taped that comb up on our bedroom wall. It stayed there for years, a silent reminder of the extremes of teenage emotion.

Rock 'n roll, baby! Rock ... and ... Roll.