Jennifer Moody

So few social occasions call for a good Judas Priest concert T-shirt any more.

Still, I’ll be keeping mine.

I’m keeping all the rest of my concert T-shirts, too: Hall & Oates (my first show, when I was 14), Sting (seen him three times), Rush, Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, Van Halen, Queensryche, my three McCartney shirts, and especially my Scorpions shirt, now that the band is going into retirement. (I spent a good portion of Sunday night listening to “World Wide Live” as loud as I felt I could and not risk waking up the Princesses.)

It was a good concert, that Priest show. The “Painkiller” Tour, 1990. Rob Halford rode a motorcycle onstage. “Johnny B. Goode” rocked.

It wasn’t the best concert I’ve ever seen, nor was it the best night out ever (I was there with my headbanger ex, then a very recent ex, and one of his good friends, and it was awkward, to say the least). But I like being able to say I was there. I like having the T-shirt. It speaks to a different side of me, the side that likes to drive really fast, even in my Mommobile, with “You Got Another Thing Comin’” blaring from my undersized speakers.

That’s the problem with cleaning out closets. I’m not very good at it, which is why I still have my outdated, outstyled leather jacket from 1989 (probably time to part with that) and my college newsroom T-shirt from my senior year (Pocket logo: “Don’t Mess with the Press”).

Still, I had to make some room, or there’s no closing my bureau drawer. Out went the Hard Rock cafe shirts from Maui and Dallas, Texas; my newsroom shirt from Stayton (it just said “East Valley News;” nothing terribly exciting about it), and the oversize T-shirt that says, in screaming neon green, “Shut Up and Jump,” which I got as a bonus for bungee-jumping from a hot-air balloon for a story, circa 1994. I still have the video from that, if proof becomes necessary.

I kept the silkscreened “7 Bedford Place” T-shirt that one of my roommates made when I went to England on exchange. I kept the Monty Python shirt (”Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition!”). I kept the shirt I picked up at a game convention in Los Angeles: “English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.”

The drawers close a little more easily now. Maybe in a few years, I’ll try again.

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