Love Note | Season 3 - Week 5
“My full Bad Bunny DtMF concert experience…”
Get in here, Girl,
I know you’ve been patiently waiting for the tea on this, but the truth is I’ve struggled to find words sufficient enough to describe how significant this experience was for me. I can barely talk (nor write) about it without tearing up because, as it turns out (per usual in my mundanely serendipitous life) this was about so much more than “just“ a world tour.
But we’ll start there…
Milan, Italy - July 17th - 100+ degrees (F)
We arrived at the venue (read: open field) at high noon. Masses gathered caged in by chest high fences waiting for the gates to open. Those of us who got there first hoping to be as close to the stage as possible were led to a metal platform to stand on. Correction: to roast on in this climate-crisis level heat.
Eight hours of waiting (!!), elbowing, rationing our water whilst attempting to hide beneath our newly acquired concert T-s, we began to question our life choices. What exactly brought us here, to this moment in the middle of a horse racing field in Italy during a heat wave?! But before we could answer in regret, a mist of water began to rain from the skies as an industrial size hose sprayed the desperate crowd.
Epic relief.
Finally, dusk approached and the blazing sun hid behind the colossal screen just as Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio appeared. His gorgeous face displayed the size of a small asteroid now stared back at us on screen.
He appropriately kicked off the concert with La MuDANZA to the response of an overheated, exhausted, yet roaring crowd. Imagine 80,000 mostly Italians primally screaming: “¡YO SOY DE P FKN R!!!” even though only a couple handfuls of us in attendance were actually from the island.
Our pre-concert torture instantly forgiven and forgotten.
With tears running down my cheeks and my stomach in full knots, I clenched onto my large Puerto Rican flag like my life depended on it because, (and not to be overly dramatic here), in a way, it actually did.
Watching something so intimate, so niche, so unmistakably mine like my Puerto Rican culture, heritage, music, traditions, and lure all on display on a massive global stage to be embraced by tens of thousands of people in real time, was the full, out-of-body experience you can imagine it would be for me.
But despite the euphoria I felt on this day, in this field in Italy, it wasn’t until I was on the way back to Hamburg from the trip that I was able to conceptualize what this life-altering Bad Bunny phenomenon really is.
I was on the Deutsche Bahn, wearing the concert T-shirt that I fought for my life to attain (and that quickly became my summer uniform and entire personality), when I was approached by a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed man.
Excitedly, and surprisingly in broken Spanish, he tells me he was just singing “Debby T-Rawr mas Fow Toes” with his daughter when she pointed at my shirt.
I hadn’t noticed that standing next to him, several feet below, was a little blond-haired, blue-eyed girl smiling up at me in that “I’m shy but you can praise me” kind of smile that children like to give when they’re proud of themselves.
(As you should be, Queen 💅🏽)
We began to chat, enthusiastically about the concert, the shirt, and the way his four-year-old is learning Spanish solely because of Bad Bunny’s music— a completely unassuming bunch geeking out by the train cantina.
“I just love what his music is doing for people around the world” the man said to which I agreed and added:
“I love what his music has done for me [a Boricua living thousands of miles away from the same small island that this music comes from.]”
My vulnerability surprised me.
For years, I had experienced the distance from home as something I had to learn to bear with. Something that I had to compartmentalize as two separate places, two split lives, two different versions of myself, even. I spent the last decade in a country literally correcting folks who repeatedly confuse Puerto Rico with “Costa Rica.” Now, thanks to an artist from said unrecognizable island, like me, I am helping a little girl with her Spanish on a train in Germany because she recognized his album on my shirt.
The thing that had felt so deeply personal to me— this album, this concert, this tour— was actually also something that had somehow traveled as far beyond me as I had traveled far beyond it.
It not only healed the parts of me that tried to assimilate and hide in my life abroad giving me the permission and the confidence to live out loud with dignity regardless of where I may be, but it also gave the world something it profoundly needs right now:
The courage to connect deeply with something you don’t even have a shared language or culture to understand.
And that’s the phenomenon. That is the magic. That is the kind of impact I aspire to have in this world (in my little world) where my work, my art, my writing, my mothering, and my presence are so unapologetically authentically Methat it gives You the freedom, permission, and courage to do the same. I won’t even make you endure heat exhaustion to do so. 😉
Until next (tea) time, know that here and everywhere, you belong.
PS — Don’t miss my next Love Note, where I get equal parts vulnerable, introspective, and chismosa with you every Sunday! Get the tea here