Lucinda live is officially off bucket list

MERIDIAN, Miss.-She wore a gray flannel shirt over a glittery T-shirt and sang in that voice that won't be hurried. Her Tina Turner hair looked like it hadn't been combed in a month of Sundays. Lucinda Williams was perfect.
I've been looking for Lucinda nearly seven years. Most of my music-loving friends appreciated her long before I did, but when finally I discovered her barbed charms in 2009, it was epic. I couldn't get enough. I put hearing Lucinda live in concert high on my bucket list. We're the same age, 63, and I figured it might be best to get this done sooner rather than later. Concerts take stamina, and not just for the star.
Only problem, Lucinda Williams is big time, so she plays cities like New York, Denver, Washington, D.C. Twice I was a few miles from where she performed-once in Boulder, Colorado, again in New Orleans-but always a week before or a week later. I suspected some cosmic conspiracy to deny me.
When I read she was to be headliner for Meridian's Jimmie Rodgers Music Festival-a swell and user-friendly festival started, as it happens, in 1953, the year we both were born-I bought a ticket. Then I lost it.
That caused the first Lucinda panic, trying to find the e-tickets that I had failed to print immediately upon purchase. Nothing sadder than an old woman rummaging through her purse to find a misplaced item, unless it's an old woman rummaging through her emails.
I eventually found the tickets. I popped a Benadryl the night before so excitement wouldn't keep me awake; it was, after all, Lucinda Eve.
With three tickets and two friends, I headed to Meridian and briefly got confused trying to find my motel, looping around two or three times on a one-way service road that seemed, again, like deliberate cosmic interference to keep me from the concert. I briefly wondered if this would be like so much else in life: a disappointment. But the setting was nice, the day bright and clear, the warm-up acts superior. I had only four and a half hours to wait for Lucinda to appear. I bought a T-shirt with a yellow El Camino and settled on a blanket.
James McMurtry, the son of "Last Picture Show" author Larry McMurtry, played before Lucinda. As much as I like McMurtry, I couldn't concentrate on his act for anticipating Lucinda. I edged closer to the stage and asked two gentlemen in folding chairs if I could put my blanket on the ground in front of them. And from the darkness she appeared, the hip sister I had imagined, rocking in her sultry way, proving you are only as old as you let yourself be. No two-car garages for her.
I'd like to tell you I stood up and danced and sang along on songs with lyrics I know by heart. I did not. As soon as she sang "Lake Charles" I started crying and didn't recover until she thanked the crowd and went wherever stars go when the show is over. It wasn't the Super 8 where I stayed.
I have to come up with something quickly to replace the carrot that Lucinda Live has been for nearly a decade. It's more important to want something badly than to get it, perhaps.
Lucinda's "Sweet Old World" gives advice, listing the small things we should savor and appreciate, better than nerve-wracking major events or even hearing a hero. "The sound of a midnight train, wearing someone's ring " That kind of thing.

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