One day way back in the 70s, when I was maybe 12 years old, my dad walked past me as I sat cross-legged at the coffee table in our den, working furiously with assorted colored pens, glue, and vials of glitter.

“What are you doing?”

“Making a card for Elton.”

My dad, quite wisely, walked away, surely rolling his eyes but saying nothing. In my dad’s world, people loved music, not musicians. However, living with two daughters who thought redecorating their rooms meant shifting around the David Cassidy/Donny Osmond/Leif Garrett posters had taught him that some girls had a different view of the world.

I think I began to leave The Partridge Family behind the day I first heard Elton John’s “Your Song” on the radio in the early 70s. My interest in him grew with “Levon” from “Madman Across the Water” and “Rocket Man” from “Honky Chateau.” By the time I bought “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” (my first double album ever!), I loved Elton John more than I had ever loved David Cassidy---and that was really saying something.

In the 8th grade, one of my teachers asked all of her students to bring in a book, poem, or piece of music that was important to them. I brought a cassette tape of “The Bitch is Back,” from Elton’s “Caribou” album. After playing it for the class, my teacher said something about how she didn’t really understand it but thanked me for sharing. I was confused and embarrassed. What’s not to understand?

I'm a bitch, I'm a bitch
Oh the bitch is back
Stone cold sober as a matter of fact
I can bitch, I can bitch
‘Cause I'm better than you
It's the way that I move
The things that I do

It’s a song about a diva with a fabulously bad attitude. I was a chubby, socially-awkward 12-year-old girl. I couldn’t imagine anything better in the whole world than to be the bitch in that song.

When “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy” came out in 1975, I rushed to the record store to buy my copy. It cemented my opinion that Elton John was a genius and one of the best singer/songwriters ever. That album remains one of my favorites of all time.

Elton’s life went a little out of control in the late 70s. He stopped recording for a while, I graduated from high school, and left home for the wild blue yonder of San Diego. I discovered new wave and then punk rock music, with a lot of Grateful Dead sprinkled in. But Elton John never disappeared from my life. There he was singing in tribute to the murdered John Lennon in 1982. There were my friends and I, singing along to “I’m Still Standing” as we closed down our favorite gay bar in Hillcrest night after night. Later, when my friends were getting sick and dying, there was Elton, despairing that enough wasn’t being done for people with AIDS and starting the Elton John AIDS Foundation. There he was at the MTV music awards, singing with Guns ‘N Roses in 1992. And I’ll never forget how he helped me mourn the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when he sang at her funeral in 1997. Along the way, I replaced my albums with CDs and continued to play Captain Fantastic if not frequently, often enough. I never did see him in concert, though.

So maybe you can imagine how freaking amazing it felt a few weeks ago when Husband called me at work to ask, “Hey, would you like to see Elton John in Skien on June 20?” Elton John? In Skien? That's less than an hour's drive from where we live. I’m there!

And I was. Last night. Skagerak Stadium, me and Elton John. Finally. After 35 years of me loving and admiring him. He (and the whole show) was everything I imagined he would be and more. What a pro! What a nice, nice man! What a great, great musician. And when he played “The Bitch is Back,” I danced my butt off. And smiled, smiled, smiled.