Things we lost in the pit
Graphic by Julia Norkus
By Amalia Sandine
If there's one thing I’m going to do, it’s trip and fall in the pit. I don’t know what it is about live music, but the minute I start dancing, or even just entering the venue, I’ll fall over or find some other creative way to get injured. There’s no better way of doing it than in a mosh pit.
It’s Oct. 2023, 6:50 p.m. on a particularly cold Saturday night in Brookline and I’m nearly 100% sure we’ve gotten to the “house show” too early. I say house show, even though we're in a church basement, and because we're in a basement, I've already fallen down the first stair landing. To be clear, I tripped over a few steps but still managed to land on my feet.
It’s late August 2023 at the end of a heatwave. I’m at the Alvvays/Alex G outdoor show, at the outdoor concert series Celebrate Brooklyn in Prospect Park. My friends and I were running around the empty pit because my friend lost her fake ID, and I’m freaking out because someone started a rumor, on Twitter of course, that everyone there should be checked for lice.
It’s May 2023, and while it’s nice outside the venue is sweltering. I’m leaving the Front Bottoms’ 10 Years of Talon of the Hawk show pit in New Haven, and in the bathroom post-show, I notice that my ear is bleeding. My best friend and I joke that Midwest emo will make your ears bleed, even if you love it as much as we do. On the two-hour car ride home I noticed the jewelry for my cartilage cartilage piercing had fallen out. It feels cheesy to say, but I did leave a piece of myself at that show.
It’s Feb. 2023, and the rain has quickly turned into hail and I am so so cold. I’m in Allston waiting for the bathroom after miraculously not falling at a house show. I won't shut up about how hungry I am, and in the most beautiful moment of my life, one of the people who lives there gives me a piece from a freshly baked loaf of bread. I practically skip back down the stairs into the basement.
It’s 2023, still August. This time I’m in Queens, trying to avoid someone who ghosted me at a backyard show. I’m moving so fast that I nearly roll my ankle on the steps to the building.
It’s July, still 2023 I’m leaving a basement set for a DJ in Park Slope, and I notice scratches covering my arm when we get upstairs. “Who the hell is scratching people at the club?” yells my friend as she waits for her Uber. We never found out who or what felt the need to scratch people in this hipster revival set that was probably just the same LCD Soundsystem song over and over again.
It’s 2019, month unknown, spring. I’m 17 and it’s my second time ever attending a DIY show, in a “rotating modern art space” in Brooklyn. I’m slightly pissed because I wanted to crowdsurf but was too scared to ask the tall people there to help me up. The last time I went, I fell down moshing immediately, and while people helped me up, I was trying to prove that I didn’t need t