Last night I got to see Laurie Anderson perform live at the Moore theater in downtown Seattle. I've loved her work since I was a teenager. Her Big Science album single-handedly introduced me to "alternative" music. I heard it at the enthusiastic prompting of a young man named Frank that my boyfriend David had met and befriended at band camp.

We had it on cassette tape and we listened to it during many long summer nights in the car, two times in particular I can remember, once, the three of us, parked beneath a canopy of trees on a side street just south of downtown Logan, between two large houses, one known as the judge's mansion and the other the headquarters for the UMWA. I was in the back seat and I listened as the timbre of her voice became invested with the disbelief and joy I was feeling at finally finding myself friends (and more) with boys, men, and really special ones at that, bright, clever fellows who knew more than I did about things I thought I knew all about, like music, books, and politics.

Another memory is of me and David driving around a tiny little town in Tennessee named Elizabethton, where we had gone to visit his grandmother. Anderson's music seemed to transport us to a different place and to surround us with a sense of ourselves as intimately and uniquely united for a brief moment in a very large and spooky universe, even if we already sensed the approach of great changes in our lives that would soon overtake and shatter our relationship.

Her voice became even more meaningful to me soon afterwards, during my first stay in a mental hospital, when another friend, in an act of great kindness, gave me her double album, United States Live, to listen to on my Walkman. Her music and voice spoke to and strengthened my good and hopeful perspective, the one that wanted me out of that facility and going to college as soon as possible — the perspective that ended up defeating the other, terrifying and yet equally real desire to give in to my fears and stay crazy and adolescent forever.

The performance last night involved her alternately speaking to us and playing wildly powerful and haunting melodies on her electric violin. By the end the going-back-and-forth had become compressed so that she had the violin on her shoulder and the microphone in front of her at the same time, and the stream-of-consciousness she expressed to us united her language and her music into one glorious brilliant communication which had at its core a question mark: What are we? Where are we going? What is this thing called life? Her skeptical, detached perspective on reality and her refusal to take it at face value are what I like most about her, especially since she combines her marathon philosophical thinking with an enthusiastic, childlike delight in the things she finds fascinating: stars ("no one told me I was living in a clock"), owls, New York, Gravity's Rainbow, dreams, the concept of beauty.

As Mathew said "she managed to be profound without sounding corny." Her material is weird, yet likable. This is surely no small feat. Other highlights of the evening, besides the amazing sound of her violin: a parable comparing her rat terrier's scanning of the sky looking for turkey vultures to the New Yorker's post-911 vigilance; her theory of punctuation ("every sentence should end not with a period but with a little clock showing how long it took to be written"), her thoughts on stuttering ("no one ever stutters at the end — by the end, it is too late to panic"), and in general her pointing out the insanity involved in our everyday existence, from the personal, where we pretend that it is normal and mundane to lose control of our body every night and undergo a non-verbal conversation with our sub-conscious which we never truly understand, to the national, how we are fighting a war which we will never know when it has ended, because it never will. The scars that our nation bears as a result of the WTC disaster had never been made more eloquently apparent to me until last night.

There was a moment at the end of the show while I was hyper-focused on her performance that I remembered a dream I had two nights ago involving a person in my office playing a violin. You could argue compellingly that I dreamed of a violin player because I had been reviewing her work earlier that day, and must have no doubt encountered images of her holding her instrument. But thinking about the dream after I had it and before the show, I hadn't associated it with the upcoming concert at all. It was in that strange moment that felt like deja-vu and memory all mixed up at once that I connected the two images, the one from my dream and the one I saw in front of me, her playing her madly glowing instrument surrounded by a stage lit up with candles flickering like stars and a brilliant blue light that looked like heaven, that I felt incontrovertibly that I was seeing precisely what had provoked my dream of two nights earlier.

I still can't find the name of the symbol that occurs at the end of a body of text to signal the completion of the piece. Traditionally, the hedera has been used for this purpose, although it was apparently originally used as an interpunct (characters like dots and triangles placed between words instead of spaces to indicate word boundaries in ancient Latin script). Regarding printer's ornaments in general: