By Joe DeShano
The last time I saw Madonna, I was in eighth grade and she was gyrating on a bed. Well, when her Sticky & Sweet Tour hit New York's Madison Square Garden on Saturday night, the show was a little tamer — and by little, I mean a lot, but that doesn't mean there weren't a few surprises. Pharrell came out early in the show for "Beat Goes On" — of course, it's supposed to be Kanye West accompanying her for that song, but OK, I'll go with it.
Big stars like Madonna bring out the celebs not only onstage, but in the audience too: And there were Chris Rock and Kelly Ripa, front and center. Kelly seemed to enjoy the show a bit more than Chris, who looked like he was serving some kind of sentence just being there.
Toward the end of the show, Madonna made a reference to what the sound of Sarah Palin thinking might be like, and answered with loads of feedback and distortion from her guitar. (She reportedly threw condoms into the audience after saying "I'd like to express myself to Sarah Palin right now," but I didn't see that from my seats.) The "Get Stupid" video montage came on, and of course had many dramatic images of war and peace and shots of Barack Obama — notably absent were the much-publicized video references to John McCain being Hitler, but the last song, "Give It 2 Me," found Madonna and Pharrell onstage wearing Palin glasses and dancing up a storm.
But the show's strangest moment came toward the very end, when Madonna handed the mic to the very enthusiastic Kelly Ripa, who sang/ screamed into it from the front of the stage! "Give it 2 me! Yeah!"
To Kelly's credit, she didn't stop moving for the entire show (I kept checking on her through binoculars from my bird's-eye view up in the nosebleed seats). She's definitely a Madonna fan, although whether she shares the Queen of Pop's political views is anyone's guess.
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