Alicia Keys, John Legend / Liacouras Center at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA / April 10, 2005

Alicia Keys has the sexiest back in the world. I know this because I spent the better part of an hour and a half staring at it last week. Whenever Ms. Keys sat down at her big white grand piano, I had a perfect view of her toned-yet-not-too-toned-lest-we-suspect-the-lesbo-rumors-are-true back muscles peeking through the glittering white folds of her artfully sliced catsuit or, after a costume change, her Harlem-renaissance-diva evening dress. Watching her heave up and down on the piano bench, I pinched my own back flab and vowed, for the thousandth time, to get that damn gym membership.

The crowd at the Liacouras Center was the most diverse concert audience I’ve ever seen, not just in terms of race/ethnicity but also age, gender and class. Families, parents with their kids and their kids’ friends, middle-aged couples on dates, groups of working women celebrating Girls’ Night Out, thugs cruising for working women celebrating Girls’ Night Out, frat guys, sorority sisters, neo-soul bohemians, large ladies with large gold crosses around their necks getting into a car with the vanity plate GODSGRL. Not too many white hipster indie rockers, but hey, I was representing.

John Legend was mad boring, yo.

I highly recommend this whole reviewing-arena-shows racket, by the way. For the first time in my life, I got to sit in a pimped-out “press suite,” complete with its own bathroom, bar and cozy sofas, not to mention the complimentary Italian buffet from Maggiano’s! The Liacouras Center P.R. guy kept checking on me to see if everything was all right, too. Wow.

If you want to know about all that unimportant stuff like the music or whatever, you can read my “real” review here.