I normally take my packet of tissues to concerts in case they run out of bogroll in the toilets. Who knew I’d need my stash of Kleenex at Lady Gaga on Friday night to dry my eyes instead?

This poor, poor woman. I can scarcely hold back the tears right now at the thought of all she’s been through. All of which she was kind enough to share with us, her devoted audience, in great, intricate, painstaking detail – first in words and then through three moving ballads. I wished those ballads would never, ever end, but eventually, they did. The Husband said it was because our Lady was getting chilly sitting at her piano but he just doesn’t understand her like I do. I mean, this poor girl was sent to a private school in New York’s Upper East Side (I hear that’s a really kak area) and she told us that while she was there, the “pretty, skinny girls with straight hair” were mean to her. (Aren’t straight-haired girls just THE WORST?) They bullied her, she said. Wikipedia has the audacity to quote acquaintances from her youth who have tried to discredit her horrific high school experience, claiming she was actually popular and totally fitted in, (although they say that her dress sense smacked a little more of Jersey Shore than of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. So OBVIOUSLY not true!) Clearly, they’re just jealous. During her performance on Friday night, she told us that she’d always vowed to herself that she’d “show those witches”. Not that it was “about revenge” or anything, she hastened to add. ‘Course not. Who would’ve thought it was? At the ripe old age of 26, Lady Gaga has clearly worked through her issues, put her high school hang-ups firmly behind her and moved WAY beyond petty vengefulness.

I felt so sorry for The Husband. He had a really urgent call of nature right when Gaga started opening up to us and just quit singing altogether for a while to really engage with us. Shame, the FNB Stadium is so huge that it took him AGES to get back to the show (he later confessed that he stopped off for a beer and a boerewors roll – he was obviously very hungry after all Gaga’s emotional talk). I was so sad for him that he’d missed connecting with Gaga but he said he that the sound in the stadium was so good, he’d actually heard every word, despite a desperate attempt to dunk his head in the toilet to drown out the sound of her voice. Men!

So, thank goodness, he did hear her revealing how she’d left her family home in Manhattan’s Upper West Side (also a really kak area, I believe) and set sail for an NYU dorm room many, many moons away on 11th street in Manhattan: “I left my family at the age of seventeen!” she confided. She wanted to make it on her own, she told us. Somehow, Wikipedia says, her Dad managed to track her down and paid her rent for a year when she dropped out of her musical theatre programme at 19 (apparently on condition that she’d go back if she didn’t become a star). What a chop! She told him she wanted to go it alone! Parents just never listen when their teens clearly know best…

I’m just so glad that, finally a star has come to South Africa who is able to to stop her show and preach to 100,000 of us misunderstood, misfits. I mean, here we were, thinking we were going to a pop concert and instead Lady Gaga literally stopped her singing and gave us a therapy session based on her own, traumatic humbling experience in New York’s slums. So, so grateful. My life will never be the same again. I’m going to end off with my favourite quote of the evening:

Don’t give a f*ck about what people think or say about you. It doesn’t matter if your parents don’t have a seat for you at the dinner table, because they can’t accept you for who you are. You will always have a seat at my table. We are family!

Sniff… I just felt so alone before I knew I was related to Gaga. I can’t believe that Die Antwoord refused to become part of the Lady Gaga family and turned down her offer of opening the concert for her. And then they made this mean video clip of her birthing a prawn – seriously, people? – and being mauled by a lion. Shame, some people have some serious issues. Here’s the clip. Not for sensitive Little Monster fans.