It’s 7:15 on a Sunday night, and I’m speeding through a back alley of Lambert’s Point like I’m Steve McQueen in Bullitt and I’m hot on the bad guys’ tail.

Stevie Wonder starts at 7:30, and traffic on Hampton Blvd. is barely moving. Desparate times, as they say, call for desperate measures.

I will my girlfriend’s VW Cabrio to grind gears like it’s a 1968 Ford Mustang 390 CID Fastback. I splash through puddles. I get air off bumps in the asphalt. I tear into the parking garage, making the vertigo-inspiring turns like I’m on tracks. When I finally make it to will-call there’s a very confused old man at the front of the line. This guy is so confused by his online ticket-buying process that, I swear, the young girl behind the glass looks like she’s about to start from the very beginning: “The Internet is a series of tubes.”

And then I get inside. Stevie Wonder is doing an African-style beatbox behind the curtains. He is led out between a back-up dancer and one of his daughters while the packed Ted stands and madly cheers. He’s wearing a sharp black jacket and a purple shirt underneath in classic modern Stevie fashion. Stevie Wonder sways his head and smiles as he’s sat down behind his piano set. And all of that–all of that shit that we call everyday life–is gone.

***

Then something horrible happens: Everyone sits down. Oh please no, I think. Don’t do this. Not for Stevie Wonder.

The reason I was late was because Hannah and I had been busy Youtubing old Stevie performances and lost track of time dancing in the living room. The sunset had been grapefruit red. It was a moment-I-want-to-remember-as-I-lay-dying, and I haven’t had enough of those in my life. And now, there the man is, not the distance between first and third away. And everyone around me is sitting on their not-getting-any-younger butts as Stevie goes into his first song, “Bird of Beauty.”

A odd thought strikes me: Are we sitting because he’s blind? Do we stand at concerts more to honor the performer than because we’re moved by the music? If he was deaf, would we not be cheering?

But there’s no time to indulge meta-concert going conversation because Stevie is just beginning to sweat up there. You show ‘em, Stevie. You’re gonna make this tired or jaded or skeptical or, let’s just say it, kind of old crowd stand and dance. I know you will.

To a lot of people here they first knew Stevie Wonder as Little Stevie Wonder. In 1961, at the age of 11, Stevie Wonder was discovered playing on a street corner in Detroit. Berry Gordy signed him to Motown as a harmonica/piano/bongos/drum playing wunderkin with a voice that could make you believe in endless dance party tomorrows. If you look up the old clips you can see a barely-teen Stevie just murdering the harmonica on a song called “Fingertips.”

As they say, a star was born.

In the forty-something years since, Stevie Wonder has won 22 Grammies and has had 30 top-ten hits, almost all of which you probably know, including “Isn’t She Lovely,” “My Cherie Amore,” “For Once in My Life,” “Part Time Lover,” and on and on. He also helped make a star of Eddie Murphy. About a zillion couples have chosen his music as their wedding song. And he’s made possibly every human on earth smile. He has made everyone cry at countless funerals and wakes for greats such as Luther Vandross and Michael Jackson. His music has been played at endless funerals and wakes for people Stevie never knew, including my dad’s.

It is impossible to separate Stevie Wonder not just from the history of American music, but also our lives. Who would you be if there never was a Stevie Wonder? Somebody at least a little different, right?

Stevie stands and howls at the crowd at The Ted.

“Yessir!” he screams. “Are you with me?”

This gets some of the crowd to their feet, but quickly they fade. I feel 3/4 nuts to be talking to a living legend in my head, actually giving him a telepathic pep talk, but it’s what I do. You’ll get ‘em.

“Higher Ground” almost does it, but not quite. Like a car in a winter morning that just won’t turn over, and you’re sure it’s about to but doesn’t… that’s what it’s like. Then Stevie goes into a smooth and groovy rendition of “Fever,” the musical equivalent of giving the engine a minute to drain.

When you see Stevie Wonder do that head thing, even at the age of 59, you see that 12-year-old playing “Fingertips” in black and white. He still flails his arms some and dances like a little kid with his eyes closed. And isn’t that, conceptually, part of what makes him so great? He makes me think that, just as he’s still Little Stevie Wonder, just a grown up, I’m still Little Jesse Scaccia. They say all your cells regenerate every seven years (or something), but I don’t believe it. At least not our hearts. Some part of our hearts never change.

As I look around the crowd–still sitting, halfway through the show–I wonder, are they afraid of refinding the heart they had when they were kids? Because to find that the little boy or little girl heart is still beating somewhere under student loans and mortgages and break-ups and divorces and sick kids and memories of loved ones lost–all that which has a way of absconding our joie de vivre–well, you’d have to make some pretty wholesale changes in life, no? You’d want your whole life to feel the way Stevie Wonder does when he’s dancing.

It’s safer to sit.

“Go ahead, Stevie,” the woman behind me says. “Go on!”

Stevie sits under the blue and purple lights and grooves for a while. This gives some time to notice the nine people in his back-up band, including three percussion sets, two synths (plus his own), and the three back-up singers dancing so sexy in their black and silver dresses and hot pants.

Stevie takes some time to introduce the band and to give them each a solo. He engages the crowd by sending love to the troops overseas and by telling blind jokes. He talks about how one of his daughters, come bedtime, would hide from him. “I’m over here daddy,” she’d say from one side of the room. “I’m over here daddy,” she’d say a moment later from the other. Then Stevie called out that daughter, one of the beautiful back-up singers, and he let her sing a song. “What are we gonna sing, daddy?” she asks.

She sings Holly Cole’s “I’m Gonna Laugh You Right Out of My Life,” and it is beautiful and moving. From then on, Stevie is relentless. He goes into “For Once in My Life” then “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” back-to-back.

For the rest of the night the crowd is up and down, which is part of what being an adult is all about. Sometimes you dance with your child’s heart, and sometimes you sit and just… let life do you as much as you’re doing life.

“I love you,” Stevie says over and over. “Do you love me as much as I love you?”

As Stevie plows through a series of his greatest hits to end the show, just about everyone is standing and dancing. There are masses of horrible dancing older white men, some grooving younger black couples, and a bunch of barely moving older people with the widest smiles you’ve ever seen. At one point Stevie stands on his piano bench and dances with us.

“I want you to use all of your heart, everything but what you need to keep it beating, to love somebody else,” Stevie says at the end of the show. “And if there’s anything left, use it to love everyone else.”