In only four lines she’s made it clear that she understands exactly how it feels to be alone and worried; thus she is every teenage kid’s coconspirator. I know, she says; she understands me at a distance, which is exactly how I long to be understood. Petula understands that anonymous comfort which is one of adolescence’s great and only consolations: hanging out, wandering around, getting lost in the world that’s larger than your family. Especially when you come from a little nuclear knot of trouble, it’s hard to feel the space around yourself in which you can come to be unknown. And you can’t go on being known in the old ways; you need to disappear a little in order to come back as someone new: yourself. You have to go—Downtown.

To do so is to do nothing, admittedly, about the circumstances that made you lonely and worried in the first place. But that’s exactly the point: you can’t do anything about those things now. Petula says, Listen, you can’t fix anything yet, you aren’t ready, your sadness and isolation cannot be solved, but here’s something you can have which is full of promise, full of what’s to come next. Thus she has proclaimed herself as every gay boy’s friend; she sees us in our isolation and extends her song to us, proving her friendship by being the first to suggest that there’s actually something we can do about our situation: get up and get yourself downtown.

You can take a form of power over what you essentially cannot change, because you step out of it all, a little bit, become less yourself while the colored lights shine on the wet streets. These are the wisest words ever spoken to gay children: “You can always go—Downtown.” Maybe, she sings, you’ll even find someone there “who’s just like you.” Later, yes—not just yet. The important thing, Petula instructs us, is to join something larger than ourselves, a stream of lights and lives: movie shows, the bossa nova, and my favorite suggestion:

Maybe you know little places to go to

Where they never close—Downtown.

I don’t, of course. In Lancaster there is no such place, just the silvery screen of the drive-in, lonely in the moonlight, surrounded by the stark silhouettes of the Joshua trees. But Petula says it’s out there someplace, count on that.

And if I can’t go there, at least I can buy some stylish clothes at the mall, and begin to get ready.