When I started going out with Amanda I asked about The Dresden Dolls. She told me it was a pity that I’d missed them. They were so good, she said. Brian Viglione and her, well, it was special.

I was sure it was. But then she’d talk about Brian, the other half of The Dresden Dolls (Amanda played keyboards, Brian played mostly drums and sometimes guitar), and talk about their time on the road in the way someone talks about a bad marriage she’s glad she’s out of: they had been together all day and every day, and for 120 minutes of that time they had made the music that made her happy, and the rest of the time they drove each other crazy. They’d sometimes been lovers, or at least, they’d had a fair amount of sex over that seven years, and they’d sometimes been friends, but mostly they’d been The Dresden Dolls, a band on the road, united in a vision of art as liberation. And then in early 2008, they weren’t.

Curious, I’d watched a YouTube video from the end of their final tour. Brian talks about why it was time for them to stop: “Why constantly fight?” he asks. “It’s not a marriage. It’s a band.” Cut to Amanda: “It’s like being brother and sister and married and business partners and then put in a box where you have to see each other twenty-four hours a day,” she says. They both look tired and they look done.

But time heals. Or at least it forms scabs.

Which explains why I am standing on the balcony at Irving Plaza at Hallowe’en, at the first gig of The Dresden Dolls reunion tour, watching two young ladies, wearing mostly glitter, Hula-Hooping in the dark with glowing Hula-Hoops, watched by an audience of clowns and zombies and mad hatters and such, and I don’t actually know where the Hallowe’en costumes end and the dressing up to see The Dresden Dolls begins.

Amanda appears on the balcony to watch the support band, the Legendary Pink Dots. They were her favorite band as a teenager, gave the Dolls their first break. She’s happy that they are playing to twelve hundred people who would never have seen them otherwise. She holds my hand, introduces me to the man who introduced her and Brian at a Hallowe’en party exactly a decade before, and slips back into the shadows.

The next time I see her, she’s on the stage wearing a red kimono over a Hallowe’en sweater she bought in June in the Wisconsin Dells. The sweater has a scarecrow on the back. She’s wearing a red military cap, and when, two songs in, she takes off the sweater and the kimono to play in skin and a black bra, she has the word LOVE written in eyeliner across her chest. Brian is dressed in a black vest, black trousers.

The first strange thing about watching the Dolls is the feeling of immediate recognition. The “Oh, I get it. This is what the songs are meant to sound like.” As if the drumming makes sense of something, or translates it back into the language it was originally written in.