EDMONTON -- I can no longer deny the evidence: I am getting old. Not so much in my actions, maybe. My co-workers can vouch that I still like making obscene pantomimes with a bicycle pump, will eat Nibs off the floor without hesitation and, when losing an argument, generally pull out my index-finger "guns" and open fire, complete with "PATCHOO PATCHOO" sound effects. How they avoid beating me senseless on a daily basis is a mystery of life I don't want to probe too closely.

But one of the indignities of aging that I've never bought into is the nostalgic hysteria for rock stars way past their prime. I mean, the Guess Who might still sound great, but no matter how you look at it they're still old, fat, balding men pretending to be 20-year-olds rocking out in their garages. Except with less sex and more Ben Gay.

Maybe the reason guys like the Guess Who are easy for me to mock is they weren't my generation's formative music. On the other hand, Billy Idol, who played a sold-out show at the Joint rock club in West Edmonton Mall Thursday night, was. The bleach boy's career peaked when I was in junior high and high school, lo those many millennia ago, and so he's as much a part of my memories of that time as lemon gin and Wendy's van. In that order.

Still, I expected to find his show either silly or sad or both, but au contraire (mon frere), it was fantastic. Even though Billy's like 46 or 92 or something, if you squint your eyes a little and stand at the very back of the bar and drink about eight beers ... why, you'd swear he hasn't aged a day!

No, to be fair, Billy hasn't lost it. He opened the show with Cradle of Love, followed it with Dancing With Myself and then hammed it up during Flesh For Fantasy, and dang if I didn't not only remember the words to all of those songs, but I genuinely enjoyed hearing them again.

It helped that Billy seemed to be having a blast the entire time, with that big, silly, sneering grin on his face as he strutted around the stage. Though whether it was because he was so utterly amused at his own comeback success or simply working on his third major life-threatening drug overdose, I'm not sure. (Note to Billy's lawyers: I changed my mind, I am sure it was the first one.)

The fourth song in his set was Simple Minds's Don't You (Forget About Me). I wasn't aware he'd done a cover of the song, so when he started into it I just about fell over. That was THE seminal song of my high school years, indelibly paired as it is with John Hughes's The Breakfast Club, which was THE seminal movie of my high school years. And I'm not just saying that because I think seminal is a funny word. OK, I am. Seminal! Tee hee. But still.

The show was freakin' PACKED, and distressingly full of people roughly the same age as me. Distressingly, because I'm used to covering either boy bands or dino-rock acts, where I can distance myself from the crowd even if I happen to enjoy the tunes. (Distancing is even more important if I'm sitting in the middle of a row of 12-year-old girls at an O-Town concert, trying desperately to look like somebody's uncle instead of a pervert.)

But the Billy show was packed to the rafters with folks who I could have gone to high school with, and probably did. After a while it seemed more like a party with a really novel band than an actual gig, since a lot of people were milling around getting caught up while Billy trotted out the hits, including White Wedding, Eyes Without a Face, an acoustic version of Sweet Sixteen, and, during the encore, Mony Mony. Which must have really pleased the drunk knob who was shouting out the infamous "HEY (person with Oedipal complex), GET (lucky) GET (bad word)!" line after EVERY FREAKING SONG ALL NIGHT.

Ah, Mony Mony. Next to wondering why more people don't beat me up, I still to this day ponder where that audience shout-out line originated. They eventually banned the song at a lot of school dances because teachers didn't want their tender, innocent whelps bellowing out swears like that. So we just went behind the gym and drank instead.

I don't know, maybe it's because Billy Idol went from being totally cool to totally invisible to making this sudden comeback so many years later that it feels so weirdly nostalgic to see him live and hear the songs again. But the biggest karmic shocker came the morning after the concert, when I got an e-mail from one of my friends saying our long-delayed high school reunion was finally going to become a reality. In a couple of months I'll be seeing people that I haven't talked to since the last time I listened to an entire set of Billy Idol songs. How weird, yet strangely appropriate, is that?

Here's hoping they play Mony Mony at the reunion dance. As long as the teachers say it's OK. (More on:Billy Idol)