A rocky evening at Disney Hall

I stumbled into a rock concert the other day and felt like a nun at an orgy.

Here is this sedate, gray-haired guy, me, sitting behind a woman who is on her feet bopping and twisting like an Alabama snake worshipper, and next to a guy who, though seated, is jiggling so hard I fear he might suddenly fly apart.

There wasn’t a riot or anything like that, the way there are at some rock concerts. No fires were set in the street or cars overturned or chairs thrown around the room, and no one was naked. That would never be allowed in so decorous a setting as Disney Hall.

It was just, well, different.

But allow me to begin at the beginning, as my mother used to say when she was listing my iniquities. My luminous wife, Cinelli, who loves the theater more than dinner, had tickets for a show at the Ahmanson, a Music Center venue that offers programs on the level of Broadway reruns.

What we didn’t know was that the place was closed due to a production problem. A sign on the door said that we should have been notified of the closure by mail, but obviously, since we were there, we hadn’t been.

Cinelli, always innovative, began wondering if anything else was going on, and a security guard who was wandering around securing things suggested that there was some kind of “doing” at the Disney Hall, down the block.

I would have preferred just going home and rotting on a couch, but that was not to be. “It’s a rock concert,” Cinelli said after talking to the box-office clerk at Disney, “and there are tickets available!” Pause. “They’re $90 each, but” -- quickly -- “Alanis Morissette is the star and she’s a legendary performer!”

As I recall, I hesitated in my response, waiting for the message to make a synaptic connection. We were going from tickets already purchased for a show that was canceled to a rock concert starring a singer I only vaguely knew for $90 a seat?

“Let me understand this,” I said, in the manner of a man who can’t quite believe the firing squad is assembling to shoot him. “You want to spend $90 to hear the kind of music you don’t even really like?” Under most circumstances, she prefers cantatas to crescendo, but she’s Italian, so who knows? They’re unpredictable.

“I liked the Beatles, didn’t I? And who discovered Sly and the Family Stone years ago at that dump in Hayward with the topless go-go dancers?”

I could sense that this was going to escalate into one of those loud and humiliating public arguments so, despite the fact that $180 could buy 17.142857 martinis at Monty’s, I said OK. The tickets also bore the words “Jagged Little Pill,” which I thought for a moment was either the intermission refreshment (you know, sucking on the devil weed and popping jagged little uppers), but it wasn’t that at all. It was the name of Morissette’s album -- first released 10 years ago and recently revisited in an acoustic version -- that has sold 30 million copies.

I don’t know anyone who has sold 30 million copies of anything, and I was naturally impressed. So are all the critics from coast to coast who have written about her in an emotional style usually reserved for people like Mother Teresa and Desmond Tutu. The pre-Alanis warm-up act was a trio that featured a young man named Jason Mraz, whose music involved such compelling lyrics as “I’m a ghetto blaster and a chain reactor when I’m in love.” Not exactly a Spenserian stanza, but this is rock, not poetry. He was greeted with healthy applause, and then when Morissette appeared the place went bonkers with screams of ecstasy. Even her Chihuahua got an ovation.

I didn’t understand most of what she was singing, but that didn’t matter because everyone else seemed to know. There was wild cheering and stand-up ovations and even sing-alongs as she strode back and forth on the stage in the peculiar manner of a football coach on the sidelines of a losing game, and otherwise moved with the grace of a penguin. The New York Times, in a website, explains, “The songs ... are tales of a young woman determined to make her own way, inventing herself as she leaves behind childhood indoctrination, manipulative lovers, sleazy business associates and, finally, her own self-doubt.”

I didn’t get all of that out of her performance, but as long as Jayson Blair didn’t write the explanation, I guess it’s OK. I mean, who hasn’t had childhood indoctrinations, manipulative lovers, sleazy business associates and self-doubt? Even you maybe.

It is best at rock concerts to have long, dark hair that swings and swirls like the rapturous young women who stood in the aisles and bopped, but, alas, my hair is short and gray and Cinelli’s is short and blond, and we don’t boogie, although we do move a little.

“I’ll just snap my fingers in rhythm,” I said to Cinelli, and she said, “You have no rhythm.”

Morissette is no Beyonce, but when you’re sitting on 30 million sales of anything you don’t have to be. All you have to do is yell and stride, march your dog around the stage, and America will luv ya, baby.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.