Last Monday night as I braved the mostly teenage sold out crowd ebbing and flowing on the floor of the Sunshine Theater, drinkers sat caged behind us--separated from those on the floor by temporary chain link fences. The Long Beach Dub Allstars, a collection of friends and former band mates of the dead Sublime singer, Bradley Nowell, kept the energy high (in many senses of the word) while the crowd beneath them churned in a relatively friendly way to the beat.

Even with the ugly, slightly militaristic chain link fence separating the "legal" crowd from the younguns, many teenagers found a way to supplement their good time. I saw many bent half-joints surreptitiously burned and smoked by crouched kids, and there was even a pint of cheap vodka thrown back quickly among a circle of friends. But the crowd was suitably mellow for this reggae/ska/punk show, and during the second to last song ("Badfish" from Sublime's 40 Oz. To Freedom) a large circle of kids in the middle of the floor grabbed shoulders and sang along, giving credence to the word "community."

There were no fights that I saw and I only saw security guards a couple of times, and they were wandering around pleasantly, rather than shining flashlights and searching out "baddies."

This week Brad Winter, a freshman city councilor in Albuquerque, thinks he's got a great way to fix the problem of underage drinking parties and the occasional skirmish that occurs: punish the parents.

Bad parents, you let your teenager and friends drink on your property--even though most of these parties happen without the consultation of the parent units, just like the ones that occurred when Brad (and the rest of us) was in high school. But it's getting out of hand because sometimes kids get hurt.

But as Al Pacino says in Heat, "You can get hurt walking your doggie!"

The problem isn't underage drinking. Underage drinking will never go away until it's not illegal for teenagers to drink. And since that's not going to happen anytime soon (just like controlled substance legalization), maybe we should be more than reactionary to this fact of life.

The problem isn't the drinking. This is only a symptom. The problem is too much time with nothing to do and nowhere to go. And as us adults know, you can do next do nothing as long as there's a drink nearby.

One of the interns where I work is getting a fake ID because there is no place she can go without feeling like she's going back to high school. She's 18, and she's been going to those underage nights at nightclubs for years. The same people, the same crowd, the same fences.

One of the guys I went to high school with (although we weren't really friends) got his dad to buy a keg for his nineteenth birthday. His dad happened to be a local judge and when it was found out that he had knowingly supplied his teenage son with beer, a large controversy ensued. In the end, the judge kept his post--mostly because all of us teenagers who had gotten our driving, loitering or whatever tickets thrown out by him went and voted the guy back in.

When I was in high school the worst thing you could have on your record was an M.I.P. Minor In Possession. I never got one, but I was at a few parties that got busted up by the cops. M.I.P.'s were both a badge of honor and shame. It just mattered who you talked to.

For adults it's relatively easy to find something to do. Everything caters to the over 21 crowd. There are bars, theater, movies, parties, casinos, happy hours, and so on. For kids there are movies (up to PG-13) and the few small theaters that have ticket prices less than $10 for students. Kids can't go to the mall in large groups without getting hassled. Movie theaters are getting fascist about Rated R movies because, horror of horrors, kids are seeing first run presentations of gore, sex and raunchy humor--rather than waiting for the video to come out or seeing it on HBO.

We've put up fences around "adulthood" and then wonder why teenagers wanting to grow up so bad. We can say going to bars and casinos and Rated R movies isn't that great. It's the same old, same old. And it is. We see the same people at the bars, see the same old grind churned out at the movies and lose the same money we've always lost at casinos. But we can come and go freely. And on the way out, we arrogantly flip off the kids with their noses pressed up against the window.

Punishing parents won't change the problem. It will only change the venue. When I was in high school, there were many times when there was nowhere to go with our ill-begotten booze. So we drove out to the country, set up a bonfire and drank until the booze was all gone. And then we had to drive back into town to get home before curfew.

Putting band-aids on cuts doesn't fix the problem. We've got to look deeper and find out why they got cut in the first place. But I guess that's too much work when we've already bought the band-aids hook, line and sinker.

Matt Worley's second adolescence is better than his first one because he's been able to buy all the beer he wants.