There was perhaps a 45-minute lag between the time the last opening act left the stage and Britney Spears took it. Every time a song would end on the sound system, the huge crowd took its cue to chant "Britney! Britney!" Or "We want Britney! We want Britney!" As the wait wore on, the crowd became restive. A 7-year-old behind me would groan "Urg!" whenever Britney did not appear. At one point, a vast moan went through the audience -- with a distinctively female preteen timbre to it -- as though an entire generation of girls had simultaneously and spontaneously tasted despair.

But this was not a lasting despair, if such it was. Soon enough, the big screens lit up to show Britney commercials -- one for Herbal Essence, and one for "Got Milk?" Strangely, the audience did not seem irritated by this.

Then Britney's head appeared on the screens -- rather, a starburst with three Britney heads in it, shooting through a tunnel or swirling vortex. The crowd was screaming so loudly, it was difficult to make out what the computerized Britney heads were saying, but I did hear: "You have accessed the Britney Spears experience."

And so we had. The lights went down, the Britney heads blinked out and blue lights appeared in the monitors, mirroring the blue and green glowsticks waved aloft in the audience.

A glowing silver disco ball, accompanied by gyrating dancers, descended on the stage. Britney emerged from it and began to sing and dance "Crazy," to the delight of the audience.

Regarding Britney's career so far, my daughter has ventured the opinion that her first album presented the teen crooner as a needy mess. The only thing she wanted out of life was for her boyfriend to come back to her.

On her second album, however, she's her own woman. "Oops! ... I Did It Again," the title tune from that CD, is the singer's half-hearted apology to a poor sap who keeps falling in love with her. Britney keeps forgetting herself ("To lose all my senses/That is just so typically me") and seducing the guy. She's just too absent-minded. It's not her fault.

Onstage, she did her revised version of "Satisfaction," in which she complains that, while watching her TV, "A girl comes on and tells me/How tight my skirt should be/But she can't tell me who to be/I've got my own identity." The impact of this mild outburst against being misunderstood was undercut somewhat by the fact that she was sitting on a throne while she was singing it, flanked by two dancers who were fanning her with giant feathers.

OK, she went from angst-driven loser to angst-driven teen queen in one short year. Maybe there hasn't been an image revision this major since Dylan went electric. I'm not qualified to judge.

Yet, watching her frenetic performance -- full of her trademark groans, growls and even a few Michael Jackson yelps thrown in, and exhibiting her distinctive, somewhat eccentric choreography -- it's still hard for me to imagine just who she is. A more interesting question, though: Why does she tower above her competitors, the Mandy Moores, the Christina Aguileras and the Hokus?

One of her new songs proclaims, "Baby, what you see is what you get." But what are we seeing? This is simplicity itself? Her show is a cross between a public appearance at a county fair and a Las Vegas extravaganza, full of dancers and explosions, and enhanced by video monitors as big as SUVs.

At one point, video footage of 'N Sync appears, and the members "ask" four audience members, who've been pulled onstage: "What would you do to meet Britney?" These four are then asked to bark like a dog, flop like a fish, belt out a Britney favorite and walk like a chicken, respectively.

The winner (the chicken imitator) had his picture taken with Britney on her Toon Teen bedroom set, and then was whisked offstage as she launched into "I Was Born to Make U Happy," one of several "my boyfriend left me and I'm worthless" laments from her first CD. Supposedly, certain segments of our culture -- those segments that are required to worry about this sort of thing -- wonder if Britney is a bit too sexy for the room, if you know what I mean. I can report that Britney closed her show with "(Hit Me) Baby One More Time," dressed like a Catholic schoolgirl (kind of). At one point during this song, she flashed her panties at us. (This may, however, have been just another spin on "What You See Is What You Get.")

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