Gwen Stefani

I went to see Gwen Stefani last night at the Santa Barbara Bowl. Now 37, she began her career 20 years ago as the lead singer for No Doubt, whose hit single “Don’t Speak” spent an amazing 16 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1996. For the past three years, she has had a career as a solo artist. In addition to her singing, Gwen Stefani--a Libra--is easily recognizable for her striking platinum blonde hair, fire engine red lipstick, and fashion plate appearance (Venus is the most elevated planet in her horoscope).

We took my 19 year-old daughter and her friend to the concert. When my daughter was little, she used to perform living room dance recitals with some of the neighborhood girls. One song she used to dance to was No Doubt’s “I’m Just a Girl,” a bouncy, neo-feminist New Wave song that helped to put the grrr! in a generation of young girls—including my own daughter. The song’s title is ironic: Gwen liltingly sings that she’s “had it up to here” with all the stares and “girl” stereotypes.

The audience at the outdoor Bowl was about 80% female. I was quite touched by a mother who was there with her ten or eleven year-old daughter. They sat right in front of us, exchanging frequent celebratory hugs and nestling up against each other for much of the concert. During the choruses for some of the more popular songs, thousands of female voices would scream the lyrics. I don’t know if it’s the Age of Aquarius, the elevation of Eris and Ceres, or the after-effects of the mid-sixties Uranus-Pluto conjunction, but hearing all those female voices ecstatically singing in unison was powerful.

No Doubt’s 2000 album, Return of Saturn—which was written during Gwen’s first Saturn return—included her song, “Simple Kind of Life,” a wrenching, confessional bass-heavy number about a boxed-in celebrity career and her inability to lead a simpler and more selfless kind of life, feeling that motherhood was passing her by. Gwen has since married and has a year-old child, about whom she lovingly spoke several times during the concert—a testimony to life’s happy possibilities, even when Saturn depresses us and makes us think such hopes are impossibly lost.

Gwen has a Scorpio Ascendant with Neptune rising just two degrees below the Ascendant (she was born Oct. 3, 1969; 10:23 AM; Anaheim, Calif.; I got her birth time from AstroTheme, although the original source was not noted). A Scorpio Ascendant can give one an intense personality and this certainly describes Gwen Stefani’s stage persona. After the concert, my daughter exclaimed, “She’s magnetic!” Neptune rising helps Gwen project an aura of charismatic glamour. She had a six-piece band, eight dancers, several costume changes, and each song was an elaborate Broadway production.

Gwen’s got a square between her Libra Sun (part of a Libra stellium) and Cancer Moon. A square between the Sun and Moon can result in an overflow of energy which, rightly channeled, can lead to great success.

Along with an exact trine of Mars and Saturn—part of a grand trine also involving Venus—Gwen has lots of energy to burn. And burn it she does.

Midway through the concert, Gwen stepped down from the stage while she was singing and began to go up one of the aisles. This is fairly common today, made possible by wireless microphones. Usually, the performer dashes up an aisle, then rushes back to the safety of the stage like a speedboat, leaving excited, frothy fans in his or her wake.

We could see where Gwen was—even if we could not always see her—because the spotlight followed her up the aisle, with a couple of security personnel clearing a protective path for her. We expected her to pass quickly by in a celebrity blur, then run back to the stage. But suddenly…there she was, just two rows directly in front of us, standing up on a low sectional wall—an impromptu stage in the middle of the audience. We could have touched her. My daughter’s friend took the accompanying pictures. Gwen stayed right there for several minutes, singing and talking to the audience. I’d looked at her horoscope earlier in the day and my first thought was…Neptune rising, Sun conjunct Jupiter—she knows exactly how to be a star.

I’d earlier walked up the same aisle she’d just run up. It was a steep incline. Gwen, however, barely seemed to breathe--and this was after a strenuous stage work-out. Just a few feet away, she turned and looked us in the eyes. She had on her face a look of pure exhilaration.