Madonna taught me the word “virgin.’’ I was around 6 when her hit single “Like a Virgin’’ (off her second studio album) came out in 1984. It soon caught the attention of a family friend, originally from Colombia, who admitted to my parents one Thanksgiving that he loved the song “Like a Veer-hen’’ — which was playing on MTV at that very moment. “What song?’’ my parents asked. “‘Like a Veer-hen,’’’ he repeated, pointing to the screen, as Madonna danced through Venice trailed by a lion. Forty years later, I think of Thanksgiving — and our two families sharing a good laugh — whenever I hear that song.

What are your Madonna memories? That question undergirds her “Celebration Tour’’ as firmly as a leather corset. Monday night’s show was definitely a celebration — at different moments, an orgiastic spectacle; a moving memorial to lives lost — but more than anything, it felt like an unabashed nostalgia trip revisiting four decades in the life of the Queen of Pop. For some of us old-school fans, it also offered a look back at four decades in our own lives.

It’s hard to overstate the influence Madonna’s had on fashion, culture, feminism. On me. In the ’80s, girls everywhere copied her street-urchin style — underwear as outerwear, lots of lace, big bows, rosary beads — the first of many memorable looks she’d own over the years. (This past Christmas, my husband, Addie, gave me a cone bra made out of tin foil, an homage to the iconic Gaultier corset she wore for “Blond Ambition,’’ along with concert tickets.)

From the moment she arrived in New York in 1978, she said Monday, a “dumbass girl from Detroit’’ with $35 to her name, Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone shattered boundaries, especially old-fashioned notions of how women should behave. Her improvised, floor-humping performance of “Like a Virgin’’ at MTV’s inaugural Video Music Awards in 1984 is now legendary, but other watershed moments are less remembered today, like how she helped educate the public about HIV/AIDS. (In 1989, she even included an insert about the “equal opportunity disease’’ in her “Like a Prayer’’ album.)

As the patron saint of sex, she challenged everyone from the patriarchy to the pope: The Vatican banned her video for “Like a Prayer,’’ featuring the singer kissing a Black saint in a fable blending religious and sexual ecstasy, with a little stigmata thrown in. In the early ’90s, with her video for “Justify My Love’’ and film “Truth or Dare,’’ the name “Madonna’’ soon became synonymous with “SEX’’ — the title of her 1992 book. It was meant for coffee tables.

I was around 14 when “SEX’’ came out, and I remember the ruckus caused by Steven Meisel’s black-and-white images showing men with men, women with women, and Madonna with everyone, to paraphrase a post she shared on Instagram a couple of years ago. (She also posed as a nude hitchhiker in Miami, my hometown.) She was called a whore, a witch, a heretic, and the devil, she added, but “Now Cardi B can sing about her WAP.’’

Is that progress? I’d say so. Madonna, who’s been relentlessly slut-shamed and face-shamed, deserves props for speaking out about the sexism and misogyny women endure in the entertainment industry, especially as they age. “You will be criticized, you will be vilified, and you will definitely not be played on the radio,’’ she said at a Billboard Women in Music event in 2016.

It’s also possible that despite being the biggest-selling female recording artist of all time (reportedly, to the tune of some 400 million records), you will not be recognized. Moments before Madonna took the stage Monday in a black kimono, her emcee, Bob the Drag Queen, strutted around in a Marie Antoinette getup and towering blond wig. Behind me, I heard a preteen girl ask her grown-up: “Is that Madonna?’’

I wish I could say I donned a merry widow corset or tattered wedding dress like some of her other fans, but I opted for comfy pants — clearly the right choice since Addie and I decided to eat at Giacomo’s in the North End as part of our Madonna pre-game. Halfway through my eggplant parmigiana, I heard her voice, like an angel sighing, over the restaurant speakers. Our waitress, as it turned out, planned to see her in concert the following night.

The Madonna I saw Monday was a different Madonna than the one I grew up idolizing: Her voice was deeper, her edges harder. She appeared to knock back beer while giving an expletive-laced CliffsNotes version of her life story in between high-energy dance numbers and a dizzying number of costume changes over the course of two hours. At one point I heard a fellow concertgoer, a young guy, tell his friend he worried she was “pushing it.’’ He didn’t mean boundaries.

At 65, Madonna wore a knee brace. When she found herself out of breath early on, she joked, “Never take a two-week break in the middle of a tour. Bad idea.’’ (She was supposed to perform in Boston this summer but rescheduled due to a bacterial infection that got her hospitalized.)

Still, a few days later, it’s what she didn’t do that stays with me: She didn’t apologize. Instead, she laughed at herself and invited the audience to do the same: “I’ve been doing this sh— for 40 f—ing years,’’ she said. “I may have actually been here during the Boston Tea Party.’’

She also embraced the gifts that have come with getting older: glowing as two of her daughters (she has six children) performed on stage with her, and enjoying a ragtag crew of sometimes-topless young dancers who seemed more like her outrageous offspring than her erotic partners, even as they writhed around her and simulated pleasuring her. (Oh, Madonna.)

Her “Celebration Tour’’ could have been called “Live to Tell’’ just as easily. Because, really, that’s what she’s done. She’s lived to tell about her own life, and the lives of those lost since she started out: musical peers like Michael Jackson and Sinéad O’Connor; and the many loved ones who died of AIDS (their faces are illuminated in a moving tribute that’s a highlight of this tour). She’s also lived to tell her fans thank you for staying with her all this time.

And if she showed up a little more than four months and two hours late, and ended without an encore, so be it.

As she put it: “Na-na-na-na-na . . . Bitch, I’m Madonna.’’

Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com.