| Perhaps all y’all on the mainland are used to this sort of thing, but it feels like years since I've waited in line for concert tickets. Now I find myself sitting in a line of island rock fans that could never live up to the name of raucous crowd -- the sort that these events are supposed to generate. This pale imitation of a passel of adoring fans has queued up for the once-in-a-lifetime chance (tongue firmly planted in cheek) to see U2 at Aloha Stadium… a garish 1970s structure whose only worthwhile uses are the Pro Bowl and the weekly swap meet.
I shall make you all privy to a couple things that are going round my otherwise extraordinarily hungover Saturday morning mind: 1) I should probably learn how to make small talk; 2) damnit, I am going to see U-frakking-2, period.
I shall first address the latter, being, as it is, rather straightforward.
Fifteen years ago, I heard “Rattle and Hum” for the first time. I have wanted to see these guys ever since, and now I get to! Among the four concerts I said I would see before I or the bands die… I plan to be halfway there as of 08 April 2006. I saw Springsteen. I’ll see U2. Steve Miller Band might come to the island before I expatriate, and God only knows when Tom Petty will hit the road, with or without the Heartbreakers; I will be there when he does.
Ah, now, we just began the random ticketing thing-a-madoo that Ticketmaster decided a decade ago was a good idea, and the buzz around me begins again. Oh, look, I’m no longer 20th in line; I’m 25…bitches, sigh.
I turn, now, to proposition #1 -- that I best learn how to make small talk, and soon.
I have been listening to those around me extol the performing genius of U2 and other concerts they have seen, and I realize that I cannot compete with, nor even keep up with, the ability of even the most average female at making and enjoying small talk.
People up and down the queue kibitz; they call their kids; they try to convince others to buy them extra tickets; they get agitated all over again. All morning, it has been an endless cycle of “Will we even get tickets? Oh, we’ll get tickets. What if we don’t? I’m sure there’ll be plenty.” What amuses me most is that I am surrounded by my way-excited elders, all afraid of festival “seating,” all debating buying $95 versus $165 tickets; I sit here quietly, intermittently working a crossword and a sudoku, thinking of my adoring footnote audience, knowing that I can barely afford the $50 general admission tickets. Ah well, more space for we crazy young’uns to rush the stage.
My amusement continues as people expound upon their networks for buying tickets elsewhere and the fairness of lottery buying and hoping there will be a second night added to the engagement… it’s the last show of the flaming tour; talk about anti-climatic. But I say nothing because I won’t piss in the cornflakes of these awfully simple and far too well-heeled boomers in their search for eternal youth.
Back to the conversationalists around me: Most are middle age -- there are one or two of an age with myself, but by and large my compatriots in the quest for directions as to how to dismantle an atomic bomb (useful in this day and age) are definitely recollecting the “War” tour. Believe it or not, one said she remembered seeing U2 open for Oingo-Boingo. Hot Shit.
Has U2 gotten old suddenly and no one told me?
In perfect honesty, I have to admit to a goodly amount of perplexity. There are those who are spending hundreds of dollars on tix but are chafing at service fees. There are those who want the concert experience but don’t want to touch other people in the crowd. There are those who will sit in line for hours to buy tickets, but want a seat from which they can escape right quick after the show and not wait for hours in a line of honking cars and carbon monoxide, because, well, they’re old... and I suppose they need their sleep.
And then, the frenzy began. We all leapt to our feet and danced from one foot to the other almost as if saying, “Oo, Oo, Edge, Larry, Bono, Adam, pick me, pick me!”
They called numbers, and reports started rolling in from the home front where those on the phone and on-line were frantically buying People stepped from line as their vanguards won decisive victories in the ticket buying battle. And then, the whisper spread through the crowd in disbelief: No more $165; no more field; no more cheap’os, and there I was, one person from the flaming counter!
Damn, blast, through a foggy, aching head and caffeine-induced jitters, all I knew was that I didn’t have tickets. I hung my head and trudged back to Miss Kitty.
My phone rang.
It was Steele.
I had to break the bad news.
But, no! She had four tickets in her hand and one of them was mine! I will join those, raising Bics in the air, singing every lyric and shrieking in like a delighted schoolgirl and expressing my blood-borne admiration for the Irish boys whose music brings me together with surgically enhanced Baby Boomers, Copenhagen chawing red necks, teenagers who aren’t sure who was shot on April 4 (but if Bono wrote about him he must be important) and philanthropist-loving hippies the world around, and that, my friends, sounds like a good way to assuage the ticket-buying vertigo..
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