It was a really great time, right up until the bananas hit me in the head. Followed, of course, by the tangerines. At least I got one of those.
Perhaps I should start at the beginning. The beginning is a text message, received by me last Wednesday afternoon, asking if I wanted to go to the Soul Asylum/Scissor Sisters concert happenning that night. After briefly considering my obligations to my employer, I decided "Hell yeah" and replied with a text message to that effect. That I was mistaken as to who, exactly, was inviting me turned out to be a minor issue (it was David, whose boyfriend John got the tickets but couldn't go); more serious was the fact that I hadn't anticipating my day taking a turn for the fabulous and had come to work in a crummy old sweater. But, one emergency trip to Target later, I was ready to go.
The show was at Bimbo's, in the city, which turns out to be a really nice place, albeit with expensive drinks. On the way in, everybody got a blinking plastic Christmas tree necklace, which just makes any outfit cooler. Soul Asylum was opening and they were pretty good, except they played a few too many songs that weren't "Runaway Train" (including "Hava Nagila", which was odd). But it was worth it, because they did get around to playing their one-hit-wonder-qualifier and I was instantly transported back to high school, when I thought that song was just so deep, and held it as proof that I did like grunge.
But, as fun as that trip down the memory superhighway was, it was the act with the current hits that we came to see, so in the break between the sets we edged our way up closer in front of the stage, into a seriously primo position (which came with it's own downside, but more on that later). David wandered off to check out the place, and I happened to notice that the people standing in front of me looked awfully familiar. They were, in fact, Jamie and Bevis, two cast members of a show called 5Takes, a travel show that I find inexplicably fascinating. They were on the last leg of their trip, in San Francisco, so of course I had to go up and introduce myself and act like a total dork. But they were nice, less naive and better informed than they come across on TV, and it was just very odd and to see in person the people who typically live inside my television. Eventually, they managed to edge away from me, and a while after that the headliners finally took the stage. I knew some of their music from the radio, and I had heard that they were good live, and suffice it to say that they were not a dissapointment. The crowd was about 1200% more into than at the last couple of concerts I've been to, and at one point I was entirely surrounded by gay men, one of whom kept stepping on my foot. People kept pushing by me, pretending like they were going to join someone, and then stopping, sometimes directly in the spot I was at that moment occupying (perhaps they had confused orientation with spin, and believed the Pauli exclusion principle didn't apply). At times, I had to be rather firm with some of them.
Inconveniences, and potential violations of basic laws of physics, aside, it was an awsome concert, and totally worth not being exactly a hundred percent effective at work on Thursday.
*About the bananas: When they came out for their encore, the Scissor Sisters brought with them what I presume was the fruit basket from their dressing room and started pitching the contents into the crowd. Boxes of raisins were going off like squishy grenades on the floor, and what seemed like about half of the larger fruit somehow found its way to my head. But it was still a very good time.
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