Tom Waits Part 1 - The Preshow
I’m trying to get back to my regular routine. Monday morning I was traveling back from Memphis, and Monday night I was putting the finishing touches on the final draft of my paper that was due at 10PM. I worked on it up until about 9:40. I’m done with school for about 3 weeks, which is kind of nice.
The Tom Waits concert was really amazing. I'm going to break it up into a couple of posts so it's not a novel.
The hotel where we stayed was about 4 blocks from the Orpheum Theatre, where the concert was taking place. We had tickets at will call, which opened at 4PM, so we decided to head down there about 3:30 so we could get some pictures of the marquee and scope out the line. There was already a pretty big line when we got there, but we had VIP tickets that we thought would be picked up on the other side of the theater so we didn’t get in the first line. When people started lining up by the VIP entrance we decided to get in line, at which point it looked like the line from the other side of the theater was being moved to our line. Luckily we were able to cut in without any heartburn.
How did we get VIP tickets you might ask? This is going to make me sound like a total douchebag namedropper, but one of my friends knows the tour manager, who arranged to get us 5 tickets (we still paid for them though). We didn’t know where they would be, but we assumed they would be pretty good. There was a bit of nervousness because my friend’s credit card had not been charged yet when we got there. When we got up to the front of the line the nervousness turned out to be well-founded as they couldn’t find a record of our tickets! We were shuffled off to the “troubleshooting” table (at which we were the first “trouble” of the day – represent!). Various people were sent off to try and verify our status. I felt like we had an ace in the hole in the fact that we had the tour manager’s cell phone number if we needed it.
We’d been standing around for about 10 minutes when something really bizarre happened. There was a girl who was sitting on a chair about 10 feet behind the tables where tickets were being handed out. I remember thinking: “Who is that person sitting around doing nothing?” Well, around the time that we were sent to the troublemaker table this girl got out of her chair and hovered around behind the table. She still wasn’t doing anything or attempting to help us, just hovering. I thought it was so weird I even made a sarcastic remark to my friends: “That girl is doing a great job”. About 5 seconds after that remark exited my pie-hole, a voice was heard to say: “These tickets here are for (my friend’s last name), is this them?” It was her! Do-nothing girl! It turned out that these were our tickets. Do-nothing girl pulled our fat out of the fire. DNG also immediately went and sat back down. Her work there was done. I thought this was all really weird and I felt a little bad for bad-mouthing DNG. I’m still not sure why tickets that were sitting near the top of a pile on the table were so hard to find, but that’s life I guess.
We had some concern over our fifth ticket since the friend we had in mind for it ended up not being able to come (we didn’t want to look like unappreciative jerks who begged for tickets and then had an empty seat), but they seemed happy to take it back and sell it to someone else. Our tickets were on the 12th row. I missed my chance to offer it to a cute redhead who was behind us in the troubleshooting line. Damn, I suck. (Two of my friends saw her later right before the concert and found out she was sitting in the balcony and would have been thrilled to be where we were. Double damn!)
So we got our wristbands and headed out, planning to return around 7 for the 8:00 show…
The Tom Waits concert was really amazing. I'm going to break it up into a couple of posts so it's not a novel.
The hotel where we stayed was about 4 blocks from the Orpheum Theatre, where the concert was taking place. We had tickets at will call, which opened at 4PM, so we decided to head down there about 3:30 so we could get some pictures of the marquee and scope out the line. There was already a pretty big line when we got there, but we had VIP tickets that we thought would be picked up on the other side of the theater so we didn’t get in the first line. When people started lining up by the VIP entrance we decided to get in line, at which point it looked like the line from the other side of the theater was being moved to our line. Luckily we were able to cut in without any heartburn.
How did we get VIP tickets you might ask? This is going to make me sound like a total douchebag namedropper, but one of my friends knows the tour manager, who arranged to get us 5 tickets (we still paid for them though). We didn’t know where they would be, but we assumed they would be pretty good. There was a bit of nervousness because my friend’s credit card had not been charged yet when we got there. When we got up to the front of the line the nervousness turned out to be well-founded as they couldn’t find a record of our tickets! We were shuffled off to the “troubleshooting” table (at which we were the first “trouble” of the day – represent!). Various people were sent off to try and verify our status. I felt like we had an ace in the hole in the fact that we had the tour manager’s cell phone number if we needed it.
We’d been standing around for about 10 minutes when something really bizarre happened. There was a girl who was sitting on a chair about 10 feet behind the tables where tickets were being handed out. I remember thinking: “Who is that person sitting around doing nothing?” Well, around the time that we were sent to the troublemaker table this girl got out of her chair and hovered around behind the table. She still wasn’t doing anything or attempting to help us, just hovering. I thought it was so weird I even made a sarcastic remark to my friends: “That girl is doing a great job”. About 5 seconds after that remark exited my pie-hole, a voice was heard to say: “These tickets here are for (my friend’s last name), is this them?” It was her! Do-nothing girl! It turned out that these were our tickets. Do-nothing girl pulled our fat out of the fire. DNG also immediately went and sat back down. Her work there was done. I thought this was all really weird and I felt a little bad for bad-mouthing DNG. I’m still not sure why tickets that were sitting near the top of a pile on the table were so hard to find, but that’s life I guess.
We had some concern over our fifth ticket since the friend we had in mind for it ended up not being able to come (we didn’t want to look like unappreciative jerks who begged for tickets and then had an empty seat), but they seemed happy to take it back and sell it to someone else. Our tickets were on the 12th row. I missed my chance to offer it to a cute redhead who was behind us in the troubleshooting line. Damn, I suck. (Two of my friends saw her later right before the concert and found out she was sitting in the balcony and would have been thrilled to be where we were. Double damn!)
So we got our wristbands and headed out, planning to return around 7 for the 8:00 show…
posted by JC at 6:42 AM
1 Comments:
I made an embarrassing attempt to flirt with one of the Orpheum staff to get one of those posters.
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