One of the first dates I went on with the guy who would become my husband was to a DC Talk concert. It was my first real concert at an indoor venue (rather than just a has-been band outside at the fireworks or a school band concert that I was in).
Though my father is an audiophile (perhaps because he is an audiophile) we were not Concert People. Bands sounded much better at home on great stereo equipment than they did in person. And our living room was not open to the General Public, which were (generally) not the kind of people with whom my dad (or I, frankly) desired to brush shoulders. Crowds don’t interest us. Loud crowds even less. Loud half-drunk crowds? Pass.
But my new boyfriend, Zach, was a Concert Person. He worked at a radio station, played bass in a garage band, and went to lots of concerts. And he scored tickets to a DC Talk concert in Saginaw, Michigan, about a half hour away from where we lived in Essexville.
He chose our seats carefully. Third row, right in front. And that’s where we were when the people who actually had those seats asked us to move.
After a short argument, Zach got out the tickets to prove to these interlopers that we were the rightful occupants of these primo seats, only to discover that he did indeed have seats for us in the center of the third row—in the mezzanine.
Now, I didn’t think this was a big deal. I was fine with seats further back, where we wouldn’t be looking up at the band the whole time.
Zach did think this was a big deal. In fact, his (to me) oversized reaction to the situation kind of threw me. As he told me much later, he was deeply embarrassed and angry at himself for making that kind of mistake. He’d wanted to impress me and, in his mind, he had completely screwed up the night.
But that wasn’t exactly true. After a good concert, there was another mistake waiting in the wings.
That night when he was driving back to Essexville, he accidentally got on I-75 South rather than I-75 North, not realizing we were going the wrong direction until about 20 minutes later when one of us made a lame joke about going outlet shopping at Birch Run, which we were just approaching. Now, on top of the ticket mix-up and the humiliating walk up to the mezzanine, he was going to have me home 40 minutes late. This was before cell phones, so there was no way to alert my parents. They would have to wait, ignorant of what was keeping us, whether a car wreck or just garden variety irresponsibility.
All things considered, it was a fun night. The concert was good (though one member of the three-man group couldn’t perform because of a sore throat) and it was fun to be out at a show in another city at age fifteen with my seventeen-year-old boyfriend. I don’t recall getting in trouble for being late, and it gave us a story tell later in life.
It also offers us an idea for a story prompt…
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