Last Friday I went to see Bon Jovi. Am I a huge Bon Jovi fan? Let me answer that with another question, do I sound like a 40 year old soccer mom, or a 13 year old girl? No, I'm not a "huge" Bon Jovi fan but he does have catchy numbers and puts on a good show. A friend, who I'll call Monkey (aka Auntie Monkey) wanted to go and being the kind, selfless, devastatingly handsome man that I am, I got tickets and we went.
The show was at the Air Canada Centre. We had seats in the last row, very close to the roof. We were, in fact, so high up, I had to use two canisters of oxygen before the opening act finished. The opening act was Hedley. They're a crappy band with a second rate Mick Jagger impersonator for a front man. At one point the singer said, "are you guys ready for Bon Jovi?" just so he could hear some cheers. He then said, "Bon Jovi is going to rock your world man, think of us as just the warm-up act." Thanks, that is how I think of you? I wasn't there to see the great Hedley/Bon Jovi double bill. I think there were only 8 of us in the ACC at the time.
During Hedley's set two women came to our row and asked if it was row 17. We confirmed it was and they started walking away looking for seats 5 & 6. Seats 5 & 6 were two seats away from us but they walked away before we could say anything. About 15 minutes later, just as Hedley was wrapping up, they came back, looked at us puzzled and walked back down to the usher. Ten or so minutes later they came back and found their seats. I'm not entirely sure what the issue was. The seats are numbered in sequential order. If I'm in seat one, seat two is either to the right of me or to the left of me. The order isn't random - Seat 1, 7, 8, 23, #FA, D sharp, X, 24, a picture of a dog, 19.
After Hedley ended the stadium started filling up fairly quickly. I imagine a lot of people were standing in the hallway plugging their ears. In our row and section, we were seats 1 & 2, 3 & 4 were currently empty and 5 & 6 were occupied by the 40 year old Bon Jovi groupies with 80s hair and a mouthful of teeth that looked like a broken down picket fence. In the section beside us the seats started at 29 and counted down. There was a couple in seats 28 & 27. At least I think they were a couple. It took me a little while to figure out if the wife was a man or a woman because she looked like a very pissed off 15 year old boy. Seats 3 & 4 were then filled by a woman and her daughter who looked to be about 11. She was a cute kid and extremely excited to be at a concert. We then saw a large group of people making their way up the stairs. The man with the 15 year old boy for a wife stood up and the wife moved to seat 29 so she was right beside Monkey. The group all filed in our row with the biggest guy sitting right beside the wife. I thought this odd because I imagined the husband would have purchased a seat beside his wife. So we sat there for a while with the husband standing in front of the wife and looking at her like, "I don't know what to do, what can I do." And her looking back like "well you'd better do something, you got us into this." This went on for a little while until the husband finally went back to his seat which was in the same row but 8 chairs away. The exact number of spaces this group took up. Instead of asking someone in the group if they could all move one seat left or right he decided to spend the rest of the concert looking longingly at his wife from afar and her looking back.
I'm not sure how it was initiated but at one point during the concert one guy in our row told the other people in the row to move down one seat. The husband finally asked or somebody put two and two together but either way the wife moved beside the husband and the group moved to the left. Unfortunately for Monkey this meant that in addition to the gigantic lard ass on her left side (me) she now had a gigantic lard ass on her right side as well. This guy must have been about 1.5 times my size and when he sat down I thought Monkey's head was going to pop right off.
Not much else to report except that the 11 year old was an enthusiastic, if uncoordinated dancer and during much of the concert I feared for my safety and was almost certain I would come out of there with a black eye at minimum. The most embarrassing thing would of course be explaining it; "so you got the black eye when an 11 year old girl hit you at a Bon Jovi concert?"
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