I have very little patience with the public at large, and even less if it’s after 9 p.m.
I used to go out a lot. I mean, like a lot a lot. At the time, it was fun - although I haven’t always been the most tolerant person when out and about. I don’t take too kindly to rude people cutting in line, pushing, shoving, spilling, etc… You name it, it irks me. My attitude also gets exponentially worse if the excursion in question is a concert of some sort. I swear to God, if your drunk ass steps on me or dances into me I will slap you in the back of the head. I’ve done it before and I have witnesses.
While I freely admit that I am cranky, I’m not as bad as the old dude I once sat in front of at a Sting concert who told me and my friend to sit down because he “couldn’t see the musician.”
As you can imagine, it takes something very special, plus a stick of dynamite, to get me out of the house and into a club. I can honestly think of about five bands that would have me excited about going out. Then the unthinkable happened: my favorite band was playing in Kansas City. At nine o'clock. At night. On a Thursday. Now, I know what you are thinking. No way! Not nine o’clock on a school night, a good 45 minutes away from home! But, I was willing to stretch out of my comfort zone (not to be confused with its cousin, the Danger Zone) to see The Dandy Warhols. I could go on and on as to why my love for them is so great, but I won’t. Let’s just say that I haven’t had a proper favorite band since Duran Duran in junior high, so when I fell under their spell in 2000, I was due.
With dreams of Dandy’s dancing in my head and dinner plans with friends, we made the trip into KC. Actually everything, amazingly, went according to plan and we had a lovely dinner right next to the venue and strolled over just to catch the last couple of songs of the opening band (which let’s face it, is the best way to watch an opening band). I even saw Zia McCabe in the crowd before the show and watched as some other nutty fan tackled her for a picture. She was gracious to the crazy-lady and I shot Mark a nasty look because he’d talked me out of bringing my camera. “I could have been crazy, too,” I wailed.The club wasn’t packed, so we picked out a nice, neutral spot toward the back. I thought, “this is the smallest crowd that I’ve ever seen them in, it’s going to be awesome.” The sentence still hung over my head, like in one of those cartoon thought bubbles, when I saw Mark make a horrible face. It like he was trying to laugh and go to sleep while not breathing all at once. I asked what his damage was, to which his only reply was to cough and point to the guys in front of us. I still didn’t understand and my newly-purchased ear plugs weren’t helping our communication at all. Mark leaned over to me and yelled “you can’t smell that?” Right as I heard the word “that” I smelled it. My first reaction was to ask, “who ate a 7-Eleven microwavable burrito before the show?”
Naturally, the two dudes standing directly in front of us took the blame. When it happened again a few minutes later, Mark and I decided to escape by checking out the merch table. Finally, the Dandy’s came onstage, and we cautiously ventured back to our spots, this time upwind from the suspects. Two songs later, we were still getting pummeled by burrito farts, but I noticed that the two guys we’d pinned the crime on were gone. In the empty space where they’d been standing was a lone curly headed mop-top swaying back and forth. He looked like a short version of Shaggy in cargo shorts and Birkenstocks.
My first thought was, “wow, what’s he doing here?” I mean, I don’t really associate hippies with the Dandy’s, because if I did I wouldn’t be a fan. Also, this particular show had the highest concentration of people in glasses that I’d ever seen anywhere. Except for maybe the optometrist, but even then you’ve got a couple of people wearing contacts. It was like a hipster-Poindexter convention, so you can see why Scooby-Doo might have seemed a little out of place.
Right about then I noticed the girl next to me, oddly enough not wearing glasses. She was squealing and literally, jumping with joy. She kept flinging her hands out toward the stage, then grabbing her hair and saying, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.” I thought to myself, “girly calm down, it ain’t the Beatles.” But that was just the beginning. I don’t know if you’ve ever witnessed someone trying to have sex with another person from 40 feet away, but thanks to this girl, now I have. She gyrated, blew kisses, dry humped the air, flung her hair around like it was a Poison video and kept reaching out toward the stage. Maybe it’s me, but if you are clearly with your boyfriend I think that it might be a little inappropriate to try and distance-fuck the singer of a band.
As entertaining she was, I found myself paying more attention to her than the band, so I decided to move. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this put me in direct firing line of burrito boy. I seriously don’t know what he ate, but I wanted to tap him on the shoulder and suggest that he see a doctor. Eventually, Mark and I moved a good distance from Shaggy, but not before we noticed that he’d successfully crop dusted the entire area around him. No one was even standing remotely close to him, and just about everyone was in hysterics. I mean, at a certain point, it has to become funny, right?
Just as we’d let down our olfactory guard, the band started playing my favorite song. I guess Shaggy had quietly moved closer to us, because just as I got excited and began to sing along, I stopped dead in my tracks. I’d waited two hours and spent $20 to have this douche fart on my beloved song. I was super-pissed, but laughing anyway, when I thought about the wise words of an old friend, “don’t smile, or it will get on your teeth,” and I covered my mouth.
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