Post by buddymo on Jun 1, 2010 8:41:26 GMT -5
charlemagne420: You might have me in mind when you mention people irritated by the drunk couple leaning against you making out. I was right in front of Steve too--the short guy in the green Comas t-shirt (are you the blond guy who looks like Mark Ibold from Pavement?). I've been going to shows for 20+ years and have never been so bothered by other concert goers as I was by the drunk couple making out and leaning against people who clearly didn't want them leaning against them. I especially felt bad for a young girl at the very front, who told me beforehand it was her first THS show, and who was constantly bedeviled by the young couple who didn't care that they were the only people in our area who wanted to be "people touching people." I tried to tolerate them as best I could until the female half of the careless couple, swinging herself around madly, managed to headbutt me the likes of which I've never been headbutted before. "It was OK in the end" and all, but here's how I recorded the events upon my return home:
Dear 21-year-old blonde, drunk and cocaine-addled girls with braces of the world: please do not stand right behind me at the Hold Steady show with your equally drunk and cocaine-addled white-belted, skinny-jeaned, 5”4’ tall boyfriend and ruin the first 2/3rds of my evening by dancing so carelessly that you are constantly elbowing me in the back and kicking me in the shins, until I have to grab you and shout “COOL IT. YOU NEED TO CHILL OUT!!” and then about ten minutes later, still dancing, bash your head into the back of my head, causing me tremendous pain, such that I grab your boyfriend and shout at him “YOU NEED TO REIN IN YOUR GIRLFRIEND NOW! SHE JUST BASHED ME IN THE SKULL AND I’M PISSED OFF ABOUT IT!!”, at which point you control yourself for about 15 minutes but then eventually try to pick my back pocket as a way of making fun of me, the old grumpy guy at the front of the stage at the Hold Steady show who doesn’t want anybody to touch him (what a loser), after which I shoot you yet another murderous look, and then about five minutes after that, during “Hurricane J”, you reach around from behind me and put your drugstore sunglasses on top of my head, as yet another way of making fun of me, at which point I decide to just embrace the annoyance and absurdity of the whole thing and put the sunglasses on my face for the remainder of the song, to which I am pogoing and singing along at top volume, after which I put them back on your face and say to you, kindly, gently even, “You’re silly!”, only a few minutes after which your coked-out boyfriend (no offense to coked-out people intended) and I are next to each other singing together blissfully along to “Massive Nights” as if we were best friends while you are grabbing my ass, and then you and he move back into the crowd so that you are neither in my peripheral vision nor in my thoughts for the last third of the evening, which I enjoyed a lot more, but then made a point of finding you on the way out to say, in a really friendly way, actually, “Wow, you guys were annoying. I’ve only yelled at people like that maybe twice before in my entire life, and I’m old,” after which you smile and say, in the manner of Chrissy from “Three’s Company,” “We were making fun of you!” and your boyfriend gives me a bro-hug, and I say “You guys be careful on the way home” and then you both say “Bye! Have a good night!”, because we’ve somehow established some friendly bar-band détente, after which I make my way of out of the Variety Playhouse, making sure to recycle my two cans of Bud Light and one can of Miller Lite on the way out the door. Thank you.
Wow. That couple did indeed suck, but they were out of my mind by the time I got home. Never thought I'd see such prose devoted to them.