I feel a bit groggy and I have started to get wrinkles in the corners of my eyes. Maybe turning 26 on Friday prompted the aging over night or maybe it was the 4 AM bedtime after the Jones Beach show. I'm not a person that worries about wrinkles. I look forward to the days when I will look older than 16, maybe people will start treating me like an adult then.
Last night was the Jones Beach show at the Nikon Amphitheater on Long Island. Honestly, I was pretty disappointed. Evan and I both talked for days about that show. We mainly worried over the number of people that would be interested in compensated tickets. There were all of the industry people; Evan's band members, producer, booking agent, management, etc. And then there were our friends that we wanted to see again. We tried to be responsible and choose 10 people to comp that made the most sense for Evan professionally.
The clock was ticking as we slowly made our way through Brooklyn traffic. I was panicked that we would be late to the show and anxious that the airbags would deploy at any moment as we fought back against the New York Drivers. As the day passed, so did the people we invited to the show. Everyone was bailing on us! In trepidation, we sent out text messages inviting anyone that could make it to the show free tickets.
It should be noted that the NY Driver, if you have never encountered one, maintains an offense game when operating a vehicle. I can't be sure about their exact psyche so I will guess. The New Yorker desperately clutches to the illusion that by arriving 3 seconds ahead of all other vehicles to wait at a red light that they have an advantage. What ever it is they crave, (wealth, intelligence, popularity, beauty) speed apparently is the key to unlocking this desire. Therefore, the faster one is the sooner one will arrive at said objective. This not only works when a New Yorker is in a vehicle, this same principle can be applied to getting on the subway, hailing a cab, bicycling and even walking. The whole population of 8 million New Yorkers are constantly pushing to get onto an arriving train, standing farther into the road than the person next to them to hail a cab, or screaming out for people to 'get their heads out of their asses' while running down pedestrians on a bicycle. The concept of 'dog-eat-dog world' has never been truer than in New York.
We arrived to the Nikon Jones Beach theatre with enough time for Evan to sound check. Our guest list consisted of our friends Brett, Dave and Foster. Quite the understatement from the tormented weeks over the guest list. We also discovered that since the theater is in a State Park, it is a dry venue. Therefore, most of the audience stayed in the parking lot to drink in their cars instead of sitting in their seats promptly at 7:30 PM. The 11,000 seats occupied less than 1,000 butts when Evan hit the stage.
It was a disappointment, the entire feel of the venue was not what I had expected. The lack of alcohol meant patrons weren't motivated to leave their cars and when they found their seats, there wasn't the temptation of buying a beer to get them back up again. Evan stood out by the merchandise table to sign CDs after his show but there were only a handful of people in the entire breezeway. I guess the takeaway from this experience is when you have expectations it is easy to be disappointed.
We left around 9:30 PM and headed north to stay with our friend Brett. We filled our disappointment with good beer and whiskey and defiantly stayed up late listening to records. Ultimately, it was nice to be back in our old stomping grounds of Westchester.
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