I had the best concert experience a couple of months ago.
If it hasn’t become abundantly clear yet, I love Dave
Matthews Band, and this year I had the wonderful opportunity to travel to
Raleigh and stay with my best friend from grad school and her family the week
DMB was playing at Walnut Creek. And this concert was nothing short of magical.
I should mention first that people in the South are just
plain nice. Everyone smiles and is courteous and makes sure you’re having a
great day, and as a native Manhattanite used to a general air of menacing
disinterest from passers-by this is a truly amazing experience. I often feel
very awkward when I have my walker and people go out of their way to hold the
door for me because it reminds me of yet another way I can’t function the way I
used to, but in the South they do it because it’s what they do for everyone.
Because it’s a nice thing to do. Seriously. They’re that nice.
I don’t know if it’s because it’s in the South where people
are nice or if some awesome person cared enough to do something, but Walnut
Creek Amphitheatre has an amazing setup for people with accessibility needs. At
the main entrance there was a golf cart ready to drive people down to the
seating area rather than making us walk. A lovely lady passing by even stopped
to help load on my walker because, as she told me, her nan uses a walker and
she hopes that people offer to help her out like that. The ADA section was set
perfectly at the ledge over a walkway that went a good 5’ below so that
everyone could see the stage at all times without standing up. I made concert
friends with the woman next to me (who also uses a walker – yay, having someone
my age to talk to about walker issues!) and her husband, as well as the
pleasantly amusingly drunk woman to my left. Then the concert began.
At the beginning of the second set my seatmates encouraged
me to leave my muticoloured flower lights (which I had used to plow through the
crowds so I could get to the bathroom in one piece) on for the rest of the
show. Despite feeling rather self-conscious, I let them shine for all to see.
And apparently they were visible, as toward the end of the main concert a
gentleman waved from the walkway below to get my attention, then handed me a
piece of paper.
It was the set list.
For those of you who don’t understand how absolutely amazing
this is… They probably print two copies of the thing, and after concert fans
will fight tooth and nail to get to the roadies who are cleaning up and see if
they can get one of the lists. But here I was, being handed what in many fans’
eyes would be considered the Holy Grail.
I would like to say that I handled myself with utmost
decorum. I would love to say that I
politely thanked the man, tucked it away, and spent the rest of the show
quietly enjoying myself. But then I’d not just be telling a slight mistruth, I’d
be lying out my ass. After a moment of dumbfounded shock, I started screaming
“HOLY SHIT! IT’S THE SET LIST! I GOT THE SET LIST!” At high volume. Repeatedly.
After a moment I motioned to the bemused man to come up so I
could give him the biggest hug. After he’d regained all of the breath I’d
squeezed out of him, he told me that he was Boyd Tinsley’s vocal coach, and
he’d wanted me to have the set list because he’d seen me rocking out from all
the way up there on the stage. I bounced around uncontrollably for a moment out
of excitement because I am a tremendous fan of Boyd Tinsley (to the point of
trying to always have seats on his side of the stage so I can watch him play). After
the giddy bouncing subsided I asked the lovely gentleman for a favour and told
him my sad, sad story of woe from last summer.
*cue magical mystical music
that always implies a flashback in cheesy sitcoms*
Last summer my then-roommate and I had front-row tickets to
see DMB when they came to Pittsburgh. That’s right, front row, directly behind
the pit, less than 30 feet away from where Boyd always stands. It was amazing. At
the end when Carter was throwing out drumsticks I started waving my cane so
he’d see me and throw me a stick. Which he did, or at least he tried. He
pointed at me, then tossed a drumstick which I would have caught had I not been
knocked to the ground by two college-aged girls from the seats behind us in
their attempt to get the sticks. While they gloated about how they’d been able
to catch drumsticks two nights in a row, I was being helped up by a couple of
guys who’d actually jumped over the barrier from the pit to help me out. And as
if that wasn’t bad enough, I got banged up badly enough from their slamming
into me that at the end of the night I had to be pushed out of the venue in a
wheelchair. Since then I’d been trying unsuccessfully to get a stick thrown my
way again so I could at least get a fighting chance at snagging one without
worrying about breaking a bone…
I told Boyd’s coach all this, and asked if he could have
Carter throw one my way. I didn’t need to catch it, I just wanted the
opportunity to try. He laughed and said he couldn’t make any promises, but he
would try his best.
For the rest of the concert I sat quietly and enjoyed
myself bounced around in my chair and checked on my set list just to make
sure it was real, smugly superior in the knowledge of what the encore was going
to be, a fact no one else in the entire 20,000+ person audience knew. And at
the very end of the encore, Carter did his thing, waving at fans, shaking
hands, tossing out drumsticks to those who were fairly close to the stage.
Then he pointed at me, and made a motion that as a rabid
football fan I easily interpreted to mean “Go long!”
And he hurled it.
Time stood still as this yellow drumstick, this golden
prize, came flying at me, arcing high over the crowd. There was nobody behind
me to knock me down! Everybody knew it was heading for me! MY TIME HAD FINALLY
COME! Flying, flying, flying…
And it missed me and fell three feet short of my arm’s reach
into the walkway below.
Have I mentioned yet how gosh darn nice people are in the
South? Had this happened here, someone would have grabbed that stick and run. But
not so in Raleigh! A man who’d seen the whole thing and knew that drumstick was
intended for me ran over, grabbed it, and… handed it up to me.
I feel like I just wrote the script to some sappy feel-good
movie, because life never has a happy ending like that, but I guess that’s the
South for you. In any case, after bouncing and screaming and acting like a caffeinated
two-year-old, I very carefully cradled that drumstick in my hands from Raleigh
to DC to Pittsburgh. The drumstick, set list, and Warehouse ticket (Holy
trinity?) are now in a picture box on my living room wall, and I could not be
happier.
So thank you, Walnut Creek Amphitheatre, for being welcoming
to those with disabilities. Thank you, Boyd Tinsley’s vocal coach, for making a
dream come true. And thank you, The South, for being pretty darn awesome.
