I have been a police fan since the early 80's. In fact, they were one of the first cassette tapes I owned. I remember the Christmas well - I received a silver Sears brand boom box complete with cassette deck and 4 cassette tapes; The Fixx's Reach the Beach, Bruce Springstein's Born in the USA, The Cars self titled album and finally The Police and Synchronicity.
I loved Synchronicity. I remember spending hours in my various middle school classes scrawling The Police on my folder. When that got old I recall having to learn how to spell my first big word S-y-n-c-h-r-o-n-i-c-i-t-y. I was so proud.
Sadly, this was to be the farewell album for The Police. And I, like many in my generation, did not have the opportunity to see them in concert. Sure I rented the Police VHS concert videos and imagined what it would have been like to go. And yes, I did go to a couple Sting concerts but that was yuppie jazz compared to the raw energy power of the original trio of Stewart, Andy, and Sting.
So when I heard that The Police had set a date to appear in Minnesota for their reunion tour. I was all over it. I happened to already be a member of Best Buy's Reward Zone program which gave me the opportunity to purchase tickets a whole 4 days earlier than the general public. I was stoked.
Jenn and I talked it over and decided that of the 3 price ranges offered for tickets, we were comfortable with the mid-range ones.
At precisely 10 am on 2-28 I excitedly logged onto www.ticketmaster.com/thepolice and put in my super secret rewardzone code and search for the best available $90 tickets. Minutes later, at 10:02 am, I received a response from ticketmaster that there were no seats available in the price range I was interested in. Odd, I thought to myself. I can hardly believe that all of the Best Buy mid-dollar amount seats would have sold out in 2 minutes. So I repeated the process to no avail.
"No seats available" it read on my screen
Again I tried but again met with only despair and the message "No seats available"
I began to panic. I switched my selection criteria to see if any seats were available at any price... And tada! Two seats pop-up on my screen. My heart raced, I could hear the blood rushing through my veins. "I am going to see The Police!" I felt like that little kid back in middle school, daydreaming of being in not just any rock band but THE rock band.
I took a closer look at my screen. The two-seats available were not the cheap seats...Just the opposite they were the Ultra crazy way-out-of-our-price-range variety seats. But still reeling from my momentary endorphine rush I called Jenn to get the okay from the wife before jumping off the deep-end and spending more on two concert tickets than I ever have. She balked at first, but I could tell in her voice that she was experiencing the same "Police fever" as myself. Quickly we were both in free fall off of the cliffs of insanity. "Okay, let's do it." She replied.
Minutes later, I had the confirmation that my credit card would require a second mortage to pay off the balance. The hysteria was now tempered somewhat. Yes, I was going to see the one band I thought I would never get to see. Yes, I was still excited, but at what cost? I assumed for the price we will be personally escorted back-stage and get to party with the band...after reading the fine print, however, I soon realized that this was not the case. Just a regular old seat stage right. Still I don't regret my impulse buy. I just wish I could have seen them play in the 80's when good concert tickets were just a little bit more expensive than going out to eat. C'est la vie.
No comments:
Post a Comment