Legacy Writing 365:347

Wednesday night I couldn’t stop laughing when reading the feeds for the Twitter trending topics while the 121212 concert for Hurricane Sandy relief was being shown live worldwide. No one would call a lot of the talent hot and happening, and there seemed to be a universal consensus that Roger Daltry needed to button his shirt. But I think classic rock and roll transcends generations, plus I suspect the organizers were aiming for a demographic who’d be willing and able to donate. I had no complaints because I saw some of my favorite performers and heard some of my favorite music. I even forgave them for including Roger Waters because Eddie Vedder sang “Comfortably Numb” with him. (This is no judgment against the music of Pink Floyd. That music just happens to be irrevocably tied to a bad time in my life.)

I relished every bit of Sir Paul McCartney’s performance, and dang, he and the reunited Nirvana sounded kickass together. Plus Michael Stipe made a surprise appearance to sing with Chris Martin, and I love R.E.M. and don’t hate Coldplay, so that was cool.

But really, what will always make me giddy is seeing that no matter how old the Rolling Stones get, Mick Jagger still struts like it’s 19-sixty-something, and good on him. I’ve seen the Rolling Stones live twice. The first time was in 1989 for the Steel Wheels Tour. Here’s the ticket, and forget everything else except THAT TICKET PRICE!

Just for the sake of comparison, if you’d been able to buy a ticket directly from New Jersey’s Prudential Center for the Stones’ December 13, 2012, show there, you possibly could have gotten it for $95, if all those tickets hadn’t already been purchased by resellers. If you tried to buy one right now, the cheapest seat in a section similar to my seat is $373.

Sure, my seat was “limited view,” and by limited view, they meant, “You will be sitting so high in the Astrodome that you’ll be required to shoot a beam from the top of your head to warn away aircraft approaching Hobby Airport. But whatever, it was the ROLLING STONES, and they had huge screens so I never missed a minute of Charlie Watts looking dapper and cool, Ron Wood looking like Rod Stewart with dark hair, Bill Wyman looking like Bill Wyman, Keith Richards looking–yep, still dead–and Mick looking like a rooster on speed.

I don’t remember when we bought our tickets, but we already had them when I began working at the bookstore that fall. I was sitting in the office with our manager, Tim W, and the other assistant, Christine, and they were telling me horror stories about what the holiday retail season would be like and how we’d be working all the time, etc., and I said, “I don’t care. I can work as much as you want me to, but I have to be off the night of November 8 because that’s the Rolling Stones concert.”

Up to that point, Christine and I had gotten along like gangbusters, but at that moment, fire came to her eyes. See, I liked the Rolling Stones, but what I didn’t know was that Christine and her husband John LOVED the Rolling Stones, probably more than I ever loved any band, maybe even the Beatles. They probably did NOT have limited view seats, and they probably paid a lot more for their tickets than we did. And here was this new assistant manager asking for the one night off that Christine had counted on getting.

For a few moments, I feared for my life, then Tim W said, “No problem. I’ll work that night and do the turnaround.” (Turnaround being our term for what ‘Nathan calls “clopen”: close that night, open the next morning.)

“I’ll be glad to work the morning shift on the eighth so Christine can be scheduled off!” I hastened to say.

So it all worked out, and Christine and John remain in our lives all these years later, and I still adore them, and I still poke Christine with a stick about Keith Richards being dead every chance I get.

This is me, sitting at the desk in the bookstore office. Christine is in red, and the girl in green–or is it blue?–is Alison, who was in high school then and working part time. Alison was British but had no accent unless I begged her to, and I used to call her my daughter, even though I’d have had to have given birth to her very young. I wish I had photos of all my favorite people from Bookstop, but those were the days before digital cameras, film was expensive, and if you knew what my salary was then, you’d wonder why no one put on a concert called Becky Aid.