Adele in Montreal (and a Little Life Lesson for Your Hostess)

I had bought tickets to the Montreal Adele show in February at the pre-sale as soon as they were made available to the Adele nerds. However, when the day for the show arrived last week -- a Monday which was really inconvenient for a middle aged woman with two half grown kids and a job to be at on Monday and again on Tuesday morning -- I almost balked. I had also bought a ticket for my friend "Splenda" whom I successfully coerced her into going to the last Adele show in Montreal a couple of years ago and a good time was had by all.

Well, now both of us are just that much older and it was raining and the kids had evening activities and blah blah. I sat in my office that Monday at lunchtime, as the time for my departure approached thinking, Where the hell am I going to park? (Montreal has the most confusing parking signs in the world and I had never been to the venue) and it's such a hassle going over the border these days - the friendly, easy days of back and forth to Canada a distant memory (at least some of the time) maybe I should just bail.

Then I picked myself up and said "that is ass." (As is, stupid, ridiculous old codger thinking). I got my umbrella (the good kind of old codger thinking) and left the building.

The drive up was in its rainy spring way, lovely. The border, a breeze (I think Adele's tour had come through the same point earlier in the day - no questions about my plans to attend her concert). I had memorized a Google map of the location of the theater and I pulled my minivan into the space in front of Adele's tour bus at around 4:30 PM. No problem. I figured out the parking meter - which can be paid with a credit card. (Montreal is forward thinking kind of city. I love that).

I walked around the corner and picked up tickets at will-call. It was three hours 'til the doors would open, but already a small crowd was huddling at the door. The venue was a standing-room-only deal - an old movie theatre where all the floor seats had been removed. This meant that the first ones in would get to stand right up by the stage. Fan that I am, three hours in the rain and wind (it was about 55 degrees) was too much for me.

Splenda called my cell to relate her plans for getting her kids to the places that they had to go and for working her way downtown. Clearly, she was pressed. I told her not to worry about me. I have always wanted to try the uniquely Quebec fast food place, La Belle Province, and there was one next to the theater. I ate a gyro (they love Greek food in Montreal) and a pile of delicious French fries (greasy with the sweetish ketchup favored by French Canadians) and read the weekly arts paper. By the time I had worked my way to the not-so-veiled ads for prostitutes at the back of the paper, I had managed to occupy myself that way til about 6. I thought I would walk around the city a little but as I passed the theater, the line had gotten much longer, snaking around the corner. I had thought that, rain and wind or no, I had better get in it.

Two guys were walking up and down the line trying to buy tickets. They had been going for about $300 a piece on Ebay the week before. No one was selling. Least of all, me. Splenda called and said she was taking her son to his diving class and then her daughter was going to her mother's house. It was rush hour. She would be a while. I asked her to top off my meter when she got downtown. I was in line and not moving. She couldn't believe it. "It's still nearly two hours til they open the doors!" She felt bad. Twenty minutes later she called again and gave me carte blanche to sell her ticket. I told her I really didn't want to do that - I wanted her to come, but I also didn't want to twist her arm. We went back and forth on this for a few minutes - she said she wanted to come but she didn't want to cost me a payday. I stood my ground. She was coming.

Splenda arrived, with parking meter money in hand, about 7 PM. (She told me that if you have the number of your parking space you can top up you meter at any of the pay stations around town). She also said that her next door neighbors who are also two of her favorite people, Marc and Marco, had tickets for the show. She called them and moments later they appeared and joined us in line (which had by then stretched to the southern horizon). M & M were fetching and friendly, so waiting that last half hour or so turned into a bit of a party.

When the doors opened, we were sufficiently near the front of the line (owing to my stakeout) to have our choice of positions in the theater. Marc and Marco I went right to the front of the stage while Splenda bought us a drink at the bar. When I turned to examine the room, however, I saw there was a balcony - with seats! I told Marc I was going to see if I could get a few. (I had already been standing for two hours and it was at least an hour before the show would start). I ran up the stairs and, yes, got seats just behind the rail. Splenda came moments later with a vodka tonic. (Can you see where this is going?) Marc and Marco (who are very fit) decided to stay in the mosh pit.

OK. If there is anything better than sitting with a great friend in a comfortable theater seat and sipping a vodka tonic while you wait for your favorite singer to do a show, let me know.

The opening act came on at 8:30: a boy/girl duo from Alabama called "the Civil Wars." They sang brilliant harmonies and the girl was very Montrealaise in a short black dress and heels. They were playful. The crowd was in a great, appreciative mood and ate them up. It was love.

Then, at last, came Adele. Now that I have pounded you with a blow by blow of the preconcert details, I'll just leave you by way of a review with the comment I left on the Adele website the day after her show and an email exchange between Splenda and I.

The comment:

Dearest Darling Adele - It was my privilege to be part of the crowd last night in Montreal. That word "magic" gets thrown around a lot, but last night was the real thing - a regular alchemical romance, We all loved the Civil Wars (could you tell?). Your band was brilliant and, of course, you looked beautiful and you sang us all up, up, and away! After the show, my friends and I stood out on the sidewalk and tried to process our excitement like the grown ups we are - but more or less failed. We just stood there trying to recover our wits and pinching ourselves. Bless you. Take care of yourself. Thank you (and your mom!).

(NB. Despite my leaving ingratiating suck-up comments like this for A on a couple occasions she has yet to reply. Oh well.)

The email exchange between Splenda and I a Few Days Later:

(From me)

Hi Dear -

I am just back from the Spring Concert at [the Understudy's school] - which I have mentally renamed "Lilly White Middle and High School." I actually like these school concerts because the kids are so putting themselves out there and are generally adorable. I remembered something I read by Margaret Atwood years ago - she had given some kind of graduation speech at a HS in Ontario and she wrote about how all the graduates were beautiful, even the ones who didn't think they were good looking (just by virtue of their youth). Anyway, I am putting this concert down in my book of recent live performances. I have been processing the Adele show since we left. Marc "friended" me the next day and sent me some pictures of A just as I was posting a fawning fan comment on her website (telepathy?) I saw a review from the Toronto show that she did the next night. They had bumped up the venue to some 6,000 seat arena and the reviewer thought (and Adele said) she was nervous. I think we may have gotten her best night....

(From S)

I have been meaning to sit down and compose my ENORMOUS thank you for what may be the best concert of my not so young life! :) and apparently she upgraded to the ACC the next day which has a capacity of 18K ... so depending on the configuration, we had BY FAR the better show! by FAR!


When I got back to the minivan after the show, I saw that Adele had been issued a whopping big ticket. I mean the piece of paper was 8 1/2 by 11! I assume the fine matched (thanks to Splenda I was still in good parking graces). However many hundreds of dollars that ticket must have been, I am sure she would be happy to pay it. She said (and seemed to mean) that we were the best crowd of the tour so far.

So, there you have it. You would think I would have learned by now that any effort that takes me out of my Hobbit-like ways is always repaid. Apparently, I need frequent reminders.

So, I Just Came In from Walking the Dog...

and there was my 13-year-old daughter, coming out of the bathroom, with a spray bottle of window cleaner and a rag.

Me: "Were you cleaning?"

(I had left no instructions to this effect and it has never happened spontaneously before).

Her: "Yes."

Me: "Why?"

Her: "I went and got my make up [I had spotted the case open on the living room floor] and when I picked up my nail polish it smelled like anus. So I cleaned the nail polish bottle. Then, I picked up the case, and it smelled like anus, along with everything around it. So I cleaned it...

And then I died a little inside."

I loved that.


...

While we're on the topic, sort of...

A few months ago, Shackleton was ravening to become a Cub Scout. A notice had come home from school about an organizational meeting. Of course. Cub Scouts. You're 9. Why not?

It was fall and dark came early. A group of us potential cub scout parents, none of whom knew one another, filled out a form and then sat in a strangely unconvivial silence around the school cafeteria tables listening to the man who was spearheading the Cub Scout effort. There was no pack at our school, he explained, though Cub Scouts were big in both the neighboring towns. He was willing to change that for boys in his son's grade. (Someone else would have to handle kids in the other grades.) He had been more or less forced into this, he said, by his young son and his wife, on account of the fact that his older son had achieved Eagle Scout. The Eagle Scout had come up through the ranks from Cub Scout to Eagle Scout. He told us about Eagle Scouts and the high proportion, for instance, of U.S. Presidents and FBI agents who had once been Eagle Scouts - of course all of them had once been Cub Scouts. He had a fact sheet on this to hand out.

Now,I have known one or two Eagle Scouts and they were perfectly lovely and Scouting has worked great good for many people, I know, but FBI agent is really not what we're going for here. The thing that I am most proud about for my own kids is that they are not mean to other children or animals and that they say funny things. (See above).

We went with Karate lessons and guitar for Shack.

Royal Wedding

We stumbled into the Royal Wedding yesterday morning. I mean the TV broadcast, of course - not the real thing. (My sister told me today that she has determined via ancestry.com that we are 40th generation descendants from Henry III - but thank God we didn't get invited as really I had nothing to wear).

The kids and I had somehow failed to register that the wedding was scheduled for yesterday, but we were all excited to find that the usual local morning news team from Plattsburgh had been displaced by K & W. I got ready for work and school to the sound of prayers and hymns and vows, stealing looks at K & W, and Elton John, and the Queen and the top, bottom, sides of Westminster Abbey while I brushed my hair and teeth and packed Shack's backpack.

And wasn't it all lovely? When we talked about it at work, everyone was smiling. The newscasters were smiling when they reported it all. I stopped for coffee at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and the staff had a handwritten sign on the counter extending best wishes to "our friends Will and Kate."

I am sure that the usual too-smart, too-cool, too-egalitarian bores are taking all this adulation as evidence that the rest of us are even stupider, more gullible and more venal than they had previously believed. But screw them. Some of them are boors, all of them are tedious, and that is worse than almost anything they can say about us.

Anyway, it got me thinking again about the Queen. (Sorry, I'll try to be brief!) With my Canadian legal education, I was more or less forced to learn about the centrality to the common law of the English monarch. She is - among other things, of course - a stand-in for the whole country. She is them. They are her. (Sort of like, you know, the Jesus model). I don't think this is a notion that gets a lot of official reinforcement these days, but it is bred in the bone over there and it will out. Like when the Heir Apparent gets married to a beautiful young woman. Hurray for all of us! Even all of us who just wish them well from afar.

Now We Are 46...

There's an A.A. Milne joke in there somewhere. I am feeling sort of decrepit.

In the background today I have been playing (though not really watching) a Gregory Peck retrospective on Turner Classic Movies. Great Cold War stuff. I remember the Cold War - or at least a big chunk of it toward the end. Sigh. Well, my recollections do not go so far back as the last horrible movie (Gregory miscast as a hard-boiled smart-aleck army officer who keeps referring to "dames" and calling a nurse "nursey"). It was somewhat redeemed by the hats and the haircuts. And GP's perfect posture.

I have stolen an hour to post a new picture or two and just to say hello. The banner is fresh from today - taken when Maisy and I stole a walk to the river to look at how it has changed in the last few days into a sinister brown lake. The first warm days of spring have just arrived here in the far north, along with floods. Nothing like the weather disasters in the deep south, though. (The older I get the more I feel the horror of natural disasters. Maybe that's progress?)

It's strange here after this punishing winter to feel a wind blowing soft instead of with a knife edge. Here's another picture from the back field that I took today. I fiddled with the greenness a bit but it is morally correct if not completely photographically correct. See you soon. Thanks for looking in.

What Have You Been Doing?

I made a resolution this year to see more live entertainment. So far, I have seen Cloris Leachman do her one-woman show at the new Performing Arts Center in Stowe. (In a word, Fabulous). I have seen David Sedaris do a reading in the a restored Vaudeville palace in my hometown of Schenectady (also Fabulous). I won tickets to see Janis Ian (remember that song "17"?) with Tom Paxton (I knew the name but wasn't sure why), also in Stowe. I won two tickets so I invited (well, "dragged") the Understudy (now 13) along. I told her to imagine she was going to see Lady Gaga but Tom Paxton and Janis were both closing on 70 and Tom, in particular, had arrived apparently arrived in Stowe via teleporter from 1969 (complete with Greek Fisherman's Cap) singing songs (for example) about the depridations of mountain top mining. "Oh they took off the top of the mountain and it will never be the same, oh for shame, do si do" variety. I was slightly charmed by the throwback nature of this and his apparent sincerity. Also, Janis was a surprisingly impressive blues guitarist. She also sang a funny song for openers about her Canadian wedding with her long-time partner and got heckled by a drunk (Not done in Vermont!). So, that gave the concert a bit of a fear factor/civil rights uplift as the audience clapped down the drunk.
So, I was enjoying the show, but at intermission, the Understudy made it clear she would never forgive me if I made her miss Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock to see the end of the concert, so we had to go. (OK, I also wanted to see those TV shows but I would have stayed if she hadn't moved me on).

Next month it's Adele in Montreal. I am the biggest Adele nerd in the state of Vermont and I bought these tickets at the pre-sale event for Adele nerds. I see they are now up to $200 apiece on Ebay but of course nobody is getting mine. I'll let you know how it goes.

It's Here...

The Best of the Last House 2005 - 2011 by KSV Woolfoot | Make Your Own Book

I haven't been writing much because I have been working on my "blook."

It's as done as it is going to get. I think the widget above makes it possible to order a copy. You may need to cash in a mutual fund or something but they are nicely printed. Or come visit and I'll show you the ones I bought.

XXOO

Have You Heard the One About A Horse Who Goes Into A Bar?

I have a new teenager in my house. The developments have been predictable. (Me: "You're not wearing that to school!") Luckily, so far at least our senses of humor have not diverged. Also a plus is that the Understudy has become the family IT department (Me: "Can you set this up to print wirelessly?") and also an internet gold miner. Here's a link to her Tumblr blog, which is a lot of fun. She found this joke out there and I asked her to send it on to me for re-blogging purposes. We both laughed at this one:


A horse walks into a bar. The bartender asks “Why the long face?”.

The horse does not respond because it is a horse. It can neither speak nor understand
English. It is confused by its surroundings and gallops out of the bar, knocking
over a few tables.

heh heh heh.