One in Every Crowd

It's not hard for me to find a character anywhere I go. Concerts though, are just a gold mine for me. You've got the regular groupies, the annoying spouses who couldn't let their significant other out of sight for the night, and then the best of them all: the posers. The other night I had the great pleasure of going to the Eagles concert here in Columbia. Yes, that's right, one of rock 'n roll's greatest bands of all times decided to make a stop in little Columbia, MO. An even greater pleasure was that I sat in floor seats. Awesome seats come with many awesome perks. One of those perks is filtering out some of the crazies. While I do enjoy a good fun crazy just about always, I hate the dark crazies. Those are the ones who have a bit of a temper with their neurosis, and a situation can easily go from entertaining to frightening tension real fast. Since my luck has never been one to fail me, I wound up with a dark crazy directly sitting in front of me at the Eagles concert. Waving her hand in the air like she just don't care and all.

You know your seat neighbor is going to be peace obstructer when she busts into her row and the first thing she does is scream "WOOOOO!" and then looks over at you stating "I hope you don't mind, but we're going to be up dancing the whole time!" and then does a shimmy in her cable cord knit sweater and collared shirt. So even though the Eagles started the show with their slower classics such as "Hotel California," I got to see a unique rendition of the head bang and churn-the-butter move. A floor has never seen such happy feet since the days of Fred Flintstone. I had no idea someone could be this big of an Eagles fan. Which is when I realized she clearly was anything but the president of their fan club for a couple of reasons: 1. She could not ever detect the rhythm of their music, and looked as if she had never heard it to detect it, and 2. She informed my sisters and I that we were too young to even know who the Eagles were. Lady, any self-respecting new driver has heard the song "Life in the Fast Lane," and instantly considered themselves a new driver. She clearly had no idea the kind of music the Eagles played to be dancing the way she was, and had no idea the breadth of their audience to question my attendance at this show.

I decided I was going to let it go. I remembered, I was in a town that gets a concert as big as this once in a blue moon. I could let her try to relive the good ol' days for a bit. That is until she decided the fun and good times were over. While enjoying the first set of the second half, a most unusual of hand waves came from my favorite J.Crew wearing classic rock groupie poser. It was from the seated position, with two arms straight up in the air, and two middle fingers sticking straight out with repetitive pulses. It was interesting how I was supposedly not old enough to know who the Eagles were, but suddenly old enough to not mind the flipping of the bird. Lucky, for her I was not part of a religious sect, or things could have got real heated. They also could have gotten real heated if I took any offense to sexual obscenities being screamed, which was what immediately followed the bird duo. Never in my life have I seen someone go from being so crazy over a band to just being crazy. Of course everyone around her wanted to tap her on the shoulder and hand her a sedative, but we had all seen the spasms she considered dance moves earlier and did not want any of those to happen to us. So one went raging and dancing. Dancing and raging. I felt bad for her really. I couldn't imagine not being able to enjoy an event such as the Eagles concert, or enjoying it too much. After all, if I became more of the show than Don Henley and friends, well let's just say live entertainment would have hit a new low.