I fucking LOVE anti-maskers

Seriously, thanks for making an epic disappointment into the best night of my life, dipshits

What do you say when you suddenly find yourself directly in front of (albeit six feet away from) the man whose words have lived in your head since you were twelve years old and shaped your life in concrete ways that you can clearly articulate and his security guard is yelling at you and you aren’t entirely sure what’s happening because you just needed to pee and now here you are?

“I’m sorry I was late, I came from north of Seattle and there was a wreck in the city that caused a traffic jam” apparently.

Let’s rewind.

Last year, when we first moved to Washington, for absolutely no reason at all I decided to google “Matchbox 20 Seattle” even though there was no album anticipated and I had no reason to believe they were touring.

But they were. The show was actually scheduled for 2020, but COVID, so…but the upshot was that there was a show and there were still loads of unsold tickets. Including some VIP tickets that included access to the pre-show soundcheck.

I love watching soundchecks. It absolutely has everything to do with my affection for my husband, who is a recording engineer that sometimes works live shows. Watching all the techs run around plugging things in and pushing things around feels like a glimpse into his life, and the opportunity to watch men like him doing that job for my favorite band felt special to me. So I bought the ticket.

The show was scheduled for May 18, 2023. On May 17th, my life epically imploded from several directions.

By the time I got in the car to leave for the show I was physically and mentally exhausted. I knew I was running behind, but I hoped to get there in time to see part of it. When I hit the traffic and knew I wouldn’t make it for any of the soundcheck, I was too tired to even be sad. My plan was just to get there, slump in my seat, get some mental rest if not some physical rest, and make the drive back.

Sure enough, by the time I parked they were playing the last song, and by the time I found security and checked in they told me the whole thing was over and I had to wait to be let in with general admission, but at the front of the line, of course, because I did pay a lot of money for my ticket.

This was fine with me, except for one tiny thing: I had to pee.

I had been sitting in the car for over three hours and I have two kids and pelvic floor exercises are all well and good but sometimes “just hold it indefinitely” is NOT AN OPTION. So I asked the security lady if there was a restroom I could use and she said “stand over there and someone will be right out to get you” so I went and stood over there.

No one came.

I waited ten minutes, and then it became a matter of preserving my personal dignity so I went and found a guy and told him I wasn’t asking to be let down into the pit because I was late and that was on me but the reason I was late was because I spent over three hours in traffic and surely there must be a bathroom nearby they could safely let me use.

He took me over to the gate and said I could go through but I had to come back out to go through security. I said “I went through security ten minutes ago, ask that guy, he checked me” and waved to the guard out front and he waved back because we chatted and he was cool.

Then I’m being handed off to this woman who is supposed to escort me to the bathroom and I’m apologizing for making a scene and then she points out the restrooms and I’m literally running to them (but not too fast because two kids) and yelling apologies over my shoulder.

When I come out I turned to go back out the gate, and I’m telling the woman that I didn’t mean to make a scene but I paid a lot of money for the ticket and I could accept not meeting the band but it seemed like the absolute least they could do was let me pee.

I thought she would laugh. But she got mad.

Turns out while I had been standing outside the gate for that ten minutes waiting to pee she had been standing inside the gate waiting to get a call that she could bring me down to the pit and with each passing moment she worried it would be too late altogether and for some reason this upset her even though I was already resigned to having missed it.

She didn’t turn toward the gate. She turned toward the pit and said “come on, I’m taking you down.”

As we walked toward the stage she was talking sort of to me but I think mostly to herself about how she knows *name I didn’t catch* is busy but it only takes ten seconds to clear someone over the radio and they won’t like her bringing me down but if anyone asks she’ll say some guy told her to and by the time we get there she doesn’t even wait to be challenged she just marches right up and says “so and so told me to bring her down here because she was stuck in traffic and we thought she could at least have a photo since you aren’t done yet.”

This was awkward for me because I hadn’t actually planned to do the photo thing.

Part of the “VIP Experience” was supposed to be group photos with the band. They were going to line us up in groups of ten with the band in the background and take commemorative photos and the whole thing felt gross to me. Like taking a picture in front of the performing elephants at the zoo. I had no intention of participating in it.

But she was so upset and I didn’t really understand why (I figured it out later) and it seemed to matter to her that I got to do this and it seemed like a shit time to complain about the morality of this photo op that I thought was being forced on the band against their personal dignity.1 Turns out I was wrong about that, too.

Whoever this woman was, she had enough say that we got waved through and she talked to another guy who passed me to a bald, cranky Irish guy who pointed to a chair and told me to sit so I sat.

I was getting a bit overwhelmed at this point because I like to have things kind of planned out in my head at all times and we were five miles off-script at this point. And then the cranky Irish guy starts yelling at me.

He asked me what ticket I had and I showed him my VIP pass and he starts yelling about how there are three levels and which level am I and I told him I don’t know because I didn’t realize there were three packages and this makes him madder and he’s shouting “you spent all that money and you don’t know what you bought” and I don’t know why he’s mad about this because it’s my money not his and I told him I had an email and he said he didn’t want to see my email he wanted to know if I was a one, a two, or a three and I’m scrolling through my phone and my hands are shaking and I’m about to cry and just as I find the email this black-haired lady comes up and tells him to cool it because all three VIP packages include the photo op so it doesn’t matter which one I am. And then she looks at my email and tells me I’m a two and walks away.

I tell the Irish guy I’m sorry I didn’t know I was a two, I bought it a long time ago except now he isn’t yelling he’s just looking at me funny and then he says “how would you like to be a one?”

Before I can respond he’s yelling at me to go stand in front of the band but everyone else has already gone and I would be standing up there alone and I’m flustered and I left my bag on the chair and had to turn back and then as I’m walking up I suddenly got VERY embarrassed about my tattoo so I’m trying to cover my forearm but it’s my left arm and I’m left-handed so I kind of need it and the whole thing is just horrible and I started babbling about the traffic.

There’s minute of awkward small talk and then someone tells me to turn around and smile and I do and now I have to go back to the Irish guy to get yelled at some more and I want to cry until I melt into a puddle on the floor.

But the Irish guy is done yelling at me. He tells me he’s the head of the band security, which I quickly gathered is very, very different than venue security and that the “number one” VIP people were going to spend the first three songs of the show backstage where they could interact with the band and I was going to join them. And then he hands me off to a lovely woman named Andrea and I’m so confused all I could say was “can he just decide that?” and she says yes and you’re with me now (just like in the movies) and that was that. Andrea gives me some instructions and tells me under no circumstances should I exit the gate (we had to go out and come back in again, it was a whole thing) without speaking to her first.

Now all the other VIP people are going to the bathroom because they’ve been doing fun stuff for a couple of hours but I don’t need to go because that’s what started this whole thing so I’m walked over to the black-haired lady who told the Irish guy to stop shouting at me and told to stay with her until Andrea comes back.

The black-haired lady is stupid cool, and she’s been doing this for a long time and she’s telling people stories about bands she’s worked for (but only naming names on the nice stories of course, when you tell the bad ones you never say what band it was) and she’s talking about some band that she felt didn’t treat their fans well and then she says “but Rob’s not like that at all.” And then she tells us how the band decided that group photos were too impersonal and first they cut it from ten people down to five but then right before they started that day Rob Thomas walked up to them and said he knew it was going to cause problems but he would really like it if they could do individual photos for the VIP people. And then she bragged about how they pulled it off and only went seven minutes over schedule, gracefully leaving out that five of those minutes were spent dealing with me.

That made me relax a bit because it meant they didn’t make *that* much of a fuss over me but I still wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing standing there with these people so I just stood and listened as everyone around me chatted.

At some point the rest of the “number one VIPs” gathered around and the dark-haired lady started giving us instructions about wristbands and meeting places and then she said: “Protecting the band is very important because we don’t want them to get sick and miss all the other shows so we are asking everyone who is coming backstage to wear a mask. Does anyone have a problem with that?”

Naturally we all called back a resounding “no!”

Then she said “Good. Because two of you did have a problem with that, and guess what? They aren’t here right now.” And then she looked directly at me “YOU are.”

I got to go backstage the first time I saw the band I have loved for literally as long as I can remember and it’s all because some uppity motherfucker with more money than sense couldn’t be assed to show some consideration for the people he had spent several thousand dollars to see.

I was not the only person who was late because of traffic. I heard several other couples, and one set of elderly women, talk about how they were late to soundcheck or missed it by minutes. I think the reason they were able to do individual photos is because so many people showed up in pairs or not at all.

I have no idea why that cranky Irish guy decided that, of all the people who were late that day, I should get one of the two newly available spots backstage. I don’t think they even gave the other one away. Everyone else seemed like they expected to be there.

I guess he just liked the looks of me.

I’m really, really glad he did.

1 Personal dignity is a thing with me