doodledee

I managed to scrounge up a ticket to the Ben Kweller show at First Avenue last night. It was a surprisingly hard ticket to track down. I had to go to three places to find one. Who knew?

It turned out to be the first all-ages show I've been to in a long time. I say 'turned out' because I didn't know it was scheduled to be until I walked by the club around 5:00 and noticed that - even though the doors didn't open for 30 minutes and the music didn't start for 90 - that the line to get in was already like a block long. And it was full of 16-year-old kids. Ohhh, boy.

I had no interest in standing in line and rushing in early, so I checked the set times and headed over to my office to kill some time. I figured I'd gamble with my usual 'get there 2 minutes before the show starts' strategy and if I ended up having to stand in the back I'd just deal with it.

Turns out it wasn't an issue because, guess what? I'm old now. And I just found out that being old comes with at least one perk: kids at First Avenue get out of your way. Seriously. I was like frickin' Moses. I'd just walk through the crowd looking kind of pissed off and all these kids would just part and let me through. Was it out of respect? Probably not. Fear that if they didn't I might call their parents and narc them out for smoking cigarettes? More likely. But who cares. I got my usual spot on the back steps and settled in to hear some guitar pop.

Rock on.