first, here’s amy the worker bee blowing the mounds of leaves out of her driveway.
and here’s randy with his giant suitcase as we got in the van for the drive to st. louis on thursday afternoon. he and amy each took a giant suitcase. i managed to stuff everything of mine into a little suitcase that had wheels even though it was tiny. i’d already applied eyeshadow, so not having to include that really save me a lot of room.
randy in his cool rolling stones jacket in the hotel room. it was a nice place, the drury inn near the convention center.
our room opened out onto the dining area, and on the other side of that was the pool and hot tub. here’s me with my free margarita.
they gave you little cards with which you could get three free drinks in the evening, including mixed drinks. plus lots of free food, which you could make a dinner of. plus it was pretty inexpensive, and only a block from the metro station.
meanwhile, the animals at home were trying to get along without me.
we finally all tromped to the metro about about 8:20. the concert was supposed to start at 8, but since i’d read that she wasn’t starting til 10:30, i figured it didn’t matter so much when we left. i had brought my short boots with a small heel, but at the last minute discussed with randy wearing my much more comfy slip-on black kind of sneaker things. he said of COURSE you have to wear the boots, and you didn’t bring any HEELS? no, because i’m not a crazy person.
we got to the metro and bought tickets, but then i started thinking about the fact that we were on one side of the tracks, and mightn’t the train to the concert be on the other side? i studied the map and decided we were in the wrong place, so we tromped back up the stairs and over to the other side.
because it’s relatively new, the metro station is very clean and nice and doesn’t smell bad. while i posed for the camera, amy went off to consult the map and ask other people about whether we were on the correct side of the tracks now.
some guy told her we needed to be on the other side but i managed to convince her, finally, that we were in the right place. it took a while for the train to get there because normally two trains were running, but only one was. it was ok, though; there was time for more pictures.
i like our identical hair here.
we got on the train and there were a couple of young women standing in the car, both dressed like madonna in her “material girl” phase. they were cute and drunk, and they kept saying IS THIS THE STOP? it’s funny that they were dressed like that because they weren’t even born when madonna actually looked that way.
after a quick train trip, we emerged from the subway and the huge scottrade center was right there in front of us.
we got inside, where there were many, many people, 90% of them women, mostly in big groups, and many, many of them all dressed up – some were dressed like madonna, mostly the “material girl” types, but i saw a couple of women with pointy gold bras, one woman in a “like a virgin” wedding dress, and a few others that were kind of combinations of things.
but most of the women were just all dressed up. many of them wore very high pointy heels. this is for a concert in a HUGE stadium with many many stairs and lots of walking. i guess that makes me an old lady, because i couldn’t imagine stomping all around in the high, high heels.
we eventually made our way up, up, up, to the top of the world. our seats were five rows from the back – and we’d bought the tickets the instant they went on sale.
here’s randy, before people filled up all the seats next to us. over there on his left is one of the few straight men, who randy said was yawning through the concert, bored silly.
after we stuffed ourselves into the narrow seats, randy said “i wish i was wearing my sweats and sneakers.” WHAT DID I TELL YOU? because i know there is something wrong with my brain, or at least different, the fact that i don’t care what i’m wearing if i’m going to a concert where i’ll be sitting in the dark, and i’m not going there with my husband, who would like it if i looked nice. but no, even if i’d gone to the concert with kevin, i wouldn’t have dreamed of wearing high heels.
very very high up. i was nervous going up and down the stairs in my chunky-heeled boots, and wondered how the huge groups of drunk women in heels were managing.
this is still way before the concert started, and i was futilely trying to send a text. because i have such a low-tech phone, i had no reception. this was kind of disappointing, but not the end of the world.
finally, a little after 10:30, the concert began. and it was…well, not as loud as i thought it’d be. kevin had given me earplugs, and i gave one to a guy i knew who we ran into. maybe the sound didn’t travel so well all the way up to the heavens where we sat.
madonna did have a lot of cool sets and good dancers and she strutted and danced all over the place in what looked like at least six inch stilettos. but she didn’t sing as many songs i knew, and the first number was about shooting her boyfriend in the head, and it was basically a bunch of bad men coming into a hotel room and trying to kill her, and then she took a huge gun and shot them, and a huge splatter of realistic blood smeared the enormous video screen in back of her. this went on for quite a while, and i didn’t like it at all.
there was another gun and violence-themed song, but then she came out in her majorette outfit like in the super bowl, plus she had drummers who were suspended from the wires high above, and they just floated up there as they played their drums.
there were many cool things like that, but we were so far away that it was a little bit hard to be involved. something kind of unbelievable is that she did have two video screens which were the actual live feed of the concert below, but they were very small screens. i’ve never been to a concert with such small screens, and i can’t imagine why she had them. amy said that maybe the scottrade center supplied them, but i know madonna wouldn’t let somebody be in charge of her screens, plus if they had belonged to the center, which they didn’t, they would have been bigger.
but at least we could get a better sense of what was going on with the smallish screens.
now, the really extraordinary thing happened at about midnight (the show lasted till almost one). a video played on the big screen behind the stage, and then madonna rose up on a big column, and she got up there and suddenly said “wait a minute, stop the show.” and she said that a couple more times, and of course we thought it was part of the show, but no, it was actually madonna stopping everything because it sounded like screaming in her ears. feedback on her earbuds! i’ve never seen such a thing at any concert i’ve ever been to. they lowered her down and she kept looking at somebody off stage and saying that she couldn’t hear them. eventually they figured it out and she told the audience that she was going to start the song again, and to please pretend that didn’t happen.
you’d think that with the kind of super-fancy equipment she has, and the highly-paid technicians she employs, things like that wouldn’t happen. i guess that just shows you that stuff can happen, even if you’re madonna.
she looked pissed at the end of the number, even from way up where we are. i bet some heads rolled for real when it was over.
by the time we left, the subways and buses weren’t running anymore, and there were no cabs anywhere, so we walked back to our hotel. on the map i’d printed out it said it was a mile, but it felt like more than that. even though i wasn’t wearing my sneakers, i did have the most comfortable shoes of anybody in the group, but it was still a long walk.
here we are back in the lobby, where the nice hotel guy was happy to take our picture.
the next morning we headed to trader joe’s, my favorite store, but first meg saw a DSW, designer shoe warehouse, which i’d never been to. it was a shopping frenzy for a while, then even more of a frenzy at trader joe’s.
the end.
ok then,
mrs. tuesday hughes.