Suburbanites and Scammers and Scalpers -- Oh, My!

So I didn't find out the Pretenders were playing here this past Saturday until well after the show was sold out. Sadly, I never saw the original lineup play live, but did see Version 2.0 on the "Learning to Crawl" tour in 1984, at the Celebrity Theater in Phoenix. (An unforgettable experience.) Although Chrissie Hynde has toured many times since with a revolving door of bandmates, I never got around to seeing her again. The past decade-plus, however, Chrissie has maintained a real band with the same three guys (including a reunited Martin Chambers), so I decided that this might be the year to catch them live again. The fact that they weren't promoting a new album on this tour made it even more appealing (no surplus of new songs).

So Michael and I set out to get tickets for the show, one way or another. The sellers on eBay all seemed to have too much baggage. They'd claim to have won the tickets on a radio contest and that they'd arrange to have our names at the radio station's van outside the gig. This sounded like a recipe for disaster and I could see me winding up with negative feedback for leaving negative feedback on the guy who'd hoodwinked me.

Next we looked on Craigslist. We agreed that we were each willing to pay double face value (so $100 for a $50 ticket) and Michael found a guy with two tickets that were the right price and e-mailed him. The guy immediately got back to him and I thought everything was going to work out fine. Then Michael told me that he hadn't gone through with the deal. "Why?" I asked. "The guy wanted to meet me in person to sell me the tickets!" (Blank look on my face:) "Um, what did you think was going to happen?" Realizing that he hadn't really thought the whole thing through, he quickly changed his line of reasoning and replied: "Well, he wanted to meet me at 7:30 and I get off work at 5. That's totally inconvenient for me." (Not unlike myself, Michael doesn't want anything to do with people, so deep down I understood, even if I acted like he was being silly.)

As Saturday rolled around I was really starting to regret not having tickets. That's when the harebrained scheme to try to buy tickets from the ubiquitous scalpers camped outside Irving Plaza was hatched. Much to my surprise, Michael was game and even offered to take the lead in the situation. (For reasons that are unclear to me, he thinks being from a suburb on Long Island makes him more street smart than I am, being from a suburb somewhere else.)

We headed over to venue at about 8 p.m. with our pockets full of cash and our heads full of determination. Like clockwork, the scary homelesslike scalper guys were out and about. But were they selling tickets? They sure didn't appear to be. They'd wander around saying "Anyone got any extra tickets? Extra tickets?" (Copiague's finest explained to me that this was scalper secret code for "I have some tickets to sell you but I can't come out and say that.") Michael would approach them and then they'd say they really didn't have any. Then another one said he really was looking for an extra ticket, even though it was perfectly clear that he wasn't a Pretenders fan. Another one said he didn't actually have any but if he did they'd be $150 and "his friend" might be coming with them later. Dozens of people in the same boat as we were approached these "scalpers" (at this point I use this term loosely) only to be brushed aside. (WTF?) Meanwhile, every so often the person who'd end up standing next to us would have someone walk up to them, ask if they had any extra tickets, say yes, then sell them at face value while I stood there in disbelief (oh, you're a scalper? you mean I'm actually supposed to interact with people to get tickets from you? Someone's not going to just hand them to me?) It was a truly pathetic display from start to finish.

So while we failed miserably in our attempts to be cool kids scoring some tickets at the gig, we succeeded admirably in our attempts to be stereotypical gay guys. We got home just in time to watch "Liza With a Z" on Showtime and can I just tell you this: it was fab-u-lous!