Friday, August 2, 2024
We parked in our usual not-so-close parking ramp and were walking to the concert when I asked, “Where are we sitting?” I kind of expected Keith not to know, because you just get what you can get and figure it out when you arrive. He said, “on the main floor.” I apparently did a slow-motion face wrinkle head turn to look at him in astonishment. What now? He shrugged. That’s what we got.
Huh.
We didn’t even know how to get to the floor. Teehee. Our seats were pretty far back, but on the aisle. There was an opening act, which I wasn’t expecting. He was a musical comedian – he made jokes and sang about bands. A lot of it made me laugh, but his impression of Billie Eilish just made me explode. Perfection. He also made a few jokes about Manilow crowds, and I have to admit the grey hair vastly outnumbered the darker hair. Just before the comedian came out, four very dressed up young women came and sat in our row. They were very sweet and very excited to be there. I didn’t really know that person existed, much less four of them.
Barry does a music educator contest to win $5000 for the person and $5000 for instruments for the school. Our friend Jenny was in the competition, and we voted online for many weeks, but she didn’t win. She did get tickets to the show. I texted when we got there to see where she was. She was in the lower section straight up to the side of us. She said that she had seven extra tickets in her pocket, if we wanted to come to sit with them. I did want to sit with them! But we had “floor seats” and I said we’d check out our view, but maybe we would just appear. I could see the comedian because I was on the aisle. Keith couldn’t see at all, so off we went to join Jenny. Donna, the percussionist from our France band, was with her, as well as her bestie, Katie. We realized once Barry came on that there was a big screen behind the curtain and we would have been able to see those fine, but it was better with Jenny.
I was told by someone to expect him to be a bit stiff and not to get around much, but he had a lot of choreography and was entertaining all of the time. He is 81 and I guess I don’t know what 81 looks/acts like, but he was good! He sounded great – just like Barry Manilow. I was wondering if he was really singing, but he changed up some words and broke in with talking and unless he is the best lip syncher out there, he was really singing. (Don’t tell me about tricks about that. I don’t want to know)
He sang all the songs I wanted to hear. I really enjoyed hearing the crowd sing along with him. He told a lot of stories – the best one was about his grampa taking him to Manhattan to a “record your own record” place when he was really little and trying to get him to sing Happy Birthday to his cousin. He was too little and didn’t get what he was supposed to do. He still has that recording and we heard some of it – a scratchy old man voice trying to get a squeaky little kid voice to sing. Charming! He was very, very funny and his talking and jokes were even better than the music (what am I saying?! Well, I can listen to the music at home…)
