Friday, March 14, 2014

an idiot dreaming of the purple rain

Late at night recently Prince's people announced he was playing this weekend in the Bay Area.  Last weekend he did a couple of last minute shows in L.A., and presumably he felt like doing the same up in NoCal this weekend.  The tickets sold out within minutes, of course.

I figured that he was likely to add another show.  I looked at the calendar for the venue.  It was suspiciously empty for the next day.  Late last night I kept refreshing the calendar, and then the object of my desire appeared:  another Prince show the next night.  I felt ever so clever.  But the link to buy tickets didn't work.  I refreshed that many times.  Examining the site more closely, I found a link which said that the tickets for that show would go on sale at "12:00 pm Thurs 3/13."  Clearly that couldn't be noon on Thursday, because the show's existence wasn't announced until around 10:30 p.m. It must mean midnight on Thursday, I reasoned.  Everyone else went to bed.  I myself was exhausted but determined, having missed the amazingly wonderful shows Prince put on last year in San Francisco which everyone but me attended and bragged about on Facebook for weeks (I hate them all).  The Sober Husband unhelpfully joked, "Don't you know some poor person in Oakland who can go stand in line for you?"

"There is no line!  It's all online!" I snapped.  I took my laptop downstairs.  Around midnight I started trying to buy tickets.  Every few minutes I'd refresh the screen, but the tickets never went on sale.  Eventually I fell asleep.  In the morning I tried again, but it still wasn't working.  After I drove the children to school, I looked at the website again, and far from the tickets going on sale, the show had been taken off the listings.

"I lost a night's sleep for nothing," I told the Sober Husband over the phone.  "I am so stupid."

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