Dance Like No One's Watching
But make sure your ticket is real.
There I was. Dressed like an aged-out Backstreet Boy, alone in the middle of the street, sweating in 90 degrees at 11:13 p.m. I am old, figuratively and literally locked out of an event meant for far younger humans. All I could do was laugh and call an Uber.
But let’s rewind. My sister-in-law Brandi is a big EDM fan. For those unfamiliar, EDM is electronic dance music, or for those born before 1970, the headache-inducing, bass-pounding anti-music known more for its technicolor psychedelics than its artistic endeavor. She gave me a sip of the Kool-Aid years ago, and I became hooked, despite having no clue the difference between deep house and dubstep. My wife and I even played quite a bit of the genre to our daughters in utero, hoping the vibes might make way for easy labors (spoiler: it didn’t).
We’ve even ventured to Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC; yes, the acronyms become confusing), the mecca and Super Bowl festival for all things dance music. A theme park for the senses, the event features five stages, hundreds of performers, carnival rides and free hugs. Calling it crazy and overwhelming would be an understatement. But I suppose in this post(?)-COVID era, YOLO. (Ironically, “you only live once” has two very distinct and opposite meanings. But I digress.)
Brandi bought a ticket to see one of the O.G. pioneers of EDM, deadmau5 (pronounced “dead mouse”), also known as the guy who dons a—you guessed it—glowing mouse mask during his sets. As a good brother-in-law, I decided to accompany her at the eleventh hour, half to watch out for her at a late-night club and half to experience yet another floor-shaking, kaleidoscopic music onslaught.
The only problem? I didn’t have a ticket and the show was sold out. Now this is the point in the story in which my daughters will roll their eyes 15 years from now and laugh about what an archaic dinosaur I have become. In a far simpler world of Blockbuster and CDs, many of us used a website called Craigslist to purchase various items on the secondary market. Event tickets, from baseball games to concert seats, were among the most popular, and these awesome new things called PDFs made it easier than ever. Of course, fast forward to today—Craigslist doesn’t have the greatest reputation any more for some reason and venues have gotten wise to counterfeit ticket scams with advanced digital technology. But apparently, I never got the memo and found myself stuck in 2008 to a soundtrack of T-Pain and Linkin Park.
So, guess what happened? I got scammed. Screwed. Bamboozled. Hoodwinked. And I deserved it. As I walked away from the box office and the chuckling attendant inside, I realized that I had lost a step. While I don’t know the difference between a hammer and screwdriver, I was always good with tech-y stuff. I could fix the TV, restart the computer and connect a bluetooth speaker. And up until now, I kind of knew how the internet worked, especially avoiding those deep dark corners featuring foreign princes asking for money and “friends” looking my social security code. Think again.
By some stroke of luck, Brandi found someone inside the venue that had an extra ticket. After explaining what Craigslist is (to confused faces and concerned glances), I bought them drinks and thanked them profusely for proverbially giving up their seat on the bus to this old man. As deadmau5 stepped on stage a few minutes after 1:00 a.m., the bass began to boom and the crowd buzzed with electricity. I was trying to remember the last time I had been awake past midnight (far too long, whether that was good or bad) and I noticed two older men a few feet away. They were in their 60s, polos tucked into khakis, sporting their formal clogs. If I felt out of place, they must been on another planet. But you know what? They couldn’t have cared less and were having a grand ol’ time. I watched them bop their heads and snap their fingers—moves more fitting for The Grateful Dead than deadmau5—and I had an epiphany.
Everyone gets old. Everyone loses touch with the times one way or another. And that’s OK. Because everyone can be happy and everyone can be comfortable with exactly who they are—even if it’s very uncool.