Rather Sit Than Dance To Van Morrison!?

Article Contributed by chris | Published on Wednesday, June 16, 2004

We went to Van Morrison at the wiltern which is kind of a stuffy, lied center sort of place.  no one was dancing, but we HAD to...people were upset behind us for standing up at a rock-n-roll concert...so we tried the aisle...the ushers told us we couldn't dance there...so ro' went to the manager to find out where we could dance, she said dance in your seat, maybe you'll start a trend. no trend, but some lady screamed at me, literally 6 inches from my face, "i didn't pay $200 to watch you dance"  now that hurt because i think i dance well...but that enraged my overprotective wife...who barely restrained herself from beating this woman up and went to the manager instead. meanwhile van cranks out another rocker that required dancing, so i got up and feeling the pressure of annoyance, danced up the aisle toward the door (so i would be out of the way) when the aforementioned woman's big fat husband tackled me into the door yelling at me to sit down!  seriously!

A number of people including the 6 foot 8 black dude who was the head usher peeled him off me and they kept saying to me, "do you want to press charges?"  My wife is on her way back to the seat with the manager and she freaks out "yes we want to press charges" and i'm saying "no, we want to see the concert..." they let us go back in and kicked out the big fat grumpy guy who couldn't enjoy a show that someone enjoyed more than him. i watched his wife sit waiting, (she wouldn't look me in the eye), until she realized he wasn't coming back...i was thinking that she must have got her money's worth by NOW.  by this time it was nearly encore time, at which point everyone except the handicap section, stood up...so we danced freely for the last three tunes, a nice brown-eyed girl (a tribute to my wife of course) and a raging shake, rattle and roll into roll over Beethoven.  had a good time over all...it was certainly memorable...we stopped to talk with the manager after the show to smooth things over and see what can be done about dancing in the future...she said don't worry, it was a strange audience and that guy should have stayed home to listen to his cd.

We left feeling pretty good about the whole night...when we got home there was a message from the wiltern manager saying, she was sorry about the hassle, and that she would like to have us back the next night.  we scrambled to find a babysitter, and took her up on the offer...at $85 (plus about $14 each for ticketmaster fees) per ticket, couldn't turn that down - she put us in a nice spot where there was a little dancing room behind our seats (and no people) we had a good time, though the first night was more rockin'...we did get treated to the appearance of Tom Jones to sing "sometimes we cry" that he and van recorded together.  this whole thing was definitely quite an experience!

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