Ben Rector and the Amazons

So about a week ago, a few friends and I went to a Matt Wertz concert, which was actually a Ben Rector concert because Ben Rector opened and Danny has been a Ben Rector fan since his youth and Ben Rector actually has a better voice anyway.

Anyway, it was pretty okay. I'm not a big concert-goer, but it was a sort of fun atmosphere.

Because Danny has such a huge mancrush on Ben Rector, we were impelled to arrive right after the doors opened, an hour before the show. That was 6:30. The concert ended around 10:30. That meant for four hours we were out there just standing. Just standing.

Apparently this is nothing unusual for concert-goers. I don't know if this means concert-goers are masochists, or if they just have unnaturally large calves.

Speaking as a regular human being, that was a painful experience. The soles of my feet were destroyed, and my legs were so stiff I walked like a reanimated corpse for a while after we were freed from the prison.

Speaking of prison, this brings me to my next point. There were so many people!

Again, apparently concert-goers have no problem with this. They must learn to reduce their personal space bubbles.

However, as a normal human being, I found this alarming, strange, and ridiculously hot.

In the temperature sense!

It was an indoor venue, House of Blues, with kind of a pit for people to stand in. If you think analogously about peas in a bowl, you'll realize this forces the people within the pit into closer proximity.

When you get these people rocking back and forth and raising their hands, you get a large quantity of body heat generated with no clear dispersion path except the bodies of other people rocking and raising their hands, which leads to ever mounting temperatures and, inevitably, sweat stains.

Oh, sweat stains.

Being surrounded by sweaty strangers rocking and raising their hands would have been bad enough, but in this particular scenario my plight was compounded by the presence of a small colony of Amazons in my proximity -- possibly the last Amazons on Earth!

These women were all the same height as me (six foot two!) and outweighed me by, I would conservatively pose, 50 pounds each. They were an extremely energetic bunch, probably because of their Amazonian descent, and they leaped into every song with emphatic rocking and bouncing.

Thankfully, they were rather poor on rhythm (Amazons were fighters, not dancers) and most of the time their bounces would cancel each other out for a net effect of some small, benign earthquake. But every now and then they would all simultaneously find the beat, and then they'd send the floorboards bouncing.

The other problem was that as Amazons, they were even less accustomed to personal space regions than usual concert-goers.

A couple Amazons were in front of me and every song they would inch back a little farther, their swinging arms threatening to shatter my ribs.

In response, I began to back up into the person behind me, subtly rocking into that person whenever the song's rhythm permitted, begging them to look around and realize the danger I was in.

They didn't.

Eventually my situation was too dire. Any second now, the Amazons would scoot back a little more and I would be destroyed by their legendary elbows and swinging fists.

I did the only thing I could think to do.

I rammed into one.

It was a calculated move, right as the song flowed into the chorus. I left the ever-so-slight potential that it could have been a misstep. But it was a good knock, solid, all my brawn behind it.

 

In the end, even though my blow failed to get through her armor, the awkwardness of our encounter forced her to take a couple steps forward and I was saved. My failing personal space bubble was resuscitated and I could stop nudging the person behind me.

This was great, because Ben Rector turned out to be a really great guy and his music was alright. Matt Wertz was pretty okay too, largely because Ben Rector stayed on stage playing piano while he did his thing.

The concert ended up being way too long. Matt Wertz had difficulty stopping once he got started. (He took off his shirt midway through, and then he was an untamed animal)

But regardless, it was still a neat experience. Both performers seemed like really honest, down-to-earth kinds of guys, and they really got into their music.

Afterwards Danny ran off with Dani and Kathy (who by the end of the concert had been converted into slathering Ben Rector devotees) to get pictures with Ben, and John and Dan and I hung out and talked about the concert, and then Danny and Dani and Kathy came back with rapturous looks on their faces and tried to find words to articulate their delight but they couldn't, and we left the House of Blues and traveled back into the cold Chicago night.

And went home.