Wisconsin Mud
For this show, I wandered way far away from my home in New Hampshire. I have a friend who lives in Wisconsin, and I went to visit her for Labor Day weekend. Styx just happened to be playing a mere 60 miles away from her house on Friday night. What a coincidence!
The show was at the grandstand, and there was no additional charge above the $7 admission fee to get into the fair. Unbelievable! In the grandstand, there was bleacher seating, and between the seating area and the stage was what should have been an expanse of sandy track, where people were allowed to stand. However, because it had poured rain earlier in the day, the entire track in front of the stage was mud. Thick, slick, take one step and slide two feet, take your next step and sink in three inches, cold, watery mud. So do I take a bleacher seat, on dry land, or walk through and stand in mud the consistency of quicksand to have a place right up next to the stage? You have to know my mud phobia (long story) to know what a traumatic decision this was. Picture the scene from the Indiana Jones movie when he says "Snakes… why did it have to be snakes?" Turns out, though, that with a good enough incentive I can overcome my fear of mud! There were a few people who had already braved the uneven, muddy mess to go up to the stage, but not many. Here was my opportunity to be right up front, on JY's side of the stage!
General admission shows have their good points and their bad points. This show being general admission was the only reason I got to be as close as I was, but on the other hand, to stay that close, you have to struggle through the whole show if someone tries to get in front of you. Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn't. It all works out in the long run, and overall, I definitely have NO complaints about the show!
I made it safely up to the stage and stood next to the last people in the front row, which put me a little to the right of Tommy's mike. Just from the short walk, maybe 100 feet, my shoes were caked with wet mud and felt like they weighed about 10 pounds each. There wasn't much point in trying to get the mud completely off, since we were still standing in the worst of it. Everyone was marching in place, stamping around, trying both to get the largest clumps of mud off of our shoes and to get a fairly solid little patch of mud staked out to stand on. From the grandstand we must have looked like the most fidgety people on earth! There was no barricade in front of the stage, but in the front row, we were leaving a space of about five feet between us and the stage itself. For one thing, the stage was above eye level for most of us - probably about 6 feet off the ground. If you were standing right at the stage, you wouldn't see a thing unless you looked straight up and someone happened to be standing right at the edge of the stage. The other reason, though, was that although the ground we were standing on was nothing but mud, between us and the stage were watery mud puddles, creating a natural barrier. I was talking a bit with the woman standing on my left, and she pointed at the wet mess directly in front of me and said, "That puddle has your name on it." I laughed and agreed - I could see that we were already inching up, little by little, and the show hadn't even started. I only hoped that when I did make it into the puddle, I would stay upright!