First of three: No Tickee, No Memoree

[captainsblog]

I put “1st of three“ in the title to remind myself of two other things I want to get to that won’t be part of this post. One is the new piece of physical therapy equipment that came home yesterday, and which has Eleanor in tears. Fortunately, these are tears of joy, because the device is really helping her extend the new knee’s range of motion. I’ll post a picture of her on the device, and some of the rather odd history of how it got here.

Also, soon to come, three weekends from now, is Emily’s first exhibition at Buffalo’s longest running and most prestigious outdoor art exhibition, the Allentown Art Festival. She has her placement for the event, one of her paintings is displayed on their website, and it’s going to be quite an experience for all of us, I am sure.

And I lied- there's a fourth thing to write about- the trials and tribs of tech I endured in the past week after our office got painted, which continue to haunt me to at least a limited extent.  Laptops and printers and wifi, oh my!

Those, however, are from the  present and not too distant future. For this entry, I’m going back, in many cases way back, good memories that will make and be rejuvenated by looking at a tiny piece of paper that used to be an essential part of so many experiences.

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I mentioned the other day that I wound up having a lot of trouble with ticketing to the Amerks game when I decided to attend it at the last minute. There were issues getting the ticket to load onto my phone in the first place, and even more deadly ones when the time came to display that "ticket" to get into the building. I did overcome both of these in time, but I later remembered, and briefly referenced, the memory-jogging effect that comes when you save your copy of a physical ticket for the event.

It’s funny how some parts of a memory can be so clear, others completely fuzzy without having something to refresh your recollection. Something like a ticket stub, for instance:  I distinctly remembered that I had only been inside once before for an Amerks game, and that it had then been only recently been renamed the "Blue Cross Arena at the Rochester War Memorial."  Just as clear was that I was accompanied on that visit by Eleanor’s brother Charlie. The first fuzz was whether Emily had been with us or not on that occasion, and fuzzier still was having any recollection of how long ago it was. But I did remember seeing my ticket stub to that game many times over the many years since then.

Many many years ago, I stapled such ducats  to a bulletin board that was hanging on the wall, somewhere in the 12 places I lived in the 10 years between 1977 and 1986. That shrine got lost to history, or possibly a basement flood, and the stubs that had accumulated on it before the end of the last century were long gone. These would have included seeing the Ramones on Long Island around 1979, probably a Peter Gabriel show or two, and my ticket to see the Who and Clash each for the first time at Rich Stadium in 1982. Ah, but God bless the Internet, somebody kept one of those latter ones:

Yes, that "Harvey" would be Harvey Weinstein, who started his entertainment career in Buffalo concert promotion after he got out of UB.

Most of my ticket stubs after losing the bulletin board all wound up stuck in a drawer, or inside the programme if the event had such a thing- typically Broadway type shows and some paid-for concerts. After the game the other night, I made an effort to round up as many of them as I could from assorted places in my desk at home, scanned them, and then put them all in a single ticket envelope. You remember, the kind they used to put the ticket in after you paid for it at the box office. I didn’t find a hockey ticket at first, but I actually set that aside in an even more special place and eventually located it:



Thar it ar; five sections away from the 217 I inhabited the other night. I can't find any online reference to the result of the game, and I don't remember, but one site that tracks hockey fights said it went to ooooovertime and there weren't any dropped gloves during the game. (One oddity I didn't mention the other day about the playoff game I just saw: dropped STICKS.  They do not halt play when a guy on the ice loses his stick- he just runs back to the bench to get another one- and the two times I saw it happen, it just lay there on the ice for a good five-ish minutes.)

Other kept memories that I can relive like they were yesterday even though they clearly weren't:

 I've been to more Mets games than I could ever count, away contests in four other cities and one Bronx blechyard, but still most of them in Flushing.  The ticket to my first, on Eleanor's 11th birthday in 1967, is long gone, but I kept the one from her first trip with me to Shea on her 30th birthday weekend the summer after we got married:



The Mets lost that game, to a future Hall of Famer making his major league debut by the name of John Smoltz.

Two decades later, not quite to the day, I would return to that holy ground for the final time before they tore down the old dump:



My best friend from high school Dennis came up from Florida for that one. And the Mets won, shutting out their Giant ancestors 7-0 behind Mike Pelfrey pitching. They would collapse and miss the 2008 postseason by a game, beginning a long streak of Met-iocrity that it took seven years (arguably more) and an eventual new owner to get completely past.

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But it's not all ball and games. There are musical memories now safely in that envelope, as well. A couple of them, completely forgotten to me, and both tied to performers we're scheduled to see in a few weeks.

Bruce Cockburn is a legendary Canadian singer-songwriter. Months ago, a local venue announced they would be hosting him, with Dar Williams opening. We've seen her several times, but I thought I was checking Bruuuce off the bucket list- and not a Canadian minute too soon, since the dude's 77 years old and we just lost another kinnigited Canuck singer, Gordon Lightfoot, a few weeks ago after I passed on a chance to see him for the first time just over a year ago.

Well, fuck the bucket, because it turns out Cockburn was already in there:




No recollection whatsoever of that show, though it was almost 20 years ago.  Now Dar, I am clearer on: definitely saw her with Emily in the basement ballroom of the downtown Statler (Girlyman opened) back in 2005, and again with Eleanor up in Toronto (Antje Duvekot opened) the fall before COVID, but I totally forgot this one in between at the very venue she and Bruce are playing in next month:




That was our 21st anniversary, and seeing the ticket reminded me why I didn't remember: we'd made a long night of it driving to a pre-show fancy dinner and then queueing to get into uncomfortable seats, so we never made it past the opening act.

We did also see Antje on her own here once, and we first saw her opening for Lucy Kaplansky, now a dear friend who we'd been listening to for years. I can't find my first stub from the Williamsville Meeting House, but I did find the one for the second time I saw Lucy:



That Syracuse show was right after she came out with an album called Reunion, and its title track recalls two occasions, decades apart, where she met members of her extended family in Toronto, and visited the bakery that had been in their family there for generations:



The business her family founded, known as Health Bread Bakery, expanded into other reaches of Canada- enough that several people in the Syracuse audience (just down I-81 from the eastern Ontario border) remembered it and even had copies of her grandmother's cookbook that the chain put out before merging and eventually dying earlier this century.

As we've moved on in time, these ticket treasures have become rarer. First, venues switched to online ticketing, with "print at home" usually being the only way to get proof of your seat and payment for "free" beyond the cost of the ticket and "processing fee" and "facility fee" and "fee fee" added on. As Ticketmonster became the near-exclusive source for the big venues and things like Eventbrite took over small-club events, your tickets became entirely home-printed paper or, more and more, just an image on your phone. My first-ever success, in almost 40 years of trying, to see 10,000 Maniacs in concert was one of the last ones I ever walked into with an actual ticket-ticket:



- while the last time seeing them (hoping it won't be THE last time for me), on this very weekend aka That Weekend a year ago-



- had gone all print-at-homey, in this case Ken and Ellen's homey. I kept that one inside the programme, but increasingly they don't print those, either, so memories will have to be made and saved in places like this. And as we saw (or rather didn't see) with my blog piece about the 2013 outdoor hockey game, links to photos on social media sites, services like AOL, and even blogging sites like LJ, are closer to ephemeral than to permanent.

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One more story behind a ticket and I'll end for tonight before getting to my Udda Storeez of the past few days:




Pizzarelli, that is. Kleinhans. Full orchestra backing him.  I first thought those tickets came from Jenn, an LJ friend back in the day, but I now think that was an earlier BPO event, and we picked this one out for yet another anniversaryish dinner. Unlike the forgotten Dar show, this one was on a Saturday night, so, not after a full workday for both of us, and we made it all the way through John's performance. I indeed did write about it here at the time, and included the story he told of his first famed Frank Sinatra meeting when he was opening for Ol' Blue Eyes on tour:

Two shows in, the Chairman's assistant called him aside and told him it was time to "go meet Frank." John was retrospectively confident- "Frank was, you know, the other  Italian jazz singer from New Jersey, plus I have Pizza in my name"- but at the time, for sure, was quaking. He looked into the same blue eyes that had once proposed marriage to Ava Gardner, and saw four words in those eyes the moment he stuck out his hand: This. Conversation. Is. Over. Yet it wasn't; John's life was forever blessed by FIVE words of pure bliss from the man, the legend that was Sinatra- and whose memory he honored by singing Arlen's "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" the way Frank used to sing it:

Eat something. You look bad.

And get some sleep, like we're about to. Plenty of weird dreams expected after the Mrs. Davis episode set on a motherfuckin boat....