The Stranger

I don't want this blog to become too dream oriented, but I had another strange one last night. In it, I was attending a Billy Joel concert with my wife. The concert was at some small venue that seemed more like a cafeteria room than a music hall. It held a few hundred people but there was no stage. Mr. Joel was performing on piano at ground level. I think we were seated at long tables too.

Anyway, he played some old songs, including Scene From an Italian Restaurant, and everyone was singing along and having fun. But then he played "We Didn't Start The Fire," and nobody in the audience really wanted to hear that song and everyone kind of got restless. So BJ started making up new lyrics as he went. The song is already just a rant of people, places and things (nouns, if you will), so ad libbing new lyrics was pretty easy: "Piz-za, beer bong, Jackie Chan and Tommy Chong, South Korea, Diarrhea, Who shot Mr. Burns." Then he would occasionally stop singing and hold the mic out for an audience member to sing the next line. But the audience, myself included, was not interested in singing that crappy song. Anyone faced with Bill's mic would either stare back at him in silence, or mumble some more nonsense. "Drunk drive, high five, Princess Di is still alive, Husker Du, Zen Arcade, What else do I have to say?"

After that song, Billy Joel decided he had to go pick someone up at the airport. But he was determined to continue the concert from his car (a Cadillac-ac-ac-ac), wearing one of those Madonna-style headset microphones. He urged everyone to stay in their seats, and they would still be able to hear his car performance. But many people decided it would be more fun to follow Billy in their own cars to the airport. I laughed at this idea, but wouldn't you know it, my wife wanted to drive after him, so we went. We could hear him singing through the car radio, but there were so many other concertgoers on the road, we only caught a fleeting glimpse of Billy Joel, with his own mother in the passenger seat ("don't ask me why"), sweaty and singing "Piano Man" as he sped away and merged onto the highway. After nearly 20 minutes of trying to catch up to Billy Joel, we decided it wasn't worth it and we went home. We found out later that once BJ got to the airport, he decided he didn't want to finish the concert anyway, and he went home too, leaving a few hundred people back in the cafeteria pretty pissed off.