as soon as the final chords of “Left of the Dial” faded into the air, the statues came to life and started filing out. i told the westernerds about my odd fortune and showed them the backstage pass.

“well, you have to go,” EM said, and i could have kissed her for that. i was a little nervous. i didn’t know how to break to a bunch of nerds that i had passes and well, they didn’t. it made me feel a little icky. because well, it could have so very easily come off as bragging or something like that. but with one sentence EM dissipated all the weirdness, well the weirdness for the situation. there was much more weirdness to follow.

so being as i have exactly 0 experience being a groupie or an i’m with the band girl. i sort of stood around waiting for the travelling companions to figure out what the hell we were supposed to do. see, the drummer is a really nice guy and he left enough passes for me and the posse.

so eventually we figured out that we were supposed to slip behind the magic curtain. only the magic curtain was being guarded by some old lady in an orange shirt. she told us to slap our passes on our shirts and to stand around and wait. apparently we weren’t going back there, the band was going to be lingering about with us rabble in the main stage area.

so we all took a perch against the wall and stood around with the other groupies. there were probably about 15 of us with the nerdy little groupie passes. we stood around for awhile, just like the night before. in the meantime, i was trying to text message darlingjason and tell him where i was. this seemed very important at the time. more important than anything. i can’t remember why.

so we stood some more. apparently a groupie does a lot of standing around trying to not look like an idiot. kelly and the load (two the the travelling companions) made a joke about blow-job betty and hand-job hannah as two scantily clad women were shown behind the magic curtain.

at that point The Load made the comment of the weekend. he turned to Wolf (whose real name is JackAss, as we all know it says so on his birth certificate) and said, “get in there wolf and start sucking.”

that alone was worth the backstage passes.

because we had not quite reached our quota of waiting as set out in the bylaws of Rockstardom, we stood around some more. eventually the rest of the groupies had either slipped past the magic curtain or given up the ghost and headed elsewhere in search of libations. but not us, oh no, not us. we stood around and waited the standard 32 hours.

eventually the old lady guarding the curtain disappeared and JackAss slipped behind the magic curtain to investigate just what in the hell was going on back there (i cannot confirm or deny if there was any actual sucking going on). apparently there was nothing because he returned and we went back to waiting, because that was our job and we were really quite good at it.

so after waiting the requisite 32 hours, some little man with dark hair came and got us. he apologized for leaving us there for so long and took us behind the magic curtain, and then down the magic stairs. he was really concerned for JackAss and my heads, there were some low-hanging metal things, and i guess he really didn’t want to deal with groupie concussions.

we walked past the guitar player whose name i could never remember and then the little man just left us, standing in a hallway. since i was still intently text messaging darlingjason, i’m not sure what our instructions were. but it seemed that they were to “Stand here and look stupid.” and we did that. because we are good groupies.

as the stupid standing ensued, JackAss and the load went in search of. . . what i’m not sure, they just started to investigate. i stood around looking stupid and growing angry. then my phone rang. it was the aforementioned EM asking what was going on. that’s when my meltdown began.

“NOTHING!” i shouted. “we’re standing around here like a dumbasses. i’m starting to get snarky.”
“is paul there?”
“NO!”
“did they offer you anything to drink?”
“NO!”

it was then that it dawned on me. i didn’t want to be down there. there was nothing there i wanted to see. hell, i don’t even want to meet St. Paul Westerberg for fear of having all my little school-girl ideas about my hero crushed.

but what burned me the most was that i was standing around in a cramped hallway where i could barely stand up straight waiting to talk to people who didn’t really give a rat’s ass about me. i was wasting my time to talk to people who were going to forget who i was the minute i walked away. i was doing all this waiting when i should have been having a drink with people who like me and would make me laugh and talk to me again on monday morning. what in the hell was i doing?

it was a serious epiphany, yo.

and it was then that i collared JackAss and Kelly and The Load and said we need to get out of here RIGHT NOW! and because they are kind and decent friends, they obeyed my minor temper tantrum. and we left.

as we stood on the platform waiting for the El, i was giddy. for some reason i was just so damn proud of myself. even now, almost a week later, i still am.