My Stoner Friend really wanted me to go to this show, and I had never seen Bob Dylan. The Red Sox were getting crushed by the Yankees in the playoffs at the time, so there was no reason I needed to watch baseball, so I figured I would just go see Bob Dylan. It was pouring rain that night, so I grabbed an umbrella and headed out to Berkeley.
Before going into the show, they made us dump our umbrellas in these big buckets, and said we could get them back after the show. How, exactly?
During the show, I usually had no idea what songs he was playing — I’d never been a big fan of Dylan, and the songs were often so different than the versions I knew, they were practically unrecognizable. Luckily, My Stoner Friend knew all the songs as he had the SACD box set of Dylan and he was filling me in. We were constantly getting shushed by the Bobheads in the crowd, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed the show at all without the color commentary from MSF.
After the show, we went outside to find a bunch of umbrellas just tossed about on a blanket. Just umbrellas everywhere. Some homeless guys were just picking up giant armfuls of fancy umbrellas, presumably to sell at Buffalo Exchange or similar. I grabbed a simple black umbrella like the one I had brought and headed out.
On the way to BART I noticed that the umbrella I had taken was actually a pretty darned nice Totes umbrella, and not the cheap Walgreens one I had brought with me. Upgrade! My Stoner Friend gave me a lot of crap for this, but I was lucky to get out of the umbrella free-for-all with any umbrella at all. At least the one I took remotely resembled the one I brought. I still own that umbrella today — it’s in the trunk of my car.
I walked past a bar and saw that the Red Sox were still on the television, so I ducked inside just in time to see David Ortiz hit a game winning home run. Wow, so they won one game. It’s not like they’re going to come back and win the whole series, so missing this game wasn’t that big of a deal, right?
Ticket Stories 