Schedule:

My friend Jim and I drove up from San Diego in little more than an hour, and arrived without tickets. After paying the $7.00 parking fee for the Irvine Meadows venue, we stood at different locations on the way to the main gate, each holding a sign that said, "Need two tickets", above a picture of my cat, and the word "Purrfect" beneath it. The only response was from "scalpers", representatives of ticket brokers who buy up existing seats. They all seemed to talk out of the sides of their mouths, and looked nervous. One offered me seats for $125 each for orchestra and $100 for loge. During the time I was standing there, the price dropped to around $70. My friend received similar offers, but eventually got hassled by the Event Pro venue security for "holding up the line!"

In the mean time, a very kind woman had informed me that the box office actually had additional seats that they were selling, and walked me over to the end of the line. Eventually my friend joined me, and we waited in the hot sun together. A media person for OCN (Orange County Network) came over with a live TV camera, and asked me and a few others if we were willing to be interviewed. When it was my turn, I said that we had driven up from San Diego without tickets, and that it was the closest thing to "living on the edge" that I had experienced it a while. The reporter smiled and asked me for my favorite artist. "It has to be Sarah McLachlan, then Jewel, but with a lineup like this, how can you go wrong?" My 15-seconds of fame had come and gone. Actually, this was truly a 3-ring circus of alternative female performers.

As we waited, we watched enormous white stretch limosines pull up, disgorging groups of 4-5 teenage girls. I found this very amusing, even for the Los Angeles and Orange County area. One by one the line inched ahead, until it was finally our turn to reach the box office. It had only taken us about another hour to get to the ticket window. In response to my "Two best seats together, please" the clerk asked "For today?" Life can really be very funny! Without further hassle, he punched out two $35 tickets (actually $41 once the TicketMaster add-on fees were extorted from us), and we were on our way through the security maze, and finally through the gates of heaven, which today was called Irvine Meadows.

The venue is huge. One part of the complex contains a gigantic water slide amusement area. Fading signs still point the way to "Lion Country Safari", a drive-through wild animal park that has been defunct for more than a decade. We walked up a long pathway that seemed to go on forever, stopping only to have our wrists stamped for alcoholic beverages, just in case we wanted a beer later. Sadly, no one asked to see my proof of age ID, showing that I was over 18 years old. Finally we were at a pavilion area with a variety of food and souvenir vendors. It looked like a small country fair. Hidden behind these clusters were two other performance sites, called "Village Acoustic" and "Stage Two". We pressed on to the main seating arena, up another long ramp, past some more ticket checkpoints, and then finally to row HH where our Loge seats were located, very close to dead center, and perhaps 40 rows back. For last minute tickets, the seats were excellent. Above us were the balcony seating, and still higher and off to the left was a grassy area, appropriately called the "lawn" where there was open seating on the grass. These were the cheap seats, going for around $25. Just as we were settling in we heard Leah Andreone being introduced on the Second Stage, and gathered our belongings to head back down and watch her perform.

I won't go through each of the artists we watched in detail. We were able to watch everyone except Lauren Hoffman and Mudgirl's gigs, because of our late arrival, made still later by the long wait for tickets. Both a drawback, and a benefit (if such inconsistencies are possible) was having to move around so much to see some of the performers. It was a benefit because it added to a sense of adventure and exploration, but shuffling along with crowds of others, up and down the long ramps and stairs, and showing our tickets each time we returned to our Main Stage Loge seats, soon grew stale. And while I am complaining, the two other things which annoyed me were the large number of smokers present, all of them seeming to sit directly in back of us, and the inattentive, boorish and asinine reactions of the crowds. In short, I thought that the audience sucked! Why anyone would pay good money to go to a concert, and then continuously talk through a performer's set, or make dog barking and coyote howling sounds DURING a song, or scream out "I love you, whomever" deeply offends my sensibilities, especially with such performers who love their music and art form so much. These aren't rock musicians who bust up guitars, or kill live chickens on stage. To Jewel's credit, before one number she said, "You know, it will sound much better is you all just stop talking." As I said to my friend, I am used to a small coffee house setting where the crowds are focused on the performer, and you can hear a fly land. At Irvine Meadows you might be able to hear a 747 Jumbo Jet land, but just barely, and only if the crowd piped down for a moment.

I missed most of Cassandra Wilson's set, because I needed to find a bathroom, and then get some food. The ratio of women to men was about 70% to 30%, and as a result there were long lines outside the women's bathrooms, but none at all in the men's facility. To my amusement, many women decided that a bathroom is a bathroom, and went into the men's toilet, trying to avert their attention from the row of men lined up facing one wall of urinals. Has equality gone too far? Mull that one over for a while.

We bought combination plates of Chinese/Thai food, and carried them to our seats just as Paula Cole was taking the stage. Seeing her perform for the first time, was a highlight for me. She is so beautiful and fluid in her movements, and generates such incredible energy. I also enjoyed watching Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman, both of whom I had never seen perform live. Jewel was also excellent, and quite different in a large venue with sidemen backing her, than in the smaller, more acoustically pure venues. A surprise for me was Sarah McLachlan herself, the last performer on the program. Her appearance looked so different from when I had seen her last, backstage at the Moore Theater in Seattle in October, 1994. As always she seemed very happy and radiant, maybe augmented by her recent marriage, though she often alludes to times of sadness and struggle in her life. I was also pleased to see Camille Henderson singing backup at far stage right. Many of Sarah's songs, from her album "Surfacing", due to be released on July 15th, were new to my ear. Perhaps in the middle of Sarah's set, many in the 15,000 seat audience got up to leave, to get a head start out of the parking lot. This seems to be something unique to Southern California venues, especially those from Los Angeles. Then again, it was a weekday night, and people had to be at work the next day. Sarah came out for a single encore, and then it was over at 11:10 p.m., more than 7-1/2 hours of music. In spite of my critical comments, it was a wonderful and exciting concert, which I'm very grateful to have attended.

It did take us over an hour to exit the parking lot, time spent listening to a live broadcast by Suzanne Vega on a syndicated talk radio program called "Love Line", with comments on a previous day's Lilith Fair. By the time that I finally reached home, and got to bed it was past 2 a.m. As I fell asleep, I thought that I heard music, somewhere nearby.