something that not many people know about me is that i have panic attacks. when i am in a crowd of people crazy things happen. the people turn into animated characters and i feel like i have to dodge them like in a video game. my heart starts to race and i start to cry and michael has to get me out quick. i know it is happening but i can’t control it, yet.
i wasn’t always this way. i used to be care free about everything until the summer of 93. michael and i had gone to (i’ll give you one guess) a grateful dead concert at rfk stadium in washington d.c. (where the redskins use to play) and there were so many people there that the parking lot was full and we had to park like 2 miles away from the stadium and walk. it was wild. i had never seen so many people. the concert was o.k and when we came out after the show they had put fences up on the grass. i don’t know why but they had them up maybe every 200 ft and people had to go through these fences to get to other parking lots. they were trying to herd us i guess, but you know how you park in one spot and you go in one door and you see where your ticket is and you walk to the other side of the stadium to your seat and when you leave you don’t go out the same door. well, everyone was trying to go through these fences to find their parking lot and the fences were getting really crowded. michael and i came to this one fence and there was hundreds of people trying to get in and hundreds of people trying to get out. people were pushing and pushing and yelling and it was really starting to get scary. we did get out o.k. but after that happened i have not been able to get in crowds.
do you remember a few years ago when i think whitesnake was playing at that bar and their pyrotechnics display caught the bar on fire and all those people were trying to get out and the news showed that footage of the people stuck in the doorway. that is kind of what this was like but not so bad.
i know that whatever God chooses to do with what concerns us, we have the assurance that his decisions are guided by his love for us and he has just not decided to let me let this go,yet.
what is something about you that some people might not know? please remember the world can read this. don’t embarrass me.
i searched forever trying to find a video clip of this show and i was very disappointed. i wanted to put a video of the encore on my post but i couldn’t find it anywhere. the encore was “what a wonderful world” and it was awesome, oh well. this story will be about my first “dead” related show. it was in hampton va in november 1991. michael was there but i didn’t know him yet. so he will just have to comment on my post about his experience.
i guess i was like 17 years old and some friends of mine and i went to see jerry band. now this is a band that jerry played with that was not the grateful dead. they did covers from all kinds of people from eric clapton to bob dylan to chuck berry to louie armstrong to anybody.
it was cloudy and rainy and cold. i went to this show without a ticket and figured i would get one when i got there. there were a lot of people there. i had to buy some gloves because it was so cold. i can still hear the sound of nitrous ballons being blown up and drum circles and every once in awhile someone going by playng a flute and lots of voices. the smell was like being at a festival with kebob’s cooking with a hint of patchouli. i loved it.
it was almost time for the show so i walked up to the coliseum to buy a ticket. a guy came up to me and told me he had a fake ticket that he would give me and i didn’t have a ticket so i took it. remember when i said it was raining. well the ink on the ticket smeared. it was so obvious it was fake but i tried to use it anyway. i walked right up to that ticket collector and handed him that ticket. guess what happened. he let me in. can you believe that. i soaked it all in. the music the people. it was awesome. we got very close to the front. it was standing room only and that’s all you had. during the show a guy passed out right in front of me. i thought he was dead but he was just wasted. i watched women spin in circles forever. the music was so great i was hooked.
i can’t think of a moral to this story. it was just the first show i went to and since i have decided to share my adventures i thought it fitting to start with the beginning. i do know that all of these stories will show that God had a plan in mind and he has given me lots of chances to die and these are only concerts. it’s not even my everyday life. i’m still waiting to hear about some of your concert adventures.
i am getting ready to tell you a small blast from michael and my past. we were on our way to church the other night and we were listening to a song and i thought i might share this memory i had. now, i say you need to read at your own risk. i will be truthful with this memory and most people know a little of our testimony and know that we did things in our past that would not be pleasing to a christian or most people, but i feel that by reading this and knowing Michael and i you will be able to see that God was with us all along protecting us for a reason. i would not trade any part of my life because God molded me into the person i am today.
this happened in march 1993 and we were going to go to a grateful dead concert with ten of our friends. michael was going to drive his 81 honda civic( which was a really small car) and someone else was going to drive a truck with a shell on the back. at the time michael’s dad owned the napa store and the weather was calling for snow, so his dad was helping him get things together he might need. all along telling michael we should not go, but we were going. he gave him de-icer and snow chains.
we were leaving in the evening just before dark. by this time all the parents were telling us not to go, because they were calling for a blizzard. well none of us had ever seen a blizzard before so we didn’t think some snow would be that bad. when we got to greensboro we picked up another friend and when we got to winston-salem we picked up another friend and it started to snow. it was really coming down and i told michael it would stop soon ( i would later eat those words). we finally got to west virginia( i think wv is nothing but mountains) and it was very dark and all you could see was white dots coming at you. the snow was really piling up and it was time to put on the snow chains. we were in the mountains and we stopped at a local store and got some locals(this man was about 300 pds and wearing overalls with hair to his butt) to help us get the chains on. then we were back on our way going 20 mph in a blizzard through the west virginia mountains in the middle of the night. it was really cold. the heat didn’t feel like it was working and the people in the back of the truck in front of us were lucky not to freeze to death. it was like a ice box. there were ice-cycles hanging back there with them. we had been riding through this for about 6 hours and we stopped at a rest area and asked a lady how much longer we would be in west virginia and she said we only had “one more mountain to cross”. hours later we finally got to ohio. we stopped at a toll and one of the snow chains got rapped around michael’s axle. we had to pull over and get it off. it was really hard because the snow drifts were like 8 feet but michael and jud (michaels best friend at the time)dug and dug and finally after working a lot got it off.
the sun finally came up on our night of hell and we reached our hotel. our room was suppose to be a room with 2 double beds, but when we got in they had taken out a bed because the windows had leaked from the 18 foot snowdrift outside and half our room was wet. which meant we had 1 double bed and half a wet floor for 14 people to stay in. the hotel was gracious and opened it’s doors to anyone who needed it. the rooms, the halls,and the lobby was full of hippies. michael and i tried to sleep, but it was hard to close our eyes and when we did all we could see was those white dots in the darkness coming at us.
the concert was canceled that night and that was ok with me because my brothers band was going to be on the indiana jones series that night. so that meant i could watch it. the next day we went to a mall and then went to the concert. it was so worth everything we had been through. it was one of the best concerts i had ever seen. i was wearing overalls( which is ok when your 19 and 108 pds, but not now) and during the concert michael kept putting things in my front pocket of an illegal nature (remember that).
after the concert we headed home. we stopped at a rest area before we got on the road. me and michael went into the rest area and jud stayed in the car to try and get some sleep. when we went back to our car the ohio state police had dogs in our car and jud was getting out. the police frisked jud and found nothing. the police frisked me and (when he put his 2 fingers in my front pocket i thought that was it, but he pulled out a juicy fruit rapper and) found nothing.the police frisked michael and found nothing. then they put us in the back of their police car so they could search our car. they told us that they found a few things but they were looking for the big deal stuff and let us go( tell me God was not in that. tell me that was just luck. God is good all the time and God knew his plan for us and it wasn’t to go to jail in ohio).
we were still in west virginia when the sun came up and the snow was really thick on the roads still. in the light of day it was scary to see what we had been through in the darkness that we could not see before. the road had no shoulder. one false move and we would have been tumbling down the side of a mountain to our death. i think a good moral to this story is my last paragraph.
IT WAS DARK AND WE COULD NOT SEE BUT THEN THE LIGHT CAME AND WE COULD.
please feel free to share one of your concert adventures!!!!
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perserveres.
