It’s 9:00 on Friday Night, Nashville. Do You Know Where Your Teenage Daughter Is?

She’s here with me at the Nashville Arena watching Justin Timberlake. And you should be ashamed about how you let her dress. I know she probably didn’t leave the house wearing that denim microskirt and those pink flip flops, but she stopped in a Mapco restroom with her girlfriends and changed clothes on the way to the show. I recommend you buy her some Desenex in the morning.

I’d tell you about the opening act, Pink, but we completely missed her because the people we were meeting to go to the show were an hour late because they went to the Green Hills Mall to get hair extensions for Justin. I’m not kidding. One of the ladies complained on the three block walk from the restaurant where we ate dinner that if her extensions fell out in the wind, Justin wouldn’t love her. I told her she could just say she was here on a Make a Wish Foundation trip. She actually said that sounded like a good idea.

Visually, Timberlake’s show has been stunning, even from the top row. The special effects and screen projections have been outstanding. I like how his dancers aren’t all x-ray skinny. They look like real people. And they’re very talented.

As far as how he sounds, I have no clue. The shrieking in this place makes me think about what it must have been like to see the Beatles forty years ago. Girls are passing out from forgetting to inhale. It’s really spectacular. Not necessarily my cup of tea, but fun nonetheless.

Luckily, I’m enough of a nerd to have Googled the set list in advance. We’ll be out of here during the penultimate song and on our way to the Sportsman’s. Parents, come get your daughters.

It’s “True Confession Thursday”

I don’t know any other way to put this…

RUABelle and I are going to see Justin Timberlake tomorrow night.

There, I said it.

We didn’t mean to. I just had a friend of mine ask me if I could help him get tickets to the show for his girlfriend and happened to say, “Oh that sounds like fun.” Y’know, just to show polite interest. And he bought two extra seats for us and said if we buy dinner, they’ll pay for the show.

Ugh. Can’t really figure a way out of this one.

At least it’ll give me something to blog about. And Pink is opening.

Double ugh.

Did I mention we’re in the top row of the arena because he didn’t score these primo tickets until last week?

“Hey, I think that little ant down there is shaking his thorax and saying something about bringing his Lexus back.”

To be fair, I downloaded the latest album from iTunes and have been running to (from?) it all week. It’s not horrible. It’s like a Prince album that Prince didn’t write, sing or play on. So maybe from the rafters, we can just pretend we’re watching Prince on an off night.

Pray for us, Nashville.

The Day/Year/Decade/Century the Music Died

I was watching the news this morning on Channel 4 when I saw the following information in the news crawl:

“Forensic scientists at the University of Tennessee have ruled that there was no evidence of foul play in the 1959 plane crash death of Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper.”

Apparently, they’re a little backed up in the lab in Knoxville. Gil Grissom would never put up with that crap.

Live-Blogging the Billy Joel Concert at the GEC

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

I’m sorry. I just took an $87.50 nap.

I remember going to Kuhn’s in Belle Meade in 1975 after “The Sting” was released to buy a 45 of “The Entertainer” by Scott Joplin. I screwed up and bought a Billy Joel song instead. Hey, I was eight. I could barely read. Thus began a lifetime of disappointment with Billy Joel.

Don’t get me wrong. Billy was in excellent form and voice tonight, and his band rocked! I especially liked the numbers where the horn section went tri-saxual. His banter between songs was witty and personable. He played almost every hit I could think of, plus some cool deeper album cuts.

But I like a Krispy Kreme donut every now and then…I just don’t want thirty of them.

Lest you think I slept through the show, here’s the set list:

Prelude/Angry Young Man
My Life
Everybody Loves You Now
The Entertainer
Ballad of Billy the Kid
Allentown
Stuck in Nevada
Zanzibar
New York State of Mind
Rootbeer Rag
Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)
Don’t Ask Me Why
Shameless
She’s Always A Woman
Keepin’ The Faith
The River of Dreams
Highway To Hell
We Didn’t Start The Fire
Big Shot
It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me
You May Be Right

Encores
Only The Good Die Young
Italian Restaurant
Piano Man

I’m glad I went, because it meant a lot to RUABelle, but for the cost of our two tickets I could have bought twenty, yes twenty!, of his albums on iTunes.

It was a late night because traffic was a bear and they delayed the start of the show. To pass the extra half hour, RUABelle and I played a couple of games. First we tried to find the youngest person in the crowd who wasn’t with their parents. We figured about 30 years old. Then we played count the black people in the arena that weren’t beer vendors. We stopped counting after 3. Cuz that’s all we saw. Oh well, I have to head to Birmingham at 6:30 tomorrow morning and back in the afternoon. So I guess it’s time to finish this nap in my own bed.

Live-blogging the Miss America Pageant While Waiting for Heroes to Come On

They just introduced the 52 contestants.  There were three minorities.  Three.  Unless you count brunettes…then there were a couple more.

That doesn’t look like the America I know.

Miss Hawaii is, well, Hawaiian.  Miss Texas is an African-Texan, err, African-American.  And apparently Miss U.S. Virgin Islands is a Virgin-American.  Honestly, did we really have to include the U.S. Virgin Islands?  There’s no Puerto Ricans or Guamians.

And Miss Tennessee is named Blaire Pancake.  Like Tennessee needed more reasons for the rest of the country to make fun of us.  Blaire freakin’ Pancake.

Oh crap, Mario “Twinkletoes” Lopez is the host and Chris “Hardball” Matthews is a judge.

I’m gonna go watch “Antiques Roadshow.”