An Exhaustive, Step-by-Step Guide to Buying Tickets to a Young Pop Star’s Concert as a 30-Something
Step 1: Get an Instagram ad for a Young Pop Star performing at Madison Square Garden in seventeen months’ time. Awesome! It would be so fun to see her sing the three songs you love and the 30 songs you’ve never heard.
Then you remember: Seeing them perform live means loud sounds and long lines. Ten years ago you would’ve bought tickets without hesitation, but now, you wonder: Am I… too old to go to a concert? And if concerts are designed for the young, then isn’t that simply society punishing us for the crime of aging? Why should we be quartered to “age-appropriate” institutions like wine bars with dim lighting and Trader Joe’s?
Step 2: Decide you will be going to the concert. As a form of protest. Against society.
Step 3: Send a link to the Instagram post to your groupchat.
Step 4: Receive no answer.
Step 5: Realize your text does not include a call to action. Type out a follow-up text that says, “Does anyone want to go to this?” before deleting and re-typing it to now contain a message that could only be written by a supremely confident woman: “In case anyone wants to go to this!!”
Receive no answer.
Step 6: Text additional groupchats. Receive only a thumbs up tapback from your friend in the groupchat who moved to Boulder.
Consider that not only are you too old to go to a concert, maybe you also don’t have any friends.
Step 7: One friend writes back. They want to go! Then another. Then several more. Should you get a party bus???
Step 8: Do not get a party bus. “I just remembered I have a child,” one friend texts. “Wait, I need all of my nights free in case the guy I’m dating in an open marriage leaves his wife,” another says. The only person who will actually commit to attending the Young Pop Star concert is a friend of a friend you forgot was in this groupchat whose name you never remember.
Step 9: Sign up for texts from the Young Pop Star so that you can be alerted to the pre-presale. Confirm your date of birth. Receive an unsubscribe message that says “Based on your age we think you may be more interested in The Lumineers.” Now, it’s personal.
Step 10: Get a burner phone. Use a fake age to sign up for texts for the pre-presale. Realize that you missed a full day of work to do this and now your boss is angry at you.
Step 11: Get texts for the pre-presale. Get shut out of the pre-presale because you haven’t previously spent a minimum of $5,000 combined on the Young Pop Artist’s merch, music, and previous tour dates.
Step 12: Now, get texts for the presale. Miss the window for the presale because you’re doing your job being an elementary school nurse.
Step 13: Call out sick from your job as an elementary school nurse to stake your claim in line for the general sale for tickets. Accept the website’s cookies and anything else it wants to give you. Wait in the waiting room for the queue. Wait in the queue. Finally, be let out of the queue. Between the bots and teens using their parents’ credit cards with spending limits as high as Mount Everest, you are only 59,735th in line.
Step 14: Get two tickets! They are $7,000 each and before you can decide if you want to spend three months of your elementary school nurse salary, they are gone.
Step 15: Get a message that says tickets are sold out. Forget to tell the friend of a friend you’re supposed to go with because you can’t remember her name.
Step 16: Spend each day reloading StubHub to see if you can find tickets you can afford.
Step 17: Get fired from your job as an elementary school nurse.
Step 18: Enroll at the local high school like in the movie Never Been Kissed but without any of the pretenses of doing it for “journalism.” Use your now encyclopedic knowledge of the Young Pop Star to infiltrate the only group of people in the world who could possibly have an extra ticket: The popular crowd.
Step 19: Go to the concert with the popular crowd. Get shunned by the popular crowd when they see you singing along to songs from the opener, Christina Aguilera, who only their moms listen to. Get ejected by security not for doing anything illegal exactly, but like, still too weird for you to be allowed to enjoy the concert.
Step 20: Stand outside Madison Square Garden, your head in your hands, wondering how it is you ended up here. Receive a text from the girl whose name you can’t remember asking where you are. Turns out she’s had a ticket for you the whole time.