I've got a rhyme that sounds like a riddle...

What's round on the end and high in the middle?

We didn't get back in until around 4:30 AM last night, and I've only got about 85% of the hearing back in my left ear. (Based on the only other time I had this happen, I expect it to be back to 100% by tomorrow) I am also still giggling madly at intervals. If by this you can extrapolate that we had an excellent time, you would be completely correct. DEVO in Akron was, as described by one of our fellow Spuds, "like a mini-DEVOtional, " which means very very good indeed.

We missed the opening band because about three hundred people besides ourselves had chosen the "will call" option from Ticketmaster, and the box office people can only hand out tickets so fast. However, we did get in in plenty of time to get settled before a very welcome surprise; Chrissie Hynde turned up and did three acoustic songs, as well as closing the show with a new Pretenders song.

And then, after a short break and the mandatory introductory film (as always featuring General Boy, who was actually present in the audience, another bonus for the concert being in Akron) Our Boys were on, and man, they were cooking. We had good seats, but I ditched them immediately and bolted down to the railing around the orchestra pit, which gave me enough room to dance properly, but put me right next to the speakers, which explains the temporary deafness, not that I am in any way bothered by that, because I had an amazing view of the stage, and vice-versa #grins# I was right next to a woman for whom this was her first time seeing them live, and she was also having a blast; it's fun being female because you're allowed to dance with each other without any sort of social penalty :) At any rate, aside from being shoved aside by a guy with a movie camera twice, I managed to stay right by the stage the whole time.

The other part that causes me to giggle madly at intervals was that I managed to get ahold of a backstage pass for a short interval, and I didn't even have to resort to any nefarious measures- apparently simple politeness will still get you pretty far. Didn't have the camera, though- sorry.

Afterwards we headed to Luigi's, a local Italian restaurant that's open until 4AM. We met up with two of the Spudtalkers, and hung around eating and chatting until the rest of the gang (who had passes and had been at the event afterparty) got in, somewhere around two. We stayed long enough to say hi and bye to everyone, and then took off; Akron is just over a two hour drive, even though it's almost entirely interstate, and we had to get home before the Owlvark got too tired to do the trip. He was fine, though, and we had a couple of energy drinks in case he wasn't, and the trip was completely uneventful- at three in the morning, 80 and 79 are almost completely deserted. We got in as mentioned, about 4:30 AM, and zonked out almost immediately.

I'll put some photos up once we've sorted them out, but we some errands to run this afternoon, and I'm notoriously bad about updates anyway, so it may be a while.