Only the Good Die Young (and only the great draw 41,000, and play for 3 hours at 60+)

I’m at Dulles Airport, waiting for my flight back to Chicago after a weekend at home in Maryland for my mom’s birthday. Back in the spring, my Dad and I decided to get her tickets to the inaugural concert at Nationals Park-- Billy Joel and Elton John. So, Saturday night, all six of us crammed onto the Metro (and I mean squeezed—due to track maintenance, trains were only running every fifteen minutes which made for a super packed house of aggressive travelers) and headed down to Anacostia.

When we got there, we realized that the system for getting down to the field was going about as smoothly for this novice concert venue as getting metro cards had gone for my Dad. Apparently, we had to jump through several hoops to get into our seats down on the field (including having our tickets marked, getting purple wristbands, making our way to section 110, where we would get said markings and wristbands checked by guards). The system was completely inefficient, not to mention frustrating. In the process, I realized that concert-goers might be some of the scariest people on earth—from the stampedes and angry shouting of fellow field ticket holders, to the angry glares and rude words of those non-fielders that we had to gingerly cross in front of.

The crowd was surprisingly heterogeneous as age goes, but it was undoubtedly the whitest, WASPiest concert I have ever been to (video coming soon), and certainly that Nationals Park has ever seen. It was also the largest that the new stadium has ever, and probably will ever hope to attract.

Both Billy and Elton were showing their age—Joel in his profuse sweating and round frame, and John in his octave-lower-than-normal singing. But both had undeniable stage presence, and as one who missed out on their glory days, I can say that even if they are only mere ghosts of the artists that they once were, that’s pretty impressive.