Under Pressure

Once upon a time, when I started with Emerson, my group had the company season tickets to the Minnesota Wild. And with that came season ticket holder access to concerts at the Xcel. It was a wildly amazing perk to occasionally win really good tickets to really good concerts. Then, sadness befell the land and the tickets (and their cost) moved to a new and bigger group and the perk that none of us took for granted went away.

Then, not so long ago, I took a job with a new group. A group that now possessed the tickets. And access to the occasional free concert returned to my life. Complete with sunshine, rainbows, and Adam Lambert. It takes a lot for Mike and I to get a babysitter and drive all the way to St. Paul. So other than deep painful despair that we missed Weezer because we were on spring break, there haven't been any concerts that we were terribly interested in. Until I saw that Queen (+ Adam Lambert) was coming to town!

Mike claimed it was just an expensive cover band (Freddie Mercury snob), so I asked my sister if she wanted to go if I won tickets. She did. And I did. So we made a girls night plan for me to drive up to her house, we'd do dinner, hit the concert, I'd spend the night, and then drive home in the morning. Such a nice, tidy, easy to execute plan ...

Except my departure timing could not have been worse and I got stuck in the middle of a monsoon-like rainstorm. People were hydroplaning on the freeway, there were inches of standing water, and I couldn't see more than a few feet ahead of me. So I pulled off to wait it out. Then caught up with the storm and repeated. Thank goodness I had my book with me - to keep me company in the line up of cars waiting it out in the Cub Foods parking lot. What is usually a 45 minute drive took me just over two hours!

So we scrapped going out for dinner, drank a couple vanilla whiskey drinks and shared a goat cheese frozen pizza at Emmy's place, and headed toward St. Paul. We were about 20 minutes late for the concert, but we don't think we missed any "critical" songs. Our tickets were in the Emerson suite and being late forced us to "sit" at the drink rail rail instead of in the main seating area. This really was for the best - as we promptly moved the stools out of our way and stood, sang, and danced to our hearts' content. Without making my co-workers hate us!

The concert was really great. They played all our favorites. Mike may have been right that Adam Lambert is not Freddie Mercury. But he didn't try to be. And Brian May is still freaking phenomenal on guitar! We did lose interest for a bit during the psychedelic rock period (and the loooooooong guitar solo) - and were quite unhappy that we missed last call ... at 9:30! Bohemian Rhapsody was their final song and the encore did not disappoint either - with We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions sing-a-longs.

Em's friend had suggested a good parking ramp and it was easy out of downtown. Because we were both amped up from the concert, we made a pit stop at the townie bar by Em's house for a night cap. As we walked in, I could hear the jukebox playing a Queen song. So funny!

It was such a fun night with my sister and something we hope to do again soon! Although next time, we are thinking movie night in where we don't have drive somewhere and we can wear comfy pants the whole time ...

I was up and on the road home shortly after 8:00am. The drive home only took 45 minutes - as it should. And they all lived happily ever after.