This past weekend, B and I got the opportunity to attend DeLuna Fest for "free." I use that term loosely because we had to volunteer to sit behind a table for four hours on Saturday to get our tickets. And we had to pay $20 for parking on Friday night when we went to see our bands (and the $1 toll both days). At least we found free parking on Saturday.
DeLuna Fest is a 3-day music festival here on Pensacola Beach, and it's only in its second year. I was originally interested in it because of some of the headlining bands, namely Weezer and Cake. Linkin Park was also slate to perform, but they dropped out all of 2 weeks beforehand. Lame. The tickets were super-expensive, so I'm glad we were able to volunteer our way into it.
The two bands I mostly wanted to see both performed on Friday night, so we headed out to the beach. The last time I went to a big musical festival with multiple stages was when I was in high school and went to Music Midtown in Atlanta (does that still exist?) and saw Hole, 98°, newly-famous Kid Rock (gag), and a pre-famous Jessica Simpson all in one weekend. B had never been to anything like this, so I'm glad he got the experience. The cool thing about DeLuna Fest is that the two main stages were right on the beach, in the sand. This was awesome later when I just needed to sit my pregnant butt down.
We got there on Friday night, just in time to see the last song from a duo called
Matt and Kim. (I'd heard of them before, but don't know their music.) We realized then that we didn't have a program--actually, I'm not even sure if there WERE programs available--had no idea what stage we were at, and I couldn't remember which band I wanted was coming on first. We also don't have smart phones, which is probably why there were no programs readily available. Somehow we ended up running into an acquaintance (we know all of like 10 people in this town, so that was a slight miracle), and she looked it up on her phone. It was sort of wrong, but I asked some other guy and Cake was indeed playing on the stage we were at in just under an hour. So we sat around and waited.
Some people around us "lit up" in true music-festival-sense (if you know what I mean). I knew the smell right away and was trying to get away from it, if anything, to protect my baby. Somehow B cannot smell this stuff. I told him to take a big whiff and remember that smell for later (especially when our kids are teens), and he kept saying that he didn't smell anything.
What. The. Heck. The things I learn about my husband . . . guess I'll be the narc of the house.
Another thing that kept bothering me, especially once Cake started playing, was people walking by us and bumping into me. (This is the opposite of what I thought would happen--I thought we were all going to get pushed forward and smooshed up once the band came on the stage. Apparently, there is no pleasing me.) I've always been protective of my space, but now it's even more so. We were pretty close up, and I just don't see why people find the need to mill around to get over there or leave only minutes into a set. I was trying to perfect a certain stance with my hands on my hips and elbows out so that people wouldn't think I make a good passageway; it was semi-effective. There were also beach balls and playground balls being bounced around through a lot of it, and one of the more rubbery playground balls totally smacked me in the bump during the first song. B did a great job of protecting his pregnant wife from falling crowd-surfers though.
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As for the music, Cake was really good. Apparently they have some new stuff out, so I didn't recognize that (or even like it too much), but they mostly stuck to their crowd-pleasing classics. Here's where DeLuna Fest needed to fix their logistics. Cake ended at 9 and Weezer started promptly at 9. A large handful of people left Cake early to haul it down to the other end of the beach to see all of Weezer's set, and the rest of us waited until the end, then trucked it down there. I was in sneakers because I needed the support and hauling butt through sand was not easy. Also, my knees had apparently locked during the hour watching Cake and it was so hard to move my pregnant behind anyway. B refused to take me piggy-back. Almost everyone at Cake went to Weezer, so it was just a cluster&*^$! of people trying to get down the beach as quickly as possible.
I made it through about 3 songs at Weezer before I plopped my butt down in the sand and just listened. Weezer has a ton of good music that everyone knows, but for whatever dumb reason, they were playing a bunch of not-so-good stuff for most of it. This included a cover of "Pumped Up Kicks," which is currently on the radio. It wasn't even a very good cover, in my opinion. I told B to take another whiff of the air when they started playing "Hash Pipe," and he still couldn't smell it. Sigh.
The next day we saw a band that we'd never heard of (more on them later this week), and then The Shins later that night. We made it an hour through that set then left because we were both really exhausted. We also realized that we're getting old, especially being around all those beach-bum-hippies. B's back was starting to hurt, and of course I had the normal pregnancy woes. I've pretty much decided that my rock concert days are behind me as I didn't really enjoy the concerts as much as I once would have. That's probably the last "standing up" concert I'll go to for a long while. The next concert I see I will be sitting in a comfy chair/church pew with a bunch of gray-haired ladies around me. And the only standing I'll be doing is for the
Hallelujah chorus.
As for the volunteering we did, we were right next to the USO tent and they gave us Girl Scout cookies. Can't argue with that!
