To start out, I drove from Lawrence on Friday night (September 22, 2000 for those anal types out there). Upon arrival, I met up with Sean and Paul at Craig's house. We hung around and watched TV for a bit, and then double and triple checking to make sure we all had our tickets, we hopped in Craig's Tracker and headed towards Kansas City's Starlight Theatre and greatness.

    We were making great time until we hit I-435 just a little bit before Metcalf. See, that part of town is busy enough at rush hour. This was also a HUGE traffic jam. Needless to say, we went from 75 to "a granny with a walker makes better time" in about 5 minutes flat. So, we all figure that it can't possibly take too long for the traffic to die down. 10, 15 minutes tops.

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Oh, god- were we sooooooooo wrong. We were stuck in traffic for over an hour. Happily, we had tunes and smokes, so we were able to while away the hours. Unfortunately, even though it was September, it was still muggy as hell, and we had no breeze. Being stuck in four lanes of exhaust belching traffic didn't help any, either.

    On the bright side, as we crept along, we had many things to keep us interested. There were the kids in the car near us we played "WHASSUP?!?!" with a for while, the guy we scared by trying to pretend I was having phone sex with my girlfriend, the many cars we tried to get to wave, and so on. There was also Sean trying to convince Craig that the strip of median between us and the retaining walla was the "Craig Lane" and that he should gun it and see how far we could get. He decided not to, only to see two guys jet down it five minutes later. They stopped, got out of their car, and last we saw them, were smoking and lounging on the hood.

    What was the cause of all of this, you ask? A semi jacknifed and was taking up three of the four lanes of the eastbound (read- OUR) lane. By the time we got passed it, we were nearly at our exit. We were also REALLY near the start time for the concert. We got there right at the start time, ran like madmen, and got to our seats (which were DAMN good, too). Then the rains came.

    Yeah, like the traffic wasn't enough. It POURED for an hour solid. Amazingly, we kept our smokes dry and didn't float away. By the time the rain ended, we were soaked head to toe (worse for me in my cotton Converse). The show came an iota away from being cancelled. We did talk with some interesting folks, though, and got t-shirts, which helped keep us warm (well, warmISH). Happily, the rain stopped, the curtain came up, and we had our Al.

    Everyone in the audience stood for the first song, then the four of us and a scattering of people were left standing. We wanted to dance. Alas, the people behind us had issues with that. Not even bothering to ask us politely to sit down so they could see, we just began hearing cries of "Sit down!!!" So we said "FUCK THIS" and went over to stand by the side under the overhang where we could smoke. We could also dance and have a comparibly good view of the stage.

    However, we wanted seats. The bright side of this was that we found that the top deck was VACANT. So, we four hauled up there, got in the front row and saw that we could see the whole stage, dance in the aisle, AND smoke. The rest of the show was great. We sang along (loudly and out of tune), boogied, and at the end, all swayed together to "Yoda." It kicked ass. Granted, with the exception of the new stuff, it was damn near a recreation of his live video, but we were THERE. We saw WEIRD AL!!!