My friend Emily and I went to a Backstreet Boys concert. We weren't sure why we were there. It seemed as if we had just wanted something to do. So there we were, in the front rows of the arena, listening to "Shape of My Heart." There were screaming middle school girls around us, dancing and putting up their hands as if they thought one of the Boys was going to let them get up on stage. Emily and I kept looking for a place to sit down. There weren't any chairs in the first few rows.
We finally noticed some box seats to our right. Some people had left, so we attempted to take their seats. The people already sitting there looked at us accusingly. I knew a lot of the box seat occupants from high school. I wondered if they were Backstreet Boys fans or if they had just gotten bored as well.
Time passed. It was a few days later and Emily and I found ourselves at yet another concert at the same arena. This time, it was the Foo Fighters and Weezer. We had reserved spots in the box seats for this show even though, once again, we weren't sure what we were doing there.
"Do you know what the big deal is about Weezer?" I asked Emily.
"No," she said, "but everyone else in the world seems to love them."
"I know," I said.
The people in the box seats had all been in my and Emily's high school graduating class. Most of them were clutching their new Weezer albums eagerly, hoping they could get them signed. Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters was standing right outside the box seats, tuning his guitar, but no one really cared. They were all waiting for Weezer to come on.
I leaned up to the window. "Hey Dave," I said, "are you touring with any other bands this summer?"
"Yeah," he said. "Let me check the schedule." He looked at a piece of paper and told me the name of a band. I'd never heard of them.
"Thanks," I said.
Then Weezer came on stage and everyone started screaming. The first few guitar chords of a song were heard, and Emily and I seemed to be the only ones who didn't immediately know what the song was.
"Ohmigod!" said some girl in the box seats. "It's 'Two Davids.'"
"Oh!" I said, faking an enthusiastic tone of voice. "My favorite." I'd never heard of the song, though the opening chords sounded exactly like those of Nirvana's "Come As You Are."
Emily and I decided to go ahead and take our seats, since we knew we weren't going to be standing up and cheering through the entire show. As we began to sit down, a girl named Kristen said, "These seats are for people 21 and over only."
I said, "I turned 21 on the eleventh."
Emily said, "I just turned 21 last week."
Kristen looked at us with narrowed eyes. I thought she was going to actually ask to see our IDs. She had graduated with Emily and me and had been very prudish in high school. As I looked around, I saw that most of the other people in the box seats had been a lot like Kristen in high school: into church activities and nonthreatening school-sanctioned stuff. I couldn't believe they were at a big concert.
Emily and I took our seats and watched all the screaming Weezer fans for two hours.
