I Can Feel Your Heartbeat
Rock Me Baby
I'll Meet You Halfway
Cherish
Ain't No Sunshine
Cry
Hush
Do You Believe In Magic
How Can I Be Sure
Point Me In The Direction of Albequerque
No Bridge I Wouldn't Cross
Hollywood Nights
I Think I Love You
I Woke Up In Love This Morning
C'mon Get Happy
I Saw Her Standing There (?)
Summer Days
They aren't in order, and there were probably more than that, but my memory of what exactly he sang is a little blurry. Too many hormones in my system. ;-) If anyone else was there, they might be able to help me fill in the gaps.
More coming in next e-mail, and this will be posted on my site at http://www.angelfire.com/poetry/aurathundera/main.html in the section for my nonfiction and original writing.
Pictures coming as soon as they get developed. Dan's does a great job on my concert pix, but they're slower than molasses in January.
Aura
I originally decided to go to Westbury because it was the only other concert for the rest of the year that was reasonably close to my home, in southeast PA. It was also relatively inexpensive, compared to the $100 for my tickets for the Tropicana show.
I had figured that Long Island wasn't going to be all that far, so the trip would be short enough that I could day-trip it--drive out early and drive back on the same day. It took some convincing, but I got my father to agree to drive me and my mother out to Westbury. He, however, refused to go to the concert and decided that he preferred to wait in the car.
Anyway, we left around 3:30 in the afternoon, figuring that it would take about two hours to get there but leaving time in case of any kind of emergency. The original plan had been to drive across Manhattan, coming in the Holland Tunnel and out a bridge on the other side. However, my father figured that trying to drive across Manhattan at 5 PM was a bad idea. Driving through Newark was an interesting experience. Living where I do, I go into New York fairly often. However, I had not been within sight of the Manhattan skyline since before September 11. There is one point on I-78 where the road goes up a hill and you can see the skyline in the distance. It was the first time that I had seen the city without the World Trade Center, and I promptly started to tear up. A frantic search for the tissue box ensued, as I was wearing a pretty heavy coat of eye makeup and didn't want it running down around my chin.
So, we drove around the Newark airport, across Staten Island and crossed the New York harbor at the Verrazano Narrows bridge.
And then ran smack into an enormous traffic tieup, which was moving at about 25 miles per hour on the Belt Parkway through Brooklyn. We had lost our radio station that we were listening to somewhere in Newark and turned the radio off so that my father could concentrate on getting on and off the right ramps around Verrazano Narrows. Concrete spaghetti does not even *begin* to describe that maze of cattle chutes.
Once we were on the Belt Parkway (stuck in traffic and bored) we decided that it was time to turn on the tape deck. I had a tape of (what else!) my favorite David Cassidy songs. Dad had an audiobook of Rainbow Six (gag!). He absolutely refused to listen to David. Compromise was reached ten minutes (and two miles) later when Mom decreed that we were listening to Jimmy Buffet. If you heard a car on the Belt Parkway with the stereo turned up a bit too loud and the riders singing along to Cheeseburger in Paradise, that would have been us.
The traffic stayed messy almost all the way into Westbury. The Belt Parkway inched along in spurts, averaging around 35 MPH all the way to JFK Airport. There was some excitement when a New York state cop and a tow truck passed us at 60 MPH on the shoulder, but they cleaned up whatever had happened before we got there.
There were some neat views, as the road passed straight through Coney Island at one point and we could see the Cyclone off in the distance on one side and the Parachute Tower and Wonder Wheel off on the other. I think that I was the only one who found that of much interest, but then I'm the only history buff in the family.
Traffic moved a bit better once we got out of Queens and into Long Island itself, on the Ocean Parkway. It was still slow and moved in spurts, but it was a bit better. A fair amount of the heavy traffic had dissipated after JFK Airport. It didn't really start to move until we were within 15 miles of Westbury.
Even with all the delays, we found the venue with 90 minutes to spare. We decieded to get gas for the car and food for us, so we set off into the town to look for a gas station and a decent restauraunt. We settled for Papa Joe's Pizzaria, a little place in a strip mall. My bright idea of going to the sushi bar was quickly squashed by my parents, neither of whom enjoy sushi. We ordered a pizza with mushrooms and sausage. I think I spent most of my time staring at it and grinning like an idiot which I had been doing ever since we crossed the Verrazano Narrows bridge. (That is, I was grinning like an idiot when I wasn't checking the map to make sure that I would be there on time.) My stomach was doing backflips and I was lost in a happy David haze by then.
We didn't eat all of the pizza and the guy at the pizzaria asked us if we wanted a box to take it along. He was a bit shocked when we told him that we had daytripped up from Pennsylvania to see David Cassidy at Westbury Music Fair. He then asked my mother if she had liked him back in the 1970s, and was still further shocked to discover that I was the David fan.
By that time it was 7:30 and we decided to head back for the venue. The parking lot was pretty crowded by then, and the car was parked near the back. Dad stayed in the car and Mom and I went in.
Sheesh, that was long. But after all, getting there is half the fun, isn't it?
Aura
There was a large crowd going into the theater at 7:30 but it was moving pretty quickly. Mom insisted on getting a picture of me by the poster outside the front door, with my silly "I'm Gonna See David!" grin still plastered across my face, to go along with the one that she took at the Tropicana in March, where I looked like a deer in the headlights of an 18-wheel Freightliner rig. (It was taken after the show, when I had been in the front row and touched his hand.) That photo is one of her favorites, mostly used in attempts to embarass me in front of her friends. But hey, when you're proud of being a fan, it doesn't work so good.
Security guys were checking everyone's bags on the way in, but that was one of those times when having a small camera that very much resembles a cell phone when it's in its case came in handy. It went completely unnoticed where it was clipped to my belt.
Mom wanted a pina colada when we were coming in. I said it was a side effect of listening to too much Jimmy Buffet and called her a Parrothead. That led to good-natured insulting of each other's musical taste for a few minutes while we walked to our seats, which turned out to be on the opposite side of the theater from the front door.
Mom and I had seats in Section A, Row F. My seat was in the middle of the row, and it was at about eye height. I didn't have to either look down or up to get a good view of David once he was onstage. No stiff neck, and the people in front of me were fairly short.
Because Westbury Music Fair is a round theater, David came in through the aisle between sections A and H. So I got a pretty good view of him coming in. He had to run like crazy to get in, as the fans pretty quickly started overwhelming the security guys. Some of them looked a little startled by the reaction that David got from the fans.
He started with I Can Feel Your Heartbeat. He came out wearing his dark red shirt, tucked into those yummy black jeans. He was definitely showing off all of his assets.
And part of the beauty of Westbury is that it is a theater in the round, with a rotating stage. That meant that I got plenty of great views of his butt, and so did everybody else.
After the first two songs or so, David talked to the audience for a bit. He talked about how whenever he was within 100 miles of New York it was like coming home for him. He also mentioned that it was summer and that meant that he already needed a shower. He gestured to his sweaty shirt and someone yelled for him to take it off. He was in pretty good form, all told. Someone else yelled "I think I love you!" at him, only to recieve a reply along the lines of "Ah, babe, I know I love you." I don't remember his exact words. He also mentioned that several members of his family from Long Island were in the audience.
Before he left for the intermission, David told us to leave his hair alone on the way out or he would end up needing a rug. This time, they brought in all of the people they could get to help the security guys get David out. They brought in all of the parking lot attendants and the ushers, pretty much everyone that they could spare to help their security guys. I don't think they were prepared for the level of hysteria that went on, although by and large people were staying in their seats more than they did at the Tropicana. That was probably mostly due to the fact that it was a more cramped venue--the aisles were narrower and it was hard to get close to the stage, although there were a fair number of people up and dancing during Rock Me Baby.
During the second half of the show, David was wearing the black shirt with the silver glitter threads in it. It wasn't tucked in, which obscured some of the view, but it was still pretty good.
The second half seemed to have a higher energy than the first. He had the audience clapping to the beat of most of the songs, and all told the audience was far more reactive than I've ever seen before at either the Showboat or the Tropicana. Every time he would wiggle or thrust his hips, he would get a squeal and yell from the audience. And for most of the songs, just about everyone was singing along. During Rock Me Baby, some people were literally dancing in the aisles, and David was jumping around.
It was during the second half of the show when someone yelled "Didn't we have some kind of a summer?" from somewhere off to my left. She got a response, something like "We've had a lot of kinds of summers, babe!" A few people had signs, and I also saw one old pennant, and a scarf that said "Darling David" on it that someone was waving around.
By the time that he got to I Think I Love You, everyone was up, dancing, singing along, and stomping and clapping to the beat. Dad later said that he could hear ITILY from where he was parked at the far end of the parking lot. During ITILY, David slapped hands with as many members of the audience as he could reach, and he threw the microphone straight up in the air at the end of the song. Things calmed down a little bit for Hollywood Nights, which was the last song that he did.
On the way out, several people were laughing over one woman's experience with a friend who just couldn't understand why she chose to go see David Cassidy instead of the Mellencamp concert. She had plenty of understanding ears.
The ride home was almost as bad as the ride up. I didn't get home until 2 AM. The traffic was still in the most hideous tieup all through Long Island and Brooklyn. I don't remember much of it; Dad had tuned in Q104 Classic Rock and we had good music (though it wasn't David, it turned out that they had been plugging two concerts all evening--David's and John Mellencamp.) I was drifting in a happy David fog that hasn't completely worn off yet.
Aura