Ok, I'm going to try this again. It won't be the same as the first time I wrote it, but I'll try to remember as much as I can. Oh, and FYI, I didn't catch the mosquito. I chased it around my room a bit, then it hid from me and I couldn't find it again. I hope it didn't bite me in my sleep.

Laugh if you must, but Tuesday night I went to the Clay Aiken concert. Just my friend Jessica from Capital and I went because we couldn't find anyone else who liked Clay enough to spend the money on the tickets. Jessica and I had been faithful Clay fans since halfway through American Idol 2 and were very excited that he was coming to Charleston. Anyone who comes to Charleston that is not country or Kid Rock is exciting. So, we made our way through the mall to the civic center not sure what to expect.

I didn't think our seats would be very good because I was too lazy to get up early and go to the box office to get the best tickets. When I got there, I bought the best seats available, but they looked far away on the diagram. So, upon reaching our row, we discovered that the seats weren't really that bad after all. Too far away to get good pictures, but I took some anyway, mostly just to finish off a roll of film. Now, in order to understand how the rest of the evening could have been funny, I will try to recreate our surroundings.

We were sitting diagonally facing the right side of the stage, 16 rows back. That put us in the second tier of the seats that pull out. To Jessica's left was a man and woman, both in their late fifties, although the woman looked older than the man. The man was bald, with a few wispy pieces of yellow-white hair covering the back half of his head. He was wearing khaki shorts and a baby blue t-shirt with the letters "CLAY" strung across the front in dark blue, outlined in white. The shirt was definitely homemade. It was too plain and cheap-looking to be bought, plus the letters were crooked and unevenly spaced. He also had a camera hanging around his neck and was not shy about taking plenty of pictures. He was very excited to be there, much more excited than you would expect a fifty-something year old man to be at a Clay Aiken concert. The woman with him had short gray hair and didn't seem very enthusiastic. There may have been other reasons for that, which I will get to later (hehe).

In front of us was another fifty-something year old man and two women, one in her fifties, the other in her early sixties. The younger woman had brownish-gray hair and wore a Clay shirt she had just bought from the booth outside. She never let go of her digital camera, but seemed unsure about how to use it at times. The man was even balder than the aforementioned man, but had a neatly trimmed light brown beard. The only parts of the concert he seemed to enjoy were the parts where there was no singing. He seemed to be perpetually scowling. The older woman had wavy shoulder length silver hair that was parted on the side and secured with a tiny silver clip. She wore small silver square framed glasses. Her enthusiasm and excitement projected an attitude much younger than her appearance would suggest.

To my right were two more women, one in her fifties, the other probably seventy-something. The younger woman had cropped brown hair and wore a very loud floral print shirt. She had a friendly demeanor, and every time I would move my head ever so slightly to the right, she would look at me with a half smile as if to say "Oh dearie, aren't you so sweet!" I tried not to look right very often. The older woman beside her was very wrinkly and frail looking. She never moved or talked once during the whole concert, but still seemed to enjoy herself. Although the younger woman seemed to have a fairly boisterous personality, always wanting to talk to someone, she was clearly at the beck and call of the small, silent woman.

I didn't turn around and get a good look at the people behind us because they might have thought I was a little weird. Lets just say that they were pretty much the same type of people.

So basically, we were surrounded by old people, a fact that was verified by Jessica's horrified grimace as we made our way down the row to our seats. Seconds after we had taken our seats, the brown-haired woman leaned over so close that if I had moved my head an inch, I would have touched her face. I couldn't even see her out of my peripheral vision. She put her hand on my knee and said directly into my ear, "Will you ask that woman over there how much that book costs?"

I really didn't know what she was talking about. I had just sat down and hadn't yet had time to take in my surroundings. The first thoughts running through my head were "why is this woman so close to me, what is she talking about, and why does she want a book like that? It's probably way overpriced." I finally realized that she was directing me towards the gray-haired woman beside Jessica and was inquiring about a souvenir book full of airbrushed pictures of Clay that the woman had been looking at. Before I could reply, the silver-haired woman in front of us had already turned around.

"Fifteen dollars, and boy is it worth it!" she exclaimed, pointing at a picture of Clay wearing a suit and leaning up against a car. She had the same tone of voice and look in her eyes as a 13-year-old with both an 'NSYNC and Backstreet Boys poster.

Jessica and I just looked at each other, using all the strength and composure we had to keep from erupting into obnoxious laughter. Somehow we managed to keep it in.

At that point, the brown-haired woman, realizing she was still holding my knee, said "Thanks, hon!", awkwardly patted my knee, then turned immediately to the older woman beside her. She left the row and returned several minutes later with a large bucket of popcorn and a souvenir book. I can't believe she wasted $15 on something so stupid.

Finally the fun started when the opening act came on stage. Everyone knows that one of the principal components of a concert is extremely loud music. This should be expected by anyone attending this sort of event. However, the old people seemed utterly shocked, as though they'd never heard of such a concept. At the first chord of the opening act, several of them jumped, then immediately covered their ears, jolted by the intensity of the volume. The bald man in front of us was the worst. He kept his fingers in his ears practically the entire time, and when the lights started flashing around the room, he would cover his eyes, as though he were being blinded by a simple rotating light. It became a strange sort of dance, watching him try to cover both his eyes and his ears at the same time. Jessica and I were cracking up, laughing as loud as we could. It didn't matter, he couldn't hear it because the music covered it up. As soon as the opening act was over, the man left and returned with cotton stuffed in his ears.

It may sound as though Jessica and I were the only people there under the age of fifty. That's not entirely true. Some of them were forty. No, it wasn't really that bad, but I think it's safe for me to say that people between the ages of 15 and 30 were the minority group. It just so happened that all the people near our age were sitting at least two or three rows behind us or in front of us.

While the old people did not want to join in with the cheering and screaming of the crowd, Jessica and I did not feel the need to refrain even if we were the only people in the vicinity doing so. We paid good money to be there, so we wanted to have fun. The old people around us did not take to noise very well. Each time the crowd got the slightest bit noisy, they quickly covered their ears. Eventually, Jessica and I figured out that the more we screamed, the more the old people covered their ears, an obvious correlation that took us far too long to figure out. We affected them more than the whole audience. So, a little before the concert was half over, Jessica and I, being the slightly goofy girls that we are, started screaming together as loud and as high-pitched as we possibly could, especially at random moments when many people around us were fairly quiet. Each time we would cheer, the old people around us would quickly cover their ears and glance our way with an evil look. It became a reflex for them, the same way you jerk your hand away if you touch something very hot. Jessica and I thought it was hilarious. Not so sweet and innocent now, huh brown-haired woman beside me! Ok, so maybe it was mean, but it was harmless fun, and people everywhere were always cheering. We couldn't help it that we were stuck sitting around old people. So what is the moral of this story? Old people are not much fun at pop concerts, but even if you are stuck surrounded by them, you can still have fun.

So now that I described our surroundings, I guess I should give my opinion of the concert. I'll spare the details because a concert is a concert, they're all a lot alike, and this post is already super long.

The opening act was some girl named Cherie. Jessica and I thought she was French-Canadian because of her accent and the Celine Dion kind of twang she had when she sang. She had a good voice, but I didn't like the music. It all sounded very much the same and was too dancy to enjoy listening to, but not dancy enough to dance too. If that makes any sense. It seemed like she sang forever.

Finally Clay came out. He sang every song off his album, a short tribute to some James Taylor songs, during which his back up singers sang lead, and a few other songs. I always supported Clay throughout American Idol 2, but when his CD came out, I didn't listen to it as much as I thought I would. I knew all the songs, but didn't really know the words, so I was excited about the concert, but not jumping up and down in anticipation. I have always thought that Clay has an amazing voice, and that thought was ascertained by this concert. Some bands or singers can sound great on CD, but then you see them in concert and they're a big disappointment. Clay was the opposite. He sounds so much better in person than on CD. It was just over a year ago that I remember sitting in my living room watching Clay sing the song "Solitaire" in the American Idol competition. Back then, he was standing in front of the judges, still a nobody, still hoping for the chance to live his dreams. Now, here he was, after a year in the spotlight, singing the same song that had given me chills watching it on television, giving me chills once again, standing only a couple of hundred feet in front of me. I have to say that I like Clay even more now than I did before the concert. I don't care what anyone else says, I think Clay Aiken is great.

Well, I think that's basically what I wrote last night. It doesn't quite measure up to what I had before, but I suppose it will have to do.