Kicked Out Of The Bowery Ballroom

Nina and I managed to slip into the Andrew Bird show at the Bowery Ballroom last night, despite the fact that we showed up and hadn't bought any tickets. The BB's calendar had marked the show as being sold out, but we'd swung by after drinking whiskey with Aanie at Double Happiness in the hopes that there'd be people outside who'd had friends cancel on them and needed to get rid of a few extra tickets. When we got there, though, it was pretty clear that no one was selling. The only other person on the scene who didn't head straight into the club was a young man in a long beige wool coat, who seemed to be waiting for the bouncer to acknowledge him. While we smoked and adjusted our plans for the evening, we overheard the following exchange between the bouncer and the guy in the coat:

"I can't let you in, but I can take your ID in and check it out."
"You're not just going to take my license and keep it, are you?"
"Nah, man -- I wouldn't do that. If I was gonna do that, I'd'a done it already."

The guy gave the bouncer his ID and went back to waiting, digging his hands into the pockets of his coat and rocking on his heels. After a few minutes, the bouncer came back out.

"Sorry, man -- I showed her. She says it's you."
"What? What does she say I did?"
"She says that you, uh, fondled her."
"What?! That's crazy! I didn't do anything!"

At this point, the head bouncer came out and asked if we were looking for tickets. "We were hoping someone outside would be selling them," I said.

"Eh, just go in, buy a drink, and a tip your bartender," he said, and ushered us inside. So that was nice.

The show was about half over by the time we got there. Look, I'm gonna level with you: Andrew Bird isn't really my kind of thing, but the show wasn't boring. The guy himself plays three different instruments (that I could see), plus he's a really precise whistler (almost uncannily so -- I've got a loose suspicion that he's gotta be, uh, whistle-synching or something). Although Nina commented that this was the type of show that girls got their boyfriends to take them to, most of the audience was dudes -- oddly sour-faced twenty-somethings who seemed incapable of growing beards evenly. I feel like these twee dudes who listen to... well, whatever passes for rock music these days are the discontents of real rock. So maybe Andrew Bird fans are themselves the discontents of the New Rock? It was a nerdy crowd, to be sure.

After the show, we stuck around and had a few more drinks, partly on account of the fact that the line for the coat check was insanely long. Andrew Bird came over and ordered a drink next to us. I nudged Nina in the ribs to get her attention -- she didn't get what I was trying to tell her at first and looked past him down the bar, noticing someone who looked a startling amount like Monica Lewinsky. The more we looked, the surer we were that it was her, and so was Nina's friend Nikhil who happened to be there. But I just googled some pictures of her and now I'm not so sure.