Summerfest has come and gone. The weather was perfect and the bands were solid, certainly for the relatively younger set. There were a few old timers, like America, which is why we went Saturday night.
We fit nicely into the crowd watching America. The two founding members are our age, as was the crowd. I was impressed how well behaved the crowd was until I realized most of them were incapable of doing anything else but standing and singing.
I broke a 5-year old rule Saturday night. We took the bus. It was something I had vowed five years ago never to do again, and our experience Saturday night reminded me why.
The din on the way down was ear splitting, on the way back it was even louder. We put a little ‘medicine’ in an empty water bottle that allowed us to weather the storm a bit going down, but we were on our own coming home.
This all brought back the night I had at Summerfest five years ago. It started innocently enough. We took the car down to the Southridge lot to pick up the bus. It was an older car, one of those that you had to lock with a key and also could lock by pulling the handle on the inside. We did the latter, leaving our house keys in the car and taking the lone car key to lighten the load in my pocket. You can see what’s coming but we’ll get to that later.
The ride down was similar to the one Saturday – a significant din. The rowdiness escalated when someone threw a plastic Coke bottle at one of his contemporaries, inciting a battle that culminated with another plastic bottle hitting me right in the back of the head. Not the way to begin the evening.
We arrived at Summerfest without further incident, but I was in desperate need of a cocktail. I needed something stronger than a beer, so we headed to JoJo’s martini lounge for one of their signature concoctions. After that bus ride, I felt I deserved it.
Martini in hand, we ventured out into the grounds, now packed solid with people. After one sip of my drink and looking forward to more, we were chatting and enjoying the atmosphere when a loud and obnoxious patron gestured wildly with his arm to make some likely irrelevant point to a friend. His arm made contact with my martini, sending it skyward, $10 worth of liquid flying into the crowd.
Instead of a consummate apology and an expected offer to compensate, he uttered something like “so much for that drink, pal.” as he moved on. Nice.
I decided on a beer to return to alcohol consumption, rationalizing that if it got dumped it would only be half the value. I shouldn’t have entertained that thought. After about 5 minutes, we were positioned under the Sky Ride outside the Miller Oasis when I received a beer shower from a patron overhead.
Now doused and unable to pinpoint the culprit, we decided dessert would be a better option. I chose vanilla ice cream with fudge. Oh, and I had a white shirt on. Despite being wet, it was still white. Not for long. Someone bumped into me from the side and a good portion of the fudge repositioned itself on the front of my shirt, now brown and white.
My appearance caused a degree of hysterics with the passing crowd as we meandered to a couple of stages to listen to some music, but I was determined to have somewhat of a normal evening before the ride home.
As we hopped on the bus, the decibel level started as a mild roar and escalated to something in the deafening category. Another plastic bottle whizzed by, luckily missing us. The ride seemed to take forever. But we knew the car awaited for the short ride home to peace and quiet. Really
We arrived at the car and began to cringe as the key failed to turn when inserted into the lock. Remember our house keys are inside the car at this point. Tried the other door. Still wouldn’t turn. Trunk. No luck. We began to realize that this particular key was one of those spare keys that only worked in the ignition. We had no way of accessing the ignition from outside the car.
So here were are at 1:00 in the morning, in a now virtually empty parking lot, with no way to get home or in the house. Given the combination of martini, beer, fudge and sweat that covered my body and clothes, we didn’t have to worry about any strangers coming too close. Luckily we had AAA, so we called. It took them 45 minutes to get to us. And one minute to open the car door. What a night.
I probably should pay more attention to my vows despite the passage of time. If the budget Madison is forcing on the county is maintained, we won’t have to worry about busses next year anyway, just the throngs of cars full of drunk fest goers.
