Saturday, March 5, 2011

Birthdays & Eric Clapton

I just love how lately my birthdays seems to be a month long celebration! A friend told me long ago that you keep celebrating them, you just stop counting them.....well, I stopped counting long ago. My family has four birthdays in less than three weeks.....mine on March 21, my brother-in-law Steve's on March 24, Darrin's on March 31 and Lou's on April 9.

Since we are all spread out now, we do one big birthday celebration during that time. This year it will be a brunch in at my dad's on April 3. Between that party, a get together with Lou's family, lunch with the ladies at work, the actual day when I treat myself to something and a couple other events, I end up with weeks of fun things! This year even started earlier.

Last Tuesday, Lou came up to me with his hand behind his back and said, "I need to give you part of your birthday present early." He produced two tickets to see Eric Clapton on Thursday evening, March 3rd. They had just opened up some tickets off to the side of the stage in the front row of the lower section! We were basically in line with the people in the first row of floor seating and maybe 10-15 feet further away from the stage......plus he got them for the same price as the nose bleed seats!

We snuck in our little camera but it turns out everyone had cameras.
Some people are singers and musicians and some are performers. We've been fortunate enough to see some spectacular performers (Mick Jagger and Bon Jovi come to mind) and some great singers (The Eagles reunion tour), but with Eric Clapton it is all about the music. He is way into blues and that was the majority of his show. It was half an hour until he did "I Shot the Sheriff" and another half hour until he launched into "Layla". Everything had a bluesy take on it and that's what I expected from Eric Clapton. He traditionally sang one of my favorite songs of his, "Wondeful Tonight"......a love letter to his then wife Patty Boyd (who he supposedly stole from George Harrison!). Not as great as my Valentine's love letter, but pretty close.

I tried to upload one of the videos that Lou took with our little camera, but this site doesn't seem to do videos (or I haven't figured it out yet). Here is the YouTube link if you wanted to check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHG0Vt21bCQ Hope it works.

Appearance-wise I've got to say Eric Clapton could easily have been mistaken for a local vagrant.....long disheveled hair, grubby and unshaven for several days, black square glasses, ill-fitting blue jeans and a large dark shirt. I know the man is 65 years old, and I'm not far behind, but come on. Fortunately, the music is still great and it was nice to sit back, relax and groove to the beat.....we didn't even need our earplugs sitting that close.

My birthday celebration has begun and won't end until our April 3rd brunch.....at least there are some good things that come with age!

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