Post Script

Avid readers of this space know that several months ago we acquired front row tickets to see the Irish band The Script.  After a health-related postponement by the lead singer led to a rescheduling back in June, the day of the concert finally arrived last week.

Our seats were preposterously close to the stage.  Not only were we in the front row but we were in the center of the row.  I couldn't even manage the front row in the early days of my friend Jeremy's band, Tina and the B-Sides, when they were playing venues like The Rajun Cajun in Mendota Heights.  The front 4 rows occupied what is normally the orchestra pit at The Orpheum.  Our seats were temporary folding chairs while the unwashed masses behind us were in the normal tiered seating of the theater.  Chumps.  Our front row brethren consisted of the following:  two teen-age girls (more on them later), a couple EVEN OLDER than we are, a mother and an ear-plugged daughter, a handful of late 20s women and a guy who fell into the category of The Bemused and Accommodating Boyfriend.  He and I and others of the same ilk -- we shared a bond that night.

At this point I still barely knew anything about The Script.  I was aware they were Irish and knew they had a few alt. rock songs getting quite a bit of airplay.  For those of you thinking to yourself, "I don't know any Script songs," well, you do.  Unless you belong to a cult that forbids FM radio you've heard at least this song (lyrics kick in around the minute mark).  But I still didn't know what they looked like.  They could have grabbed 3 busboys from Crave and the Orpheum's custodian and trotted them out and I would have yelled "Woo-hoo yeah!  Let's rock!"

Eventually the lights dimmed and the band came out and I deemed them to be sufficiently rock-and-roll-y and Irish-y and therefore authentically The Script.  They were all nice, clean-cut blokes but when the lead singer came out I had a greater understanding of The Script's appeal.  Sure they've got some popular tunes but the lead singer and keyboardist, Danny, is a good-looking gent.  When he sings his heartbreaking love songs the ladies think he's singing to them.  Lads, I'm on to you.

Here's how I would describe Danny and I don't mean this as a backhanded compliment.  He looked like a guy Disney would look for when they needed an actor to play a teenage boy-band heartthrob and found a mid-20s guy to act with the other mid-20's actors in what is supposed to be a teen drama.  Anyone with a girl under 12 knows what I'm talking about.  He's attractive, seems earnest, keeps hair product companies flush, and you could bring him home to momma.  But he can certainly sing and write good songs and you can't blame him for being good-looking.


Danny O'Donoghue , lead singer of The Script and future star of High School Musical 4

A quick perusal of the swath of audience behind us revealed the crowd to be 75% female.  The women were intensely focused on the band and the music.  They were singing along to all the songs, even the ones that haven't seen the light of day on the radio.  They were enthralled.  Some of these women brought along their boyfriends and husbands.  If they didn't know entering the theater that their significant other had a little crush on Danny, they knew it now.  The guys kinda swayed to the music and looked on benignly while their wide-eyed women gawked at the stage.  This was all harmless because no one was going to run off with the band, so the guys were Bemused and Accommodating.

Back to the front row.  I didn't know the lyrics but I didn't want to seem like a completely un-hip tool.  That role was being ably filled by the EVEN OLDER GUY two seats to my right.  I wanted to make a good impression for Minneapolis.  I wanted to represent.  So I pretended to mouth the lyrics as best as possible.  Unfortunately there's nowhere to hide when you're 2 feet from the lead singer.  We were so close that I could have grabbed Danny and dragged him down to be devoured by the females before security could react.  The music was a little lighter-weight than I prefer but reasonably enjoyable so I wasn't faking my enthusiasm, just my knowledge of their lyrics.  Luckily the lead singer hardly noticed me because of...

...the two teen-age girls next to me.  Oh my goodness gracious they were going absolutely apeshit for Danny.  As soon as the band came out they started screaming that high-pitched girlie scream that drowns out banks of amplifiers and makes dogs hide under beds.  Armed with a sign asking Danny to bring them up on stage for a kiss, they were doing everything possible to attract his attention:  jumping up and down, reaching for him, and crowding the stage the entire concert.  If you check out that Breakeven video again you can see them pressed up against the stage in the center of the front row.  Around the 1:08 mark they raise their hands when Danny walks by, hoping for a low-five and an exchange of incidental DNA with their idol.  The tall-ish guy in a blue shirt behind them who looks like a tool is me.

Immediately following the concert, in acknowledgement for their ardor yet aware of their jailbait status, a roadie handed them the setlist but no invitation backstage.  The girls squealed "He touched it!" and they weren't referring to the poor roadie.  I don't know how they reconciled sharing the one item between the two of them.  I fear it may get rent in two in a fit of teen puppy-love jealousy someday.

Remember the mother/daughter pair I mentioned earlier?  The matching father and son were also at the concert but they were in the 4th row.  It is no accident that the wife ended up in the front row and the husband was further from the stage.  Bemused and accommodating.

The band, and especially the guitarist, were clearly influenced by U2 and there is no shame in that.  Several songs had guitar riffs reminiscent of The Edge's church bells-like sustained notes.  And Danny's voice echoed Bono's tone on occasion.  Any Irish band from the last 15 years is sure to have some thread of U2 running through them.  U2's done OK.


Guitarist Mark Sheehan, the Irish Chris Daughtry

Was the concert worth the price we paid for the tickets?  That doesn't matter.  We had a great time and we got to make a donation to a good cause.  Some Script songs will make their way to my ipod eventually.  Karen was certainly pleased and she giddily shows her friends the pictures she snapped.  And now she's dropping hints about wanting to see The Script in another city...

Sexy MFer

Prince's "Sexy M.F." is a song so over-the-top that it veers head-on and crashes into awesome.  For reasons that remain inexplicable it became the theme song of my bachelor party, which is the kind of wrong-headed thinking that occurs when 10 guys start doing shots of Bacardi 151 on a boat in Brainerd.  (In a related development that will surprise no one, we woke up the next morning to discover that at some point during the night's proceedings we had broken off the sun deck off the back of the boat.  It was just...gone.)

Maybe there have been more mis-matched bachelor party theme songs over the years than Sexy M.F. for a bunch of suburban guys getting liquored up on a lake in central Minnesota and gagging on cigars (OK, that was just me).  But this came on the stereo at some point and we just ran with it.  Or, more accurately, stumbled with it.  I'm fairly certain there was dancing but the statute of limitations has run out on those abominations.

I'm sure all of this was foreseen by Prince.  During the songwriting process I can envision him thinking, "Yes, a few years from now this song will be co-opted by a bunch of dufuses from the whitest suburb in Minnesota as their weekend theme song, with none dufus-ier than the soon-to-be groom.  They will be the least sexy motherfucker-ish dopes to walk the earth.  They will gyrate and thrust like birthing ostriches.  They will sing along off-key and butcher half the lyrics.  One of them will fall over backward into the lake.  I write this anthem for them."

And who, exactly, is the Sexy Motherfucker described in the song?  It can't be directed at the girl.  "You sexy motherfucker" has to be at or near the bottom of effective pick-up lines.
Average Guy: "You sexy motherfucker!"
Her:  "Why yes, I'd love to go out with you and start a fulfilling, long-lasting relationship."

Yeah, uh, no.  This song may be ostensibly about a woman but the title isn't about her.  The words of the song keep insisting this isn't about sex, until the end when, in fact, it's clearly all about sex.  The crowning glory of the song are the deep-voiced lads at the end repeating, glee-style, "sexy motherfucker shakin that ass, shakin that ass."

Obviously Prince himself is the sexy motherfucker.  He's of the class of guy that could walk into a room of babes, drop a line like that, and have it work.  And it had worked for him for some time before he wrote this song.  Much in the same way Justin Timberlake or Leo DiCaprio could walk into a gaggle of uber-hotties, say something inane like, "chicken salad" and each and every girl would launch herself at him.  THAT is a sexy motherfucker.

On the other end of the spectrum, but still happy with our lot in life, was our group.  The guys at the lake cabin that night had to use traditional means to land their women:  cajolery and pleading, visual trickery obfuscating one's true physique and hairline, good old-fashioned sales puffery regarding career prospects, strategic use of alcohol, and puppies.

Posturing

Soon my daughter will be of dating age and the day is coming when I will be greeting prospective wooers at our front door.  For the sake of argument I will assume these wooers will be boys.  And like an end-of-the-world survivalist getting ready for imminent apocalypse I must begin preparing now.

I don't own a gun.  Yet.  But more on that in a moment.  My first step is to decide what type of personality I will project with these hapless lads.  Do I go with the traditional grim, stone-faced intimidator or the jolly, sure-you-can-talk-to-me confidant?  I see this dilemma as similar to the choice a newbie professional wrestler must make when entering that business:  hero or heel?

Either way, my goal in this endeavor is to ensure that these guys behave respectfully and conduct the romantic proceedings on terms agreeable to Jenna.  Early on this probably won't be much of a problem since the laws of human growth are in our favor and Jenna is taller than pretty much every boy in her grade.  This will probably hold until age 14 or 15 when the pipsqueaks start to catch up.  But I need to have my strategy in place and well-established before any growth spurts kick in.  Staying on message will be critical.

Playing the heel can be much more fun than being the nice guy.  If I had any acting skills whatsoever this could be utterly hilarious.  I don't see much need for gun ownership with our current, militia-free lifestyle but what if I started answering the door wearing a shoulder holster like I just left the set of a Beastie Boys video?  (70's lamb chop sideburns optional.)  Is there a 7-day waiting period on those?  Or should I mount a large gun rack in the living room in sight of the front entryway? 

Between my dad and my Marine friend I could probably collect enough large caliber weapons that, just on display, would scare the bejeesus out of any kid.  Throw in a little creative story-telling and the beau is toast.  "Junior, let me give you a little tour here.  This is the .50 cal I used in Columbia back in the early 90's when I took out the Cali cartel.  Let me show you this scar here..."

A path that requires fewer ATF permits would be to stage contrived, Ron Burgundy-style dioramas that spotlight faux physical supremacy.  I could remove the entryway chandelier and replace it with a boxer's punching bag.  Whenever the door rang I could quickly put on some gloves, squirt myself with a spray bottle to simulate sweat from exertion, and start slugging away while Jenna opened the door.  "... 998, 999, 1000.  Oh, I didn't see you there."  Then I'd grab ridiculously heavy-looking dumbbells that I had strategically placed nearby and start curling those.  I'd have to make sure he didn't linger lest he see that I could only muster 2 reps for show.

An even more subtle approach would be to create a "Most Interesting Man in the World" backstory combined with chucknorrisfacts.com absurdity.  Prospective dates would have to review a special website listing my "accomplishments":
- Dave Carl invented the exclamation point
- Dave Carl once won a staring contest with one of the plastinated Body World cadavers
- The Titanic didn't hit an iceberg, it hit Dave Carl's toe.  Specifically, the little piggy that went to market.
- In Transformers, Dave Carl was the stunt double for both Optimus Prime AND Megan Fox

As long as the prospective suitors retain some amount of fear of me, either due to ill-gotten admiration or the assumption of insanity, I've done my job.

Conversely, being the nice guy may require more finesse than I can muster.  With this generation I would probably have to learn to speak in texting abbreviations to make a personal connection:  "OMG, ROFL, DGTG, H&K."  I'd have to offer to chillax and call him "brah," all without snickering.  Yeah, this ain't gonna work.

So, heel it is.  I'll arrange for my own bad-guy theme music to play whenever I enter a room with Jenna and the boyfriend.  Something that instills fear and dread, like "Vader's Theme" or "Enter Sandman" or anything by Coldplay.  Er, wait, Coldplay instills fear and dread in *me* -- never mind.  I'll develop a signature move like the "Blatantly-Sending-a-Message Absurdly-Macho Crushing Handshake" or the "Arched Eyebrow of Disdain" or the "I-Was-Once-Your-Age-And-I-Know-EXACTLY-What-You're-Thinking-Hormone-Boy Glare of Death."  I'll get inside their heads and then I'll have won.

Old School Road Trips

Kids these days, they have it so easy.  This has been a generational lament since the Neanderthal days, back when Lothar grumbled, "Thag has it so easy now that we have a wheel.  Back in my day I had to do yardwork pushing a squarebarrow."  However, I think I have a legitimate gripe when comparing road trips between my heyday as a kid in the 70's and what my daughter gets to enjoy now.

Growing up near Chicago we would usually travel twice a year to Minnesota to see family at holidays or visit the lake cabin in Alexandria.  This was back in the days of the 55 MPH speed limit so it was a good eight hour trip between Chicago and the Twin Cities each way.  Like most other families contemplating similar trips those days, we drove it.  And there wasn't much to do in a car back then.

Our family vehicle for road trips was a 1973 Chevrolet Impala station wagon.  This may have been the largest, heaviest family car ever built.  It was thick.  It was girthy.  It was brown, inside and out.  To combine two Chevy Chase quotes from two separate movies:  "It was an Oldsmo-Buick Family Truckster."  Later on, when I had to choose between that car and a small, manual transmission Toyota for my driver's test, I took the stick shift.  There was no parallel parking the Impala.

The boys at OPEC probably slapped each other on the backs and ordered another round of luxury yachts when this one rolled off the assembly line in Detroit.  The doors appeared to be 1 foot thick and required two hands to swing shut.  My dad was pleased that an entire 4x8 sheet of plywood could fit flat in the wagon area.  Every time you stepped on the accelerator Exxon placed another order for light crude.

Wanting to preserve their substantial investment in this car, my parents ordered an aftermarket covering to protect the vinyl back seats.  This amounted to reupholstering plastic with plastic.  Was it a smooth, comfortable material?  Oh no.  It had a raised waffle pattern on the seat where your tush and legs go.  If you're wearing shorts, as a young lad is often wont to do, you get up from the seats after a long drive and your legs look like Eggos. 

We would get up early and shove off from the suburbs of Chicago.  The first parts of a long trip are relatively exciting since you're on vacation and the new-ness of the trip hasn't worn off.  For this part of the trip my dad provided his traditional entertainment with his usual gripes about the I-94 tollbooths.  "They were supposed to take these down when the highway was paid for years ago!"  Check that one off the trip list.

We would get into Wisconsin in about an hour and then the doldrums would set in.  Nowadays, my daughter has an iPod for music, a Nook for reading books, and an entertainment system in the car for watching movies.  Once we even plugged in the Xbox so she and a buddy could play video games the entire way.  Someday she'll probably have a cell phone for texting and yakking with her friends about how her dad is such a dufus.

What did I have?  I had the window.  I could gaze out of the car and watch endless farms roll by.  Not exactly a Pixar classic.

I had the aforementioned plastic wrap:  I could amuse myself by pressing down on the waffle pattern with my fingers and see how long before it reformed its shape.  That was good for about 2 minutes.  478 minutes to go.

We had the alphabet game.  You'd look for billboards and road signs that started with letters in order of the alphabet.  Quaker State and Dairy Queen were highly coveted, as were any kind of wildlife/varmint X-ing signs.  If you saw an X or Q sign you were a family hero.

I had a sister but we didn't talk much so she provided me with no amusement.  I could have read a book but would have gotten car sick well before lunch.  There was no music.  The car had the default AM radio, and that survived only because the dealer wouldn't give my non-musically-inclined parents a rebate for taking it out.  I'm not sure if it would have helped anyway.  Radio stations were probably littered with disco at the time.  I say this with some confidence because I remember my older cousin's radio alarm going off twice when I stayed in his room at my aunt and uncle's house in St. Paul.  Both times it was playing "The Hustle."  As far as I know, no other song was released between 1974 and 1977.

We had a car-based bingo game that appeared to be from the 50's.  If you saw a sight that was represented on your bingo board you'd close the cover on that item and hope for 5 in a row.  The manufacturer's address was on the cardboard bingo boards which helped date it from a bygone era:  1) no zip code was listed after the city and state,  2) the telephone number had letters in the exchange, and 3) it was made in the U.S.

One advantage I had over kids of today:  no seat belts!  I was free to roam around the cavernous back seat with no consideration given to modern safety policy.  If we had had an accident I would have been a 60 pound missile flying toward the windshield (which, given the ponderous nature of the car's design, was probably leaded glass and I would have bounced right back).  This mobility kept the typical kid antsy-ness somewhat muted.

Another thing we didn't have was stops at gas stations.  First of all, gas stations back then only sold gas, strangely enough.  The days of gas stations with attached supermarkets-bordering-on-malls were still years away.  So it was drive up, tell the guy "fill 'er up regular", and never get out of the car.  "Regular," of course, meant with lead, at about 64 cents a gallon.  Man, I'm old.  Second, the Impala apparently had an 84 gallon gas tank.  So even though our mileage was horrendous we could go a fair clip before needing to re-fuel.

The town of Mauston, WI will forever hold a special place in my heart because that's where we'd stop for lunch.  By late morning we'd be passing Baraboo, home of the mystical, enchanted Wisconsin Dells.  The Dells were mystical and enchanted to me because I'd constantly see ads for it all the time on Chicago TV.  The ads always depicted water activities and kids having fun.  But we NEVER went there because our vacation destination was always Minnesota.  I didn't get to the Dells until my mid-30's.  And by then I was paying for it which removes all enchantment and mysticism.

We'd pull into the Country Kitchen -- always the Country Kitchen -- and I already knew what I was going to order:  spaghetti.   It was my go-to restaurant order unless we were going out for pizza.  I don't recall if they had kid's menus back then -- I think I was just ordering the most palatable thing off the regular adult menu.  Occasionally I'd mix in a curveball and get the French toast.  But only if I was feeling crazy.  Unlike today, there weren't 12 well-known restaurants at each highway exit.  Maybe you'd get a McDonald's, but often it was Aunt Maude's Grease Griddle where squirrel may or may not have been on the menu.  At least at Country Kitchen you knew what you were getting.

Bellies full, we'd clamber back into the Impala and resume the trip.  After about 20 minutes the excitement of eating and getting out of the car had faded and we were back to the sensory deprivation tank of the back seat.  The window had a rolling TV show of corn, corn, cow, corn, silo, cow, farmhouse, bizarre roadside attraction such as a giant plaster moose, corn, silo, corn.

When we crossed the St. Croix river and saw the "Welcome to Minnesota" sign personal adrenaline levels went up.  We're close!  (Relatively speaking.)  Civilization looms!  I learned how to spot the Snelling Ave. exit early in life.  The image of the diamond-shaped reflector sign at the base of the exit ramp was stamped in my brain well before that of, say, Big Bird's or Cookie Monster's.  After that it was just a few minutes to my aunt and uncle's house and the return of sanity.  I would roll out of the car and teeter around while I regained my land legs.  Then I would try to recover before we had to make the return trip in a week.

Compare this to my wife and daughter, who on one trip without me stayed in the car longer than necessary so that they didn't interrupt the audio book they were listening to on the trip. Times have changed.

Following The Script

For the second time in the past few years our wee doctor friends Mark and Trudie invited us to attend the St. David's School fundraiser gala.  Our daughter went there in her early years, then both their kids did, and now Trudie is on the board, so she's got enough juice to get us an invite.  The gala is a swanky event where the well-meaning folks at St. David's find all the wealthy people they can get, get them liquored up, and then invite them to bid on items at auction.  There are two groups of attendees:  those with Serious Money, and the rest of us who hide under the table when the auctioneer is scanning the room for a bid of $5000 for a custom prepared dinner by Chef Trendy McHighBrow.

I'm sure many scholars have analyzed the motivations and hidden agendas of wealthy people, men in particular, bidding large sums of money at public charity auctions.  This is no such scholarly paper.  I will merely attempt to document my motivations and competitive glee while bidding on a few items during the silent auction.
Since I knew from our prior experience that we would be sitting out the live auction -- which is for high rollers only -- we were most interested in the silent auction.  The twist this year was the electronic tool provided to facilitate bidding.  An iPod with a customized app, using wireless networking set up just for the event, was handed to each couple upon entry.  This app, called BidPal but more accurately described as BidJacker, allowed people to look up the current bids of items, place a bid, and view a list of all items personally bid on.  The killer feature of the app was the notification when someone else outbid you for an item.  This outbid feature knows how to stir the competitive juices.  Outbid me?  Ooooh, I'll show you...

The outbid feature, henceforth known as The OF, surely was responsible for as much wild price speculation as the free wine being proffered at every turn.  But at this point I was still unaware of The OF as we entered the areas where the silent auction items were on display.  There were autographed sporting goods, offers for photography sittings, a couple of XBoxes, an iPad, deals for numerous restaurants, concert tickets, and even an offer to have a tree guru come to your house and assess the state of your foliage.  And my foliage could use some assessment, considering we currently have a tree pitched at a 45 degree angle.  All kinds of interesting stuff was available.  Items could be had for as little as $50 but some could run up close to $1000.  Not Serious Money, but enough where us normal folks can't cover it with the float in our joint checking accounts.  "Honey, we're not going to Olive Garden this month."

Since Mark and Trudie had essentially paid for our seats at the dinner table we felt like we should put in a few bids.  After passing over the John Randle-autographed Hall of Fame helmet, an iPad (version 1 -- that's sooo 2010), and an offer for free Invisalign orthodontics, we stumbled across a display for 2 front-row tickets to see the Irish alt./pop rock band The Script.

Hmmmm.  Karen REALLY likes The Script.  I am ambivalent about The Script (their level of rocking is generally insufficient for me), but I'm not ambivalent about Karen, so I thought this would be a good one to take a run at.  It was early in the silent auction and the current bid hadn't even cracked $100 yet.  I boldly put in a bid of $85 (basically a tank of gas, I rationalized) and moved on to other items.  We put in some half-hearted bids on a Chipotle dinner and a Fogo De Chao Brazilian restaurant gift card.  I threw a token bid on the tree guru and an in-house interior decorating consultation.

And then The OF made it's presence known.  I looked down at BidPal and it was telling me I'd been outbid.  Outbid!  How cheeky!  The unmitigated gall of someone to surpass me!  And it seemed so personal to have this little device tell me to my face that I was no longer in first place.  Because that's how this evolved in my mind:  this was a game.

There is no way to know who specifically is bidding.  The silent auction was spread over several hallways of one floor of an open-plan office building so even looking around I could only 30 or so guests out of the few hundred in attendance.  I furrowed my brow and stared holes in a few suit-clad potential perpetrators but I could glean no guilt.  It was to be a silent, face-less battle, much like for opposing submarine commanders.

How was I to respond to this effrontery of being outbid?  This impingement on my masculinity?  Well, I was going to give him some of his own medicine.  My foe could easily have been a woman but in my mind it was another guy.  Probably a guy in a better suit, with cash hanging out of his pockets and a second home in Vail.  If so, then I was toast.  But if it was somebody with my middling wherewithal, then game on.

The minimum overbid was $5 but that just seemed lame.  Let's not dabble in half-measures, people.  I jumped up $20.   I put the iPod down with the feeling that I had just lobbed an electronic grenade at some poor sap.

I checked the bidding in a few minutes and realized I'd been outbid.  Although this was now expected, nonetheless a frisson of annoyance skittered down my spine.  I re-bid.  But in the few seconds I was pushing buttons someone else had overbid.  I needed to bid even higher.  Things were escalating.

We were now into the low hundreds for these tickets.  We weren't really sure how much we wanted to spend on The Script.  Karen clearly wanted to go but wasn't sure it was worth it.  She wasn't sure how much *I* was willing to spend.  I wasn't sure either but I still wanted to play the game.  In my mind I was now equating this to the traditional male role of hunting and gathering.  I'm not going to shoot an elk in downtown Minneapolis but I can sure as hell bag a pair of concert tickets.  Re-bid.

I was enjoying the assumed knowledge that one or two other bidders were being routinely irked by getting OF'ed.  Based on the pattern of bidding I could tell there were at least 2 other bidders.  I didn't always instantly rebid after being notified by The OF.  Sometimes I'd wait a while, letting a sense of complacency set in, letting the tension build, and then I'd jack it up.  Shazam!  Or, "another notch!" as Emeril would say.

The silent auction ended at 7:20 and the remaining time was ticking down like a bomb in BitPal.  With about 10 minutes left it was time to plan for the End Game.  We were now over $500 for these damn tickets.  Did I really want to win them, or was I satisfied with simply stirring the pot?  I decided I was comfortable spending a little more on these, that front row tickets would be pretty cool, and that I wanted to give it a shot.  Huntin' and gatherin.'

I've only been involved in one eBay auction.  A few years ago I put a bid on a corny Christmas jigsaw puzzle that my family used to put together when I was a kid.  It was lost to the ages and various family dogs eating the puzzle pieces so I thought it would be cool to have it again.  I put in a top bid and didn't pay attention during the last minute of bidding.  Some bozo swept in at the end and overbid me by $1.  C'mon, man!  I would have paid double what I bid.  A humbling defeat, but it laid the foundation for my end game strategy on this night.

I forsook the bidding on the interior decorator and the restaurant offers.  No one seemed to be challenging my bid on the tree savant so I let that ride.  We were now down to one minute left.  The bid was at $715.  My plan was to make a bid in the last 5 seconds, but to make sure it was high enough in case my rival did the same thing.  His overbids were often in the $5-$10 range.  I figured a big leap in the final seconds would be enough.  I entered $750 and pushed Submit Bid with 4 seconds to go...

It was enough.  $750 held up.  I was filled with a sense of satisfaction disproportionate to the value of the victory.  I was quite full of myself.  I'll never know if the other bidder made a final too-low overbid on himself as insurance but I prefer to imagine that he did, cursing the ceiling as he became aware of being thwarted.  In fact, I'll never know who that person was.  Maybe it was Vikings owner Zygi Wilf, who was rattling around the event.  Maybe it was crusty sports columnist and name-dropper Sid Hartman, a big supporter of St. David's.  Maybe it was some hedge fund jockey who indirectly contributed to the lowering of my 401k a couple years ago.  One can only hope...

$750 for tickets to a little known band?  I can always pull out the "it was for a good cause" justification.  $750 just to win a little personal contest seems a bit much.  It definitely made the missus happy, and we all know THAT'S priceless.  Plus, I got the tree guy coming over...