I love outdoor concerts. I love live music in general, and being outside listening to live music makes me feel like I’m actually sort of outdoorsy. I mean, there are bugs, and I’m sitting on the ground, right?
This Labor Day weekend, I attended two truly American outdoor concerts, and I find the juxtaposition of these concerts to be very entertaining. On Sunday night, I went to the National Symphony Orchestra’s free concert on the Capitol lawn. The Capitol was behind us, the Washington Monument was in front of us, there was a ridiculously gorgeous sunset, and generally the entire event oozed classiness. Our view basically looked like this:
Of course, the only songs I really recognized were the suites they played from movies (um Harry Potter? AMAZING.), but still, it was classy. After the concert, we even went out for some classy glasses of wine at a classy restaurant AND took a cab home. I know, I’m an adult. (As long as you disregard the fact that we tried to bring wine into the concert and failed because they legit tear apart your bag looking for booze and weapons, so we had to hide the wine in the bushes. That wasn’t so classy.)
Unfortunately, my faux-maturity came to an end last night when I attended a Jimmy Buffet concert. You heard me. Jimmy Buffet. I know you’re jealous. Going into the concert, I anticipated dancing like a hippie alongside a bunch of people who looked like my parents. I wasn’t entirely off-base on that assumption, except instead of dancing next to a bunch of middle-aged white folks, I watched in horror as police tackled them to the ground and arrested them. I have never seen so many arrests in such a short period of time, and man, those cops were brutal! It was mostly entertaining/shocking to watch all of this stuff go down, but at one point I found myself alone right as a cop took down a fat guy in a Hawaiian shirt, and I nearly started crying I was so scared. My favorite fight, by far, involved two trashy women who started going at it right in front of us. One of them was holding a child and screamed “Can’t you see I have my baby here?!” right before she smacked the other woman in the face. That poor kid’s gonna have some issues.
On the whole, the Buffet concert was a hell of a lot of fun. I thoroughly enjoyed dancing around like a sweaty maniac to all of the songs I know by heart (har har), and for a dude who’s like 112, Jimmy sure puts on a good show. (Although we think he maaay have been lip syncing some of the songs…)
I loved that everyone at the concert went all-out when it came to tailgating. We were proud of ourselves for having Margaritaville brand margarita mix, but some people brought sand, decorated their cars like sharks (fins to the left baby), had baby pools to lounge in during the tailgate, etc. One little girl even had a sign that said “I missed my first day of kindergarten to be here.” Again with the good parenting.
The costumes in general were absurd. I saw more bikini tops on people who shouldn’t have been wearing bikini tops and shirtless dudes who shouldn’t have been shirtless than I ever wanted to see, and I started to get jealous that I didn’t have a parrot on my head. My favorite costume was this younger couple that was totally decked out in pirate gear, and I told them how much I loved their outfits. Then later in the night when we needed our car jumped, THE SAME PIRATE COUPLE stopped to help us. How’s that for karma?!
While hopped up on margaritas and Jimmy Buffet, I made a startling observation: Jimmy Buffet and Joe Biden are twins who were separated at birth. (And they even have the same initials…dun dun dun.) See for yourselves:
Right?!!
Now for your at-work enjoyment, take a listen to my favorite Jimmy Buffet song (and be sure to notice Jimmy’s mustache and the delightfully literal video):
[Posted by Mallory]
six words to change the world. 
