Just back from the Trans Siberian Orchestra Concert in Peoria tonight. This is somewhere around my 4th time seeing them and I can tell you they still put on a great show. I think for the third year in a row we got the West coast version with Al Petrelli. It appears he previously took a nasty fall off the stage and destroyed his knee. He had a pretty big brace on it and was moving on it gingerly. That did not stop him from shredding up the night alongside his wife on the keyboards. I will not go much into the show since you really need to experience it yourself – especially you like your music fast, in your face and played to perfection. I did appreciate the fact they changed it up since the last time we saw it. They changed the dueling keyboards and moved up the “Strat” vs “Gibson” shred-off into the middle of the Christmas story. A strange place for it, but it worked for me.
There were two interesting aspects of the night I did want to comment on. First off, we could not locate our seats. My wife had purchased them at the Civic Center Box Office so we new they were legit. Unfortunately, the row numbering scheme confused us. When we got to our section, we headed into the first level concourse and showed the tickets to the attendant there. He directed us to the first rows in the level above us. So we headed up there, passed the press box rows and checked out the first row number. Turns out it was row 9. We looked at the press boxes and noticed there were only two rows there which on best guess would make it rows 8 and 7. Totally confused, we went back down and talked to another attendant and explained our situation. He was confused as well and walked us up to the press boxes and told us to just sit in the second row (our guess row 8 ) and see what happens. This NEVER works out for me so I went back down and talked to the first attendant and told him we were still confused. I do not think he actually believed me, but he did walk up to the seats with me and I re-explained the situation. This time he understood the situation and decided he needed to contact his supervisor. So we walked back down and located her. We ALL proceeded back up to the seats and had the exact same discussion resulting in the exact same confusion. This time the lady told us to go ahead and sit there (I had Linda move down to row 7 which seemed more logical to me) and she would go to the box office and get it straightened out for us. 10 or 15 minutes later she came back and confirmed that we were now actually in the correct seats. I still think we were in row 7, but the deduction we made is that the rows were wider to fit the tables in so they had to remove a row. Anyway, we sat in the press box which ended up being a pretty cool place to watch the concert from. The table actually cut down a bit of the stage view, but you could stretch out and see the rest if wanted to.
About 75% into the concert, we noticed a security guard talking to someone two rows below us (in the lower bowel). He seemed to be getting upset because the person he was talking to wasn’t cooperating with him. Eventually a guy about 55 or 60 in a brown sport coat stood up and followed the security guard. It was just him and he really didn’t say anything as he weaved through the row. We speculated that it might be smoking or possibly filming but his age threw me off for the latter. A little later, my wife went out to the restroom. On her return, she relayed the fact that same individual was out in the hall with multiple security guards and he apparently was holding a high end 35mm digital camera. Turns out the security guards were forcing him to delete the pictures off of the memory card. A smart person would have put spares in his coat pocket and periodically switched them out so he at least got some benefit for the effort.
That is it for tonight. My ears are still ringing a little and my eyes took a beating with the strobes.
Shred On!
