The Jonas Onus

If you look up the phrase "managing expectations" on Wikipedia, you will see a picture of me sitting with the girls at the dining room table explaining how bad our Jonas Brothers tickets are (you will see it because I put it there myself earlier today).

The concert came up again tonight and in my typical "managing expectations" fashion I threw out the "you guys remember that our seats aren't that great" spiel. It's mostly because I've lucked out in the past with concert tickets for Stef that I wanted her to know that you don't always get good seats; Jess thinks she's sitting in the front row so I've tried everything from etch a sketch renderings to IZOD center replicas made from Lincoln Logs to show her the distance from our seats to the stage. They asked to see the seats tonight so I went on the IZOD Web site and showed them the seats - way up there in section 228, where I've seen the likes of U2, Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel, AC/DC, John Mellencamp (I think he was still using Cougar back then) and countless others. The site happened to say "tickets available" and just for the heck of it, I put in for 3 tickets. And lo and behold I saw 3 lower level seats just to the left of the stage. Of course, just to throw a wrinkle into things, these new seats were three times what I paid for the first set of tickets.

I had 3 minutes to decide, according to the Ticketmaster countdown clock on the lower right hand corner of the screen. And then the questions started in my head. Jess is only 6; does she really need good seats? Stef is 9 and already saw them last year, does she really need to be that close? Can I unload my existing tickets? Are they even going to remember this a year from now? Then I thought back to all my bad seat experiences from my concert history and pulled the trigger. I think I'd rather sit in the good seats myself than sit in the boonies once again. Plus, I skipped the last Bruce tour and the Police reunion tour the year before so I haven't overspent on concerts. And maybe, just maybe, the Jonas Brothers will do a cover of Backstreets.