My trip to see DMB on The Today Show #fail

I attended the Today Show this morning to see DMB perform live. I knew as this was a free show and first come, first serve, that I would need to get there early. I arrived at 12:50am and there was already a crowd on line, camped out.

There were 110 people in front of me, we counted. I tweeted this at 2am:

To my surprise, @Studio1A (The Today Show studio’s Twitter handle) had seen my tweet and retweeted me at around 4am:

I thought that it was great that they were using Twitter and responding / RT’ing to fans outside. Word was, that they would be letting people in around 6am. So, we just had to wait. Some slept, others stayed up the night and had a great time, including a bunch of guys from PA, one of whom was 17 and had been to 267 shows. How is that even possible??

There were guys selling Tie Dyes, one for $5, another for $15 and another for $30, all within 5 feet of each other LOL. I bought the $5 one, and I actually thought it was really funny when I read it:

…But I paid $5 for this shirt! Around 4am, the girls I had met on the train (Jen and Mandy) went to the McDonalds around the block (the one that is open 24 hours) and were told they were closed, that they ran out of food. How does a McDonalds run out of food? They found a deli and got bagels instead. While they were gone I took a pic of my feet and the sign I had made in hopes that @davejmatthews would see it:

And a self-portrait in my poncho for posterity:

Time went by pretty freaking slow, as you could imagine, although we were never bored, there was a lot of action, between us getting all the trucks to honk their horns and explaining to many a cab driver why we were sleeping out there. At 6am, we all packed up our belongings and got ready to walk in, except, we weren’t moving. I could see other people going in. I assumed this was the fan pass line. Well, it wasn’t.

Someone messed up and let the wrong line of about 100 people in (people had arrived only an hour earlier). The people who had slept there the night before (one woman had arrived 1pm yesterday) made a big stink but they let all of those people stay in there. By the time my line of 100 was let in, we ended up on the side behind the tent, in the “non-camera” section. We couldn’t even see the stage because of the equipment tent:

We were right beyond the reach of the boom camera that took crowd shots. I rewatched my DVR and you could see (my sign) me for 3 seconds (barely) in the bottom left side of the screen. We were not given any memorabillia like the cheesy microphones or guitars (not that I would have wanted one anyway) like everyone else in the crowd, because we “weren’t going to be on camera”, and the staff were quite rude to us about it when we asked. The only nice people were the NYPD who went out of their way to be kind to us and even took pictures for people.

DMB sounded great (as always), We watched it on a screen in the equipment tent when the sound guy wasn’t standing in front of it. I probably would have been better off watching the show from home, dry, clean and awake. I’m going to sleep now. Goodnight.

***On a side note, Matt Lauer was the only person from NBC who came back to say hi to us. Thanks Matt.***