Every event can do with a little rumour mongering. That little sales push on social media that says the tickets are almost sold out so the more paranoid among us rush to the box office, Computicket or to that guy we all know who puts a premium on the price and says to meet him in front of Kalahari Sands for a dose of daylight robbery.
I say every event but I don’t mean Acoustic Friday featuring Black Vulcanite. For that, tickets quietly went on sale and a few eager beavers left us in no doubt as to how much time they have on their hands by Instagramming photos of their tickets days before the whole thing sold out without a whisper.
I say without a whisper but I don’t include the foghorn that is featured artist Sean Kamati who announced tickets were sold out a good few hours before the show to a chorus of “Nooooooo!” “WTF?” and one comment from a particularly deep Under Rock Dweller who inquired “Tickets for?”
Needless to say, no one answered him.
In a world where cyber stalkers reply to every question with links, Wikipedia entries and a How To video on YouTube, no one answered the utter buffoon who didn’t know enough about life to be sweating bullets about the fact that he didn’t have tickets for the biggest live Hip-Hop happening by the biggest and most elusive Hip-Hop group in the city.
And while the crickets chirped in response to the crazed query, the rest of us texted everyone we knew to find out if they had spare tickets or wanted to swop one for a spleen.
My life at this point was a little easier and didn’t look like it would require invasive surgery.
The reason being that TJ, my 19-year-old brother, had headed to the venue an hour early and, in a call that drew blood as I nicked myself shaving, told me there were four tickets left and asked if I would like one.
Naturally my answer was a resounding “Hell yes!” before I did the kind of thrilled victory dance that ended with me cutting my leg up with a cheap BIC razor.
Because dancing while shaving is not a thing.
And it never should be.
With a ticket waiting and totally “ready for a good time” (See what I did there?), I arrived at the venue with all the fashionably late soon to be fashionably foolish suckers who stood staring at the entrance with the kind of dumbstruck look most commonly leveled at Home Affairs queues.
Wising me up to the scalpers doing a crooked trade in the FNCC parking lot, a particularly harassed looking young woman sauntered up to me hopefully and asked if I was selling.
Thinking weed, heroine and that crack is wack, I caught her looking down at the slip of paper in my hand and realised that the desperation and the light dimming in her eyes was all about her need for a ticket.
Not Class one drugs.
I told her I wasn’t and she looked at me as though I had just spat on her newborn child and vowed to do so in this life and the next before heading towards a dodgy figure standing on the corner looking like he’d just finished editing ‘The Scalpers Guide to Looking Dodgy’.
Finally appreciating what a nightmare it would be to be out on the street and only able to peer up at the FNCC terrace to see Mark Mushiva, Ali ThatDude and Okin stepping out for the first time in forever to do a show that bloggers, reviewers and randoms would rave about for days, I quietly wished the wishful woman luck. And pepper spray.
While I waited for TJ near the entrance, I scrolled down my Facebook newsfeed and saw that singer, poetess and paparazzi all star Nunu Namises couldn’t make it and was giving her tickets away for free.
The catch, however, was that she was all the way in Auasblick.
I don’t know if anyone other than the one guy who commented saw her post and I don’t know if he ever went to go get them.
But I do know that if those tickets are still in Nunu’s home somewhere and the foam in the corners of the mouths of fans turned away is anything to go by, she best burn them.
Erase all evidence of their existence and pray that the haunted woman desperately seeking scalpers never gets wind of them before meeting her in a dark alley on an even darker day.
With ‘Beware of Cars’ blaring through her earphones.
– @marth__vader on Twitter or martha@namibian.com.na
