They'll sell you the whole seat, but you'll only use the edge

I can still remember the radio adverts for the very first monster truck pull that was ever put on in my hometown. The announcer's voice was pitch-shifted down to a baritone rumble, and saturated with echo. In later years it was a style that became a parody of itself, but at that time it was still new, and all business. It was particularly memorable because of the tag-line, "We'll sell you the WHOLE seat, (eat...eat...eat...), but you'll only need the EDGE!(EDGE!...Edge!...edge!...edge)".

Wow. I could really imagine myself leaning forward off the front of one of the flip-down plastic seats in our new football stadium, bristling with excitement along with the rest of the crowd. I was sold. This I gotta see. This was before web commerce (a couple of friends insisted that I should "get on BitNet" but I never did--it seemed too nerdy compared to CompuServe's 7N1 true ascii dial-up service) so we went downtown my brother and I, stood in line at TicketMaster and bought our tickets.

The event was nothing like I imagined it would be, based on the TV ads and Sunday-afternoon motorsports shows I'd seen. It was surprisingly entertaining but it was not edge-of-your-seat excitement, not by a long shot. I never did go to another one of those monster truck events, and I never really gave much thought over the years to that advertising slogan that hooked me in so effectively. That is, til earlier this month.

My wife had received rock concert tickets as a birthday present--"good seats "on the floor of the hockey arena. The idea of seats on the floor at a rock concert was kind of an odd one for me, I have to admit. Festival seating has been gone for a long time, because of what happened at a Who concert once. Still, I remember lots of concerts where the floor remained "festival" style with no seats and just empty space between the stage and the boards at the back of the rink where the Zamboni goes in and out. Everybody mobbed the stage: how close you got depended on how determined you were and what your tolerance was for close physical contact with total, probably drug-crazed, strangers. I only remember two rock concerts specifically where there were assigned seats on the floor. One was Kiss, on their Crazy Nights or possibly their Hot in the Shade tour. I was in a floor seat that night and hated the entire show because everyone stood to try and see better, and within moments everyone stood on their seats to see better, and none of us saw any better than if we had stayed sitting. Except that I kept falling down because the flip-up chair seats were tippy and when ever the stoned rocker chick next to me would weave and bump into me or grab my arm to keep herself from falling I would lose my balance. And no, I wasn't stoned at that concert either--shows even then were too expensive to not be able to remember what went on afterwards. I cursed the interlinked folding cardtable chairs for being what they were and cursed myself for thinking that they would provide a good vantage point in the first place.

Fast-forward to this millennium. The Barenaked Ladies, good Canadian kids with great music, some social conscience, and seemingly down-to-earth personalities (this was pre-coke bust). Should be a mellow crowd, folks my age. Should be civilized. Reserved seating on the floor, close to the stage? Should be awesome.

The performance was everything I expected and more--can't say enough good about the band. Who I can say something bad about is the immense fat f*cker and his enormous tub-of-goo companion who sat near us. Between them, they literally took up three seats, the two they paid for and half of the seat on each side of them. Can't discriminate and penalize the morbidly obese now, can we! Can't charge 'em extra and have 2 tickets, one for each cheek. Nope, no way would civil society tolerate that. One person, one vote. One person, one seat on the plane or in the theater.

So, just as surely as you can't squeeze three pounds of sh*t into a two-pound bag, there is no way that these two 400-pounders can squish into the space allotted and guess what? Big surprise, their lard cascades into the space that we have paid for. I am not going to make a scene and tell the porcine pair off--it won't make them suddenly lose weight, or make an extra seat magically appear. If I was to try to be abrasive enough to make them want to leave I am sure I would get tossed out long before they would depart. Besides, this is Canada. We are polite, and tolerant people. I take pity on my wife, who doesn't relish the potential for frotteurism in this scenario, and shift half-off my chair to make more space for her. Having an aisle seat, I am able to do this without seeding a blog in some other hapless concert-goer. My wife has to sit straddling the crack between our seats, but no big deal.

That was when I started to laugh. "Sitting on the edge of my seat" I always imagined to mean sitting on the front edge. Yet, here I am literally on the edge of my seat for the entire show --the right hand edge.

Yes, they sold me the whole seat, but I only ever got to use the edge. I guess maybe there can be truth in advertising, of a kind.