I'd Rather be Scalped

I haven't mentioned a fairly important and mildly regrettable (to put it mildly) circumstance surrounding the weekend.

Originally, the Bruce show was supposed to be the last concert ever at Giants Stadium, given its impending implosion (and that of its football teams). We, in fact, bought our tickets with this in mind. We figured, the last show ever at the place that is the Yankee Stadium to Bruce's Mickey Mantle had to be pretty special.

Apparently, tens of thousands of other Bruce fans thought the same thing. Due to demand, Bruce scheduled two additional shows, to be played next weekend. And so our tickets to "the last show ever" became tickets to "the next-to-the-next-to-last show ever."

Why does this matter? In part because of the clunky name, the value of our tickets declined precipitously.

This was a problem because the three of us (Marc and his fellow Jew, Cooper) had bought six tickets. We figured, Hey, it's the last show ever. We'll sell the extra tickets for double the face value and go see the show for free! It's foolproof!

Alas, this was us you were talking about. Since this wasn't the last show, and because of their clunky name, these third-from-last show tickets proved an especially difficult sell. Overtures on StubHub drew nary a reply.

Postings on Craigslist drew only one lunatic -- a man with only the barest grasp of syntax and vocabulary offered to buy our tickets and emailed every day to beg us to hold the tickets for him. The problem is, one of those emails came the day after the concert. Perhaps he is confused. Perhaps he plans to go back in time. God knows.

So, come Saturday evening, we were still holding onto these extra tickets, having each invested $120 on them. We assumed that people who schlepped out to the Meadowlands without a ticket would gladly meet any price to go in. Wrong.

Our first potential buyer seemed happy and willing to buy two tickets at $120. The problem was, he thought we meant $120 total. After we explained to him that they were $120 each, he laughed and walked away.

Uh oh.

At this point, Marc nearly had a nervous breakdown. He screamed. He yelled. He threw a tantrum. He actually fell to his knees at one point, literally screaming at the sky. Also at us. Marc insisted that no one would pay us half of what that guy offered and that now we were out $120 each and, if I'm transcribing his rant correctly, yearrrghhhh.

Unfortunately, and rather amazingly, Marc was right. Like a gambler who just saw $100 in chips disappear in ten minutes, Cooper rationalized the loss by saying it was worth it just to see Marc's meltdown.

Well, not quite. Marc's meltdown was entertaining, to be sure. I wish we had it on camera. But it wasn't worth it.

We finally got rid of the tickets, at the bargain basement price of $30 each. That's right: Our $120 investment resulted in a loss of $90. So we did better than Lehman Bros., but not by much.

That and we had to resort to the indignity of roaming the parking lot like common scalpers, brazenly yelling "TICKETS!!" like lunatics every two seconds whilst attempting to avoid detection by concert and state police.

So I guess two Jews and a Mexican can't come together to make a sound business decision. The worst part was realizing that after the three of us collectively spent over $650 on the event, we could have gone without any tickets and found $20 or $30 general admission tickets.

Good stuff to know, if I ever stop crying.

Update: This was too good to leave buried in the comments:

Marc: This just about covers everything except when I was openly trying to sell the tickets to benefit "the two mentally handicapped gentlemen standing next to me"