The Rick Wakeman Piano Show, Deluvial Conditions in South Florida, and Me

So, think I was saying six months ago or so that I'd purchased tickets for Rick Wakeman's Even Grumpier Old Rock Star tour.

And the date on the tickets said yesterday!

So my gal Mel and I made plans to mosey on over to the Amaturo Theatre in Ft Rockerdale, but man, was the weather positively crappy yesterday (and it remains so today, too!).

I left work 20 minutes or so early to help me get to the show by its 8PM start time, but the drive home was absolutely *brutal*, maybe not hurricane winds, but definitely torrential rains, streets and highways overwhelmed by unhandled storm water and you better believe it plenty of automobiles piloted by the crappy drivers for which SoFla is so justly famed.

I got home on time, but the drive home had drained me, and I wasn't sure I had it in me to *go back out* into those so-freshly-imprinted-in-my-brain awful road conditions. As I arrive, my gal clearly doesn't want to go out into the Great Wide Shitty Weather, either, so I say to her: I'll mull it over; let's look at it in a half hour.

I'm an old man and I've always been easily annoyed and my gut feeling on the day of *any* concert is, oh, I don't know, something just this side of dread. I don't wanna drive for an hour, I don't wanna have to find and pay for parking . . . can't I just stay home?

I always overcome these feelings and head out, and I always (or almost always) have an excellent time, so yesterday, I was finding it hard to separate actual and rational dismay at driving in the crappy conditions vs. my usual oh-fuck-this-is-just-a-pain-in-the-ass response.

I had just about come to the conclusion that the only way to go was to proceed to the show, weather be damned, how many more times is Rick Wakeman gonna come to America, when my search for an online parking map led me to a webpage (dated October 20 or so) that informed me the second half of Mr. Wakeman's tour, including his Ft Lauderdale appearance, had been rescheduled to February-March, due to lingering COVID issues.

Well, fuck. Best news I had all day. No longer tasked with Having To Make A Decision, I ripped off my dress shirt and popped open a Voodoo Ranger. It might be pouring outside, but I was staying home, and doing it absolutely guilt free.

So now the date is March 11, and without any ability to predict the future on my part, I can still fucking *guarantee* that the weather on that date will be better for driving to and parking at a rock concert than it was yesterday.

So, anyway, while I was still trying to decide what to do last night, I did burn off a copy of The Six Wives of Henry VIII, just in case. I listened to that on the way to work today, and then at lunch. (SPOILER: it's a really really good album!), and then when I came back from lunch it was a little slow, so I went to rwcc.com, which is Mr. Wakeman's website, and he had posted this vintage ad for the album that I've been listening to all day, so that was cool.