Two women provide entertainment during Seal concert

<i>College 401</i> column

By ROBERT RICH

Since I didn’t write this column for much of my spring 2009 semester at UT, from time to time I’ll share with you a story from said semester so that you can feel up to date. You see, I know how interested you all are in what goes on in the life of a poor college student.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a member of the Music & Entertainment Committee, a group dedicated to bringing high-quality concerts and other entertainment opportunities to campus at either a low or no cost to students. Because of this, we often work with the people who run the Performing Arts Center here on campus, a relationship that affords us many perks, namely free concert tickets. A few months ago we received a handful of passes to a show at the newly renovated Bass Concert Hall, passes to see Seal. In case you don’t know him, Seal is a British R&B singer known primarily for the song “Kiss From a Rose,” a tune that gained notoriety because of its inclusion in the Batman Forever soundtrack. According to pretty much every woman you talk to, Seal is also, and this will be important later, a very sexy black man.

I’m not particularly a fan, but I do have “Kiss From a Rose” on my iPod, and any opportunity to visit the Bass Hall, which is a gorgeous venue, is worthwhile. The thing that was immediately evident upon taking my seat in the balcony was that the crowd present at the show was about 95 percent female. That’s not necessarily surprising, but I found myself struggling not to drown in the sea of estrogen. When Seal took the stage, I also found myself willing my ears not to bleed and my eardrums not to pop from the high-decibel screeching of the multitudes of women swooning over his presence.

I won’t lie to you, it was pretty entertaining. I didn’t know many of the songs, but they all featured prominent synthesizers, driving pop beats and Seal’s smooth crooning, so at the very least it was intriguing. On top of it all, a giant screen at the back of the stage constantly played pulsing displays of LED lights (think of the visualizer in Windows Media Player), so if I got bored of the music, I could just zone out looking at a swirling red and green flower.

That’s all well and good, but the best part of the evening was that aforementioned crowd. They screamed, they cheered, they sang along, and most importantly, they drank. The beer was flowing freely, and the formidable mixture of alcohol and Seal’s ever-present gyrating hips sent them into a frenzy. Special mention must be made of one woman, who we’ll call Nancy in this column. Nancy was about 45, sitting about five rows back on the very left side of the concert hall, attending the show with a man I’m assuming was her husband or boyfriend, due to her incessant nuzzling of his neck. However, it seems that Nancy loved Seal even more than her date to the show, as every chance she got, she stood up from her seat and walked to the edge of stage, reaching to Seal and trying to touch any portion of him available to her.

At one point, Nancy got her wish, as Seal reached down to grab her outstretched hands. However, she took this to mean that he wanted her on stage, and she started trying to climb up with him. He put the kibosh on it as quickly as he could, and pushed her back down, somewhat forcefully, but necessarily so thanks to Nancy’s unbreakable desire to dance with Seal. She had been denied, but that did nothing to break her spirit, and she tried several more times before finally, she was given the opportunity. Seal pulled her up and for what was surely the best three minutes of Nancy’s life, she danced on stage with him. Afterward, she kept going back to the stage, but her euphoria ensured that her badgering was tempered.

Now let’s talk about someone else, who we’ll call Jessica. I didn’t see much of Jessica throughout the concert, mainly because she was sitting on the right side of the stage and I was looking at Nancy most of the time. However, everyone in the venue saw her when all the Bud Light finally went to her head and she jumped up on stage and went across the entire stage behind Seal. Not with him, behind him. Her movements were an odd mixture of ballet and hopscotch, and she had barely gotten on stage when a security guard came sprinting from the back to remove her. She didn’t see him coming, and when he grabbed her, Jessica started struggling violently, finally jerking away but slipping at the same time. She flailed her arms and tipped backward, heading for disaster and a nasty bump on the head, but the security guard caught her gracefully and hauled her off stage.

I’d never have guessed it’d come at a Seal concert, but it was one of the wildest crowds I’d ever seen, and a thoroughly enjoyable experience, thanks in no small part to Nancy and Jessica. But in reality, it was just another example of the power of music and what it can do. It can make you happy, give you a shared experience and bond with the other concertgoers, and even cause you to lose your inhibitions.

Actually, that last one may have been a byproduct of the beer.

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Robert Rich is a senior journalism major at the University of Texas at Austin. He graduated from Westwood High School in 2006. He can be reached via e-mail at robert.rich@mail.utexas.edu