My first "real" concert

My son is a traveling chef for a catering company that does concerts.  He goes all over the southeastern part of the US following different artists on tour.

This week they're doing the Jason Aldean tour.  He got DH and me backstage passes and invited us to the new Bank of Oklahoma center in Tulsa to attend the concert.

This was my first "real" concert.  I've attended some at a college auditorium and a couple at a nearby casino but this one was all out!  The venue seats 18,000 people and tickets sold out within 2 minutes after they went on sale!

There were no empty seats tonight!  With our passes, we didn't even get a seat! lol! When he told me we'd be on the side of the stage, I assumed we'd have seats in a specified area.  But our passes gave us access to everything behind the scenes and up close access to the stage.   We were within 10 feet of the stage so the HUGE speakers were right beside us.  Luckily, Gene, our son, had advised us to bring ear plugs. 

We stood and watched the John Deer Girls and Eric Church perform as warmup acts for Jason Aldean.  By the time he took the stage we were exhausted and left after about 30 minutes after his act began.  I know, you probably are wondering why we would have left right in the middle of the main performance!  We'd been at the BOK for about 4 hours by that time.  Gene took us on a tour of the facility, we saw the tour bus they travel on, watched him prepare some of the food and ate a wonderful dinner that he had fixed.

Gene on their tour bus

Eric Church

Jason Aldean

This is how close I was to him during his performance.  I'm sure there are a lot of his fans who'd have loved to have our passes!

The reason I drove almost 100 miles to the BOK wasn't for the concert, it was the first chance we've had to see how Gene does his job and have him cook dinner for us.  He's on the road a lot so we don't often get to see him.

I was totally fascinated by the routine they have as  traveling caterers.  They do have an extremely nice tour bus to take them from venue to venue but it's the logistics of their job that intrigued me.  I had Gene show me their equipment trailer and explain to me how they do their prep work, etc. 

There were only six people working on this tour and they do their jobs like a precision drill team.  Gene and the others are feeding about 70 people this time.  They start with breakfast and don't get through until after 8:00 p.m.  Tonight they were packed and ready to head out to Lubbock, Texas by 9:30 p.m.  They get on the bus, go to bed an wake up at their next location.

One of the people that he works with, named Cisco, is a Cordonbleu trained chef.  Gene insisted that we sample his banana pudding.  For a regular banana pudding recipe, he sure did it up right! I kept insisting that he'd added some sort of liqueur to the recipe but even Gene's boss assured me that it didn't have anything other than milk, eggs, flour, sugar, bananas and vanilla wafers.  Maybe it was the whipped egg whites that he'd topped it off with?  Let's just say, it was good!

One of the vegetables we were offered tonight was grilled carrots.  They were delicious and I liked them even better when I was told that Gene came up with the sauce recipe for them.  He even took me back into the prep area and showed me how he'd prepared them on a flat top.  I've tried to tell DH that I need a flat top. Now, if I just had room for one in my kitchen! lol!

It was a fun trip.  DH and I haven't been anywhere in ages, it seems.  I did spend a few minutes in a Hobby Lobby and had a clerk at Barnes & Noble do a good demonstration of a Nook e-reader for me before we headed to the concert.

Making our way across town we found a Whole Foods Market and stopped in.  It's the first one I've been to and was wowed by their produce and cheese selection.  There's one opening soon in the Oklahoma City area so I'll be able to go there more often.  I saw so many things today that I'd like to experiment cooking with but knew we'd have problems keeping it fresh until we could get back home.  Of all things, (welcome to the weird world of Oklahoma weather) it was in the high 70's today----January 29th!