BNL and Sushi!

The tickets for the Barenaked Ladies concert in San Francisco went on sale while we were in Seattle a month or so ago. Since we had heard tales of tickets selling out in 15 minutes for nearly every other city on the tour, we made sure to set the alarm and get a wake-up call so that we could start calling BASS before 10 AM. $30 in calling card calls later we had the tickets, and after a month of waiting we finally saw the concert on Friday.

We decided to get sushi for dinner before the show, and went to the place downtown that we've been to a number of times before. I don't know if we got there too early or what, because it was like the Keystone Cops were manning the sushi bar. We ordered a couple of things from our chef, who promptly disappeared into thin air, leaving us with no chef at all. For 15 or so minutes we watched as a woman sushi chef — the only person behind the bar at this point — mess up practically every order she touched. We were praying that our original chef would magically reappear so that we wouldn't have to risk ordering from her, but of course he didn't. We ordered two spicy tuna temaki, which are the cone-shaped handrolls.  Five minutes later she plunks a monstrous 12-piece spicy tuna maki down in front of us.

Avery: "Oh, we asked for temaki."
Sushi Chef: "You want spicy."
Avery: "No, temaki."
Chef: "Yes, it's spicy!"
Avery: [making the hands-in-a-triangle international symbol for "hand roll"]: "No, we wanted two TEMAKI! Hand rolls!"
Chef: "Very spi–ohhhh…hand roll?" Then, like she had done us a favor by completely changing our order into something that could practically be an entire meal in and of itself, something we didn't want, not even in the slightest bit, "Well, this one have more meat. Other roll doesn't have lot of meat."
Us: Sigh. Grumble. Sigh.

That amusing little fiasco aside, the concert was phenomenal. BNL sound just as good, if not better, as they do on CD, and they're hilarious to boot! Of course, there were those annoying people there only to hear "One Week" (why people spend $20 on a ticket to hear one song is beyond me&#41, like the yuppie-looking, very dressed up, very perfumed girl who sat next to me and talked to her girlfriend through just about the entire concert, and at one point, when she was deciding if she should visit the lobby or the restroom or something, was heard to chirp "But I don't want to miss my song!" Granted, That Song was the song that made me want to listen to the rest of their CD's, and I think that it's catchy and original and playful and creative and cute and everything, but it's not even close to the caliber of their past stuff, yet these people go absolutely apeshit over it. And I'm sorry, but if you don't know the words to at the very least "If I Had $1,000,000," you shouldn't even be allowed into the building. Anyway, they played for two hours and did three, count 'em three encores, and let me tell you, there us nothing cooler than having pretty much every single person in the entire audience singing at the top of their lungs to classic songs like "Brian Wilson" and "If I Had $1,000,000."