“The concert’s over there.”
You know those comments that are just perfect? The ones that are impeccably suited to their time and place, akin to The Dude in The Big Lebowski? So beautifully executed that they cut right through the noise and flawlessly capture the essence of a situation better than anything else possibly could?
This was one of those comments, courtesy of my friend Chase.
We were at the first night of a three-day music festival in Montana attending the headlining show — the inimitable Turnpike Troubadours. They were in the middle of another amazing set, and the crowd was responding in kind.
There was a girl in a red top on someone’s shoulders who was dancing all over the place. The combination of the dancing being completely out of sync with the music and her position directly in the middle of the crowd made this girl hard to miss. A small group around her cheered her on, and she obliged by doubling down on the moves and doing her best to engage with the group.
A concert videographer noticed this and saw an opportunity to capture someone ‘enjoying the show’. He made his way over as she flailed around, and as soon as she saw that she was being filmed by a professional, she committed even further and made some strange faces as she tried to show the camera just how much fun she was having.
The kicker was that the cameraman was standing in the exact opposite direction of the stage. This meant that someone was carrying this girl on their shoulders not so that she could get a better view of the stage, but so she could put on this performance directly in front of it.
“The concert’s over there,” Chase said flatly toward the girl, just loud enough for those of us around her to hear.
I couldn’t stop laughing. This is the sort of line that authors and screenwriters strive for when writing dialogue: punchy, perfectly timed, and illustrative of a larger, more thematic truth. The second I heard it, I instantly knew what today’s blog post would be about.
Nice work, Chase.