I had caught a cold that week, and I rested all day just to be ready for it.
I met my one lawyer friend from Missouri at a nearby Italian restaurant since she wanted to get some thing to eat, too, and while we were there, some people across from us on the patio (this big [African-American] [pediatrician] guy and a shorter older [German] woman) asked her if she wanted to have half a glass of wine and finish their bottle for them, since they couldn't finish it.
We started chit-chatting, too, and it turns out they had really really good tix to get rid of, like $355 tickets on the main floor about 50 feet from stage, and they would sell them to us for $150 each.
Since ours were way high up on the 3rd tier of the stadium and separate (the only tickets together I could buy were practically behind the stage, for the same price!), we impulsively bought them, and decided to sell our $110 tickets outside the stadium- THOUGH- as it turns out, there was a scalper glut and we could only get $20 each for them (erp).
Whatever, we still got mega-good seats for $240 each, and it was worth it.
For me, the absolute highlight of the concert was after the "Vogue" sequence, when a (black) man in a tophat playing a piano was raised up from beneath the floor onto the catwalk, and Madonna slinked down the stage doing a striptease while a giant male eye looking through a peepshow hole was projected on the back screen. As she staggered up and everything slowed down, she stripped off more and more till she was in a bra and panties and fishnets, and thrust her (muscular) (53y.o.) ass out at the audience and turned her back to them, which had on it tattooed in giant letters the word -
FOR
GIVE
- and then, after the applause, she began a really really slow song in a minor key, as the guy played, and she just sounded old and chastened, and she crooned in the low part of her register the lyric "shiny and new", and you realized she was singing "Like a Virgin", but not as a happy pop hit, but as an old, worn-out woman would sing it.
(Oddly, in the YouTube footage I found from the tour in Rome, she had the words "NO FEAR" on her back.)
Also, the other absolute highlight of the concert (and perhaps the better one) was right after the opening number, where she was a girl gone wild brandishing guns, then ends up in a box set up like a hotel room with the word "Paradise Hotel" above it as a neon sign as she swigs out of a bottle and sits jauntily holding a gun beside a crucifix on the hotel wall... And then an intruder starts coming through the window, and she non-chalantly holds up the gun and blows him away, as a huge splotch of blood flashes across the background screen. Though it was all staged, it was very intense - and as the song went on, she proceeded to blow dancer after dancer away, and people were actively cringing, and me and my friend and people around me had to avert their gaze. It's actually the most effective stage violence I've ever seen.
Though I was sick, I was so hyped up after the concert - it was slated for 8pm, but she began at 10:20pm and ended at 12:20am - that I couldn't get to bed after 3am.
Though, that might have been the espresso from the Italian restaurant earlier, I did that to make sure my energy wouldn't flag.
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