U2ITNOL
Acrobat
I get the Arizona Republic newspaper delivered every morning. I open up the Arizona Living section today and find a full-page article about one of their reporter's obsession with Bono and her quest to be pulled onstage to dance with him at the Glendale concerts. Pretty amusing article I'm sure a number of the females on Interference can relate to (even a few guys; DiamondDave!) 
. I found the online version on the Republic website. Unfortunately it doesn't have the photos that accompany the print version. I remember seeing these two gals in the U2.com line Friday morning not too far behind my sister and I. Both pretty cute!
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/arizonaliving/articles/0419chasebono19.html
. I found the online version on the Republic website. Unfortunately it doesn't have the photos that accompany the print version. I remember seeing these two gals in the U2.com line Friday morning not too far behind my sister and I. Both pretty cute! http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/arizonaliving/articles/0419chasebono19.html
At most concerts, the singer Bono reaches down to the crowd and lifts a woman onstage for a song. This is the story of report Megan Finnerty's attempt to be that woman at the group's recent sold-out Valley concerts.
Bono-fide obsession Would her 4-month dance to see U2 end in his arms?
Would her 4-month dance to see U2 end in his arms?
Megan Finnerty megan.finnerty@arizonarepublic.com
The Arizona Republic
Apr. 19, 2005 12:00 AM
January
I'm running out of time. If I'm to smush my body against the stage at U2's concert in Glendale, I need in on the fan club-only presale now.
I had procrastinated. So late on a Monday night, I'm in the empty office frantically trying to register at www.u2.com.
The fan club wants $40 from my maxed-out credit card. Not that I need a fan club to throw myself at Bono. But I do need fan club access to presale tickets. It's my only hope of reaching the "pit," the standing-room-only space in front of the stage. I need to be there so when Bono reaches down to lift a woman onstage, I'm ready.
Typing in my name, address and user name, I imagine dancing onstage with Bono.
Everyone has one beautiful obsession, something trivia and drudgery haven't worn down. A band, Star Wars, NASCAR, scrapbooking. Something that says the real you is still in there.
You geeks who sat through the megascreenings of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, I understand.
I know how pathetic this looks. A 25-year-old woman blowing a week's grocery money on a fan club membership for a chance at tickets.
Tough.
I hit "Enter." Up comes my password to the presale. Flushed, I picture Bono's boots at eye level, his hand reaching down.
2 weeks later
Presale at 10 a.m. But I have a work meeting I can't miss. I call my friend Emily minutes before to make sure she's ready.
First, she has to go to U2's Web site and click on "find tickets." That gets her into the merciless Ticketmaster site. There, she enters the $40 password and clicks furiously.
I love Emily. But leaving my future with Bono in someone else's hands makes me nervous.
Emily and I met three years ago as interns. In the first 10 minutes while standing in my apartment's foyer, she told me she wanted to do AIDS relief with the Peace Corps so she could write a book Bono would read and then fall in love with her.
We agreed that day to save up for the next time U2 visited Phoenix.
I go to my meeting. Emily steadies her mouse, knowing thousands of others are doing the same as the minutes tick down.
Time. Emily clicks. In seconds, pit tickets are gone.
Ticketmaster offers up a pair of lower-level seats, cut off from the pit. Total $225. Emily's debit card can't handle it. She has three minutes to complete the transaction before Ticketmaster gives our seats to less-deserving fans whom we would hate if we knew who they were.
Back in the meeting, I'm thinking about kissing Bono. Emily bursts through the door. Gasping, she blurts out to the room she needs me in the hallway right now.
I give her my debit card and she runs back upstairs.
But the security code had been rubbed off. She can't use it. Panicked, Emily calls her boyfriend. He gives her a credit card number, and she swings back to her computer. Too late. Hateful Ticketmaster has timed us out. When I come running up after my meeting, Emily has finally managed to buy us a set of lower-level tickets.
Cut off from the pit, out more than $200, we still jump up and down. Yes, I feel self-conscious, spazzing in front of people I want to respect me.
But it's a touch of the obsession, a little dance with that joyful part of yourself. U2 makes me a teen again. Back then, I listened over and over to Achtung Baby and Zooropa, albums that overwhelmed me with a soaring sense of romance and possibility. U2 showed me the world could change if you walked around any corner, even in Michigan City, Ind.
So I jump up and down like a girl.
Emily and I pore over the Glendale Arena seating chart and find our seats. There is the stage, not too far away.
But I wasn't giving up.
4 days later
Burned in the presale, my last chance for the pit is now the general sale, when everybody mobs ticket sites on the Internet and at malls all over the Valley.
Surprisingly, I don't have a computer at home.
So on Saturday, I'm in the office for my last chance at Bono. Desperate times, desperate measures.
Even before the sale begins, I click frantically on the "find tickets" link on indifferent Ticketmaster's site. After 30 minutes, I still have a 15-minute wait. I'm nauseous thinking about some tacky girl getting my pit tickets.
Suddenly, a new screen pops up, a second show added. I click desperately. In seconds, the newly benevolent Ticketmaster offers me two pit tickets and three minutes to fill out the purchase forms.
Three minutes becomes three seconds. My fingers tremble. I can't swallow. Name. Address. Head pounding. Credit card number. Click, click, click, Enter.
I make it. Two tickets. I shriek, grab my cell and call Emily.
It's only after hanging up that I face the math.
Fan club registration: $40; first-night seat: $112; second-night pit ticket: $63. Half a week's pay for a chance to touch Bono. I think about selling the first night's seats on eBay. I hear they're going for more than $300 each.
But that would mean one less night with Bono.
2 months drag by
With U2 tickets tucked safely in my desk, there is much to do.
Dressing each morning, I play all my U2 CDs so I can scream along at the shows.
I plan outfits. A fashion writer; it's what I do. But dressing for Bono is paralyzing. I change my mind. Plan again.
When Bono reaches out, I need to look delicious.
Emily and I start Oprah's 12-week fitness boot camp. Lifting weights or pedaling madly in spinning class at the Chris-Town YMCA, I imagine my toned arms reaching up toward Bono's outstretched hand.
Yep. I'm shallow.
Why don't I spend this energy volunteering, learning Spanish, writing my Nana?
Because this is my shot at going back to 15 and some remembered glamour here in my so-called adulthood.
I'll wear my skinny jeans (thank you, Oprah) and my "Everyone Loves an Irish Girl" T-shirt. Hello, I'm Irish, U2 is Irish.
For the second show, I need flip-flops, to run to the entrance and stand in line all day. Then I'm changing into stupidly high heels so Bono can see me above the crowd.
Thursday: First show
We miss the opening band Kings of Leon while buying well-fitting U2 concert T-shirts.
As we come down the aisle of the bright arena, we see empty seats everywhere even though U2 starts in minutes.
Emily and I reach our seats as the pre-concert anthem, Wake Up by Arcade Fire, blares. All the seats are full now. Lights dim, a bass riff erupts and I am a lightning rod of joy.
I am in Bono's house.
This is the first time I've seen U2 since 1997 in Chicago. I missed the Elevation tour in 2001, when I was interning in New York City that summer. My family skipped a vacation to lend me the $2,700 it took to live there. I couldn't justify spending $100 on a ticket when rent was $900.
Believe it or not, there's only so far I'll go.
As the show unfolds, fans in the pit jump and surge as Bono sings to them. I can't wait to be there. Emily and I are the only ones dancing in our section.
At one point, Bono pulls a shirtless, tattooed man onstage. I think, "That's so me tomorrow."
At the first encore, the band bursts into Zoo Station from Achtung Baby, my favorite album. I can't stop screaming. I feel possessed by irrational happiness. This is why we've come.
I'm dancing, shaking, thinking, "I want my whole life to be this trembling excitement."
The band swings into Mysterious Ways. Everyone is dancing now, arms up, hips swinging. I head-bang and get dizzy.
Bono reaches out to a group of women against the stage, sings to them and holds their hands.
My breath catches, thinking I'll be there in 24 hours.
Friday: Second show
The next morning, we're back at the arena parking lot at 8:15 a.m. The idea is to be first in line and first in the door this evening on the way to the pit.
Emily and I join a small crowd of fans at the entrance. Everyone's talking about how to get in line and complaining about security.
A girl appears and writes the numbers 57 on my arm and 58 on Emily's, our places in line when it forms. Everyone seems to accept this as normal.
Several security men herd us back to the parking lot. As more fans arrive, they, too, get numbers.
By 9 a.m., there must be 100 of us when security finally lets us line up at the door. No one runs or pushes. Two lines form, one for fan club members, one for others, in the order we arrived.
We're in the fan club line near the front. I realize we will reach the stage. I start to relax for the first time since I heard U2 was coming to town.
Emily holds our place in line and I walk to the front because I hear the guy who got pulled onstage last night is up there.
He and a group of friends are sitting in camp chairs at the front of the line, playing Uno. I introduce myself. A woman next to him introduces herself. She's disheveled, wearing pink sweat pants, a Pop Mart 1997 Tour T-shirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She tells me she got here at 5 p.m. Wednesday for Thursday's show.
Last night, she and her friends slept in her minivan in an empty lot across the street, then drove over at 7 a.m. to start the line this morning.
Hard-core. She's been to more than 20 U2 concerts. She's been pulled onstage four times! My mind's screaming, "How? What's so freakin' special about you?!"
So I ask her, nicely, "How do you keep getting up there?"
She says Bono feels her energy some nights. Really. I think how I hate her and how un-Bono it is of me to hate.
She assures me, though, that Bono is more likely to pull up new people rather than regulars. My heart jumps a little at this.
The tattooed guy chimes in that he has indeed been pulled up four times. He's met Bono several times. I ask about the tattoos. He says the band has autographed his body, drawn pictures on him. And then he goes to tattoo parlors to have their work tattooed into his skin.
The woman in the Pop Mart T-shirt tells me how she and about 25 other fans meet up at shows across the country, get into sound checks, meet the band in front of the arenas, and stand in the pit, night after night. Bono recognizes them, chats with them during shows and, apparently, pulls them onstage. I'm dying a little now.
But I'm also starting to realize I could never go there, especially the part of her rambling story about the "massive" credit card debt she's run up buying tickets and gas. And, hello, she's sleeping in her car.
I rejoin Emily against the east wall of the arena. There is no shade. I am covered in sweat, sun block and grime.
I write my Nana and six other friends and relatives. I call my brother. I read three magazines.
The afternoon goes on and on. My butt hurts from the concrete. I am dehydrated because I stopped drinking hours ago so I wouldn't have to pee once I got to the pit.
At 5 p.m., Emily and I run back to the car to change and do our makeup. We wear tall flip-flops, like the other pit girls. They're comfortable and make you tall.
Security lets us in at 6:30 p.m. My ticket is scanned once for entry. The stage is at the end of the floor. An arching walkway juts out in an ellipse. There is a lottery to get into the space inside the ellipse and be closest to the main stage. My ticket is scanned again. We don't make it. A setback.
Rushing down several flights of stairs, I reassure myself, thinking, "Girls get pulled up from outside the ellipse, too. You've come this far."
We make it. We're against the barricade, slightly to the right of the ellipse. We look up to last night's seats and can't believe how far away they seem now. A stagehand walks along the walkway and I think, "Oh my God, Bono will be that close to me!"
We have two more hours until U2. My back hurts from standing. My feet hurt. I want water. I begin to wonder if I will be physically able to make it though the whole show. But I stay focused on holding my place against the barricade.
Life in the pit is shockingly friendly. There's no pushing, yelling or squishing. People show each other banners, photos, notes, things they want to pass to Bono.
The Kings of Leon take the stage. The arena is still mostly empty. They leave. A short break. Then it's time.
The lights drop. Singing City of Blinding Lights, Bono appears, hair gelled back, red sunglasses on, in black jeans and a red-and-black button-up shirt. He struts in front of us on the ellipse. I am about three feet from him. I can see the lines on his face, the sparkles on the soles of his shoes, the close fit of his jeans.
I love him.
I reach out over the barricade to him, scream his name, scream the songs, just scream. My heart is pounding, I lose my breath. I am out of control.
Halfway through the show, bassist Adam Clayton walks the ellipse to play. He smiles at me. I giggle and wave.
Songs roll into one another. Many times, Bono struts and sings right in front of me. I reach over the metal barricade to him, banging my body against it to get a little closer. But he never looks at me. He never takes my hand. I won't be that girl onstage tonight.
During Mysterious Ways, he pulls another woman out of the crowd, one of the women from the front of the line who's been to dozens of shows. They dance.
Watching from the pit, surrounded by sweaty strangers, I am happy for her. It's OK.
I never needed to touch him. I sing along, in the music, in the moment. The arena vibrates with the song.
I realize all the daring, earnest, hopeful, sensitive things I feel in the songs are really already inside me.
Bono just lifts them up.
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