Billy Joel fans, please sit down.
A curmudgeonly complaint about suboptimal equilibria.
As my final hoorah in New York before my fall in Hanover, my parents brought me (and my brother) to a Billy Joel concert at Madison Square Garden—our second concert of the week. The first was the Eagles Goodbye Tour. Both performances were sublime; the same adjective does not describe both crowds.
Billy Joel had a rowdier crew of Boomers and GenXers hooting and hollering.
From the first note, the surprisingly limber old(er) folks were out of their seats for the Piano Man, thereby obscuring my view of Billy the Kid with their tuchuses. If everyone were seated, we could all relax and enjoy the show. But no; some inebriated classic rock revanchist had to haul his ass out of his seat, causing the person behind him to do the same and so on: sitting down was a strategy dominated by standing up, thereby leading to a suboptimal social equilibrium from the standpoint of ATP expenditure.
Unless you’re me and my brother: We stubbornly refused to stand and kept our eyes fixed on the LED screen telegraphing Joel’s every movement in higher resolution than we could see from afar.
This is all to say I’m grateful to my parents for bringing me and my brother along for the ride. If you do not have the privilege of your parents purchasing your concert tickets and can only see one, I recommend the Eagles—they still sound like angels. Billy Joel is a wonderful performer and his music rocks, but his voice doesn’t have anything on Joe Walsh, Don Henley, or Glenn Frey’s son (Deacon Frey).