As I mentioned earlier this week, Loverboy put on a good free concert at the Iowa State Fair on Saturday. As Paul Harvey says, Now the rest of the story.
Our pal Continental Frutiger had been excited for this concert for a while. Unfortunately, Hurricane Dean and its desire to destroy their Cayman Island house put a kink in those plans. No matter why he wasn’t there, we had to give him a bad time, of course. So after the show, we got permission (read: we took it) to take the “Loverboy” placard from the “Who’s on Stage” sign. This, coupled with a “Stu Stavies for President” button that we’d made at the CNN booth and a Loverboy notebook we’d made during our last batch of hand-made 33-1/3 Notebooks, made for a nice busting of chops gift.
We left all three items in the mailbox of his office on Sunday. It took until Wednesday for him to respond, and when he did, it was one of thanks, not the snark I’d expected. But that’s not the best part of the story.
I talked to Nicole, whose floor we were supposed to crash on before she got sick from the heat, and whose dad was working security for Switchfoot. He told us it was a great gig, because not only did he get $7 an hour and get a free t-shirt, he got to hang out backstage. There was to be a party that night with kegs of beer, and he’d brought a bag of pretzels to contribute. He has a great 8-to-5 job, and just works fair security for something to do…and to bring pretzels to a keg party backstage. As you can tell, he’s a helluva good guy.
It seems Loverboy outdrew Switchfoot 2 to 1, probably because it cost $28 to see Switchfoot at the grandstand and it was free to see Loverboy…and also because nobody can name that one song that Switchfoot has. So when the fair realized the huge crowd that was gathering at the Loverboy concert, they pulled some of the force off grandstand duty and moved them to Loverboy duty. Her dad was one of them, and he was Mike Reno’s personal security guy after the show.
This is where I get upset. After a few minutes to allow the crowd to disburse, Reno came back out and signed autographs. I’ll let Nicole take the story from here.
“(my dad) was hanging out with his new friend Mike (that’s Mr. Loverboy to us). This means that had my dad not tried to play it cool he could have called me and told me so you guys could befriend