Lady Gaga Live

Shopping bag souvenir from the concert

Having teenagers at home would eventually lead you to to entangle some of your music tastes with theirs. Although I hardly imbue myself with my teenager's iPod  selections, when it comes to Lady Gaga, we both share a desire to watch her perform live at least once. In addition, I was impressed upon learning that she had achieved early acceptance into the New York University's Tisch School of the Arts program at a tender age of 17.

Her concerts have always sold out in minutes. If one is lucky to get a ticket, the seat may end up in the nose bleed section. This create a quandary of whether to watch a miniaturized version of her from the upper most section of the venue or just save the money and stay at home.

That was the decision I have to make last February when Lady Gaga was performing at New York Madison Square Garden (MSG). It was the winter school break hence for my teenager to attend the concert and then staying up beyond the regular bedtime was not an issue. The dilemma was that Lady Gaga concert has been sold out and the only available option was to get the tickets at the secondary markets.

I was referred by a friend to a secondary market vendor. I visited the vendor website and noticed that there were quite a number of seats still available for the Tuesday night concert. Some of the prices have been jacked up dramatically to as much as 3 to 4 times the original prices. An hour later, I noticed that the some of the prices begin to drop. As I continued monitoring throughout the afternoon, I jotted down several possibilities that were within my budget. At about 3 hours before the concert, I managed to score a pair of tickets with decent view. Since it was drawing so close to the concert start time, the prices were close to the original prices even with the commission fees added.

The fun part of the concert was witnessing all the enthusiastic fans dressed like Lady Gaga. You have The Little Monsters, younger kids dressed in costumes. Then you also encountered males dressed like her.

The concert started late at around 9:30 pm. Lady Gaga interacted actively with the sold out stadium crowd estimated at 20,000. She claimed she did not lip synch unlike others who did (I wonder who she was referring to). The show was energetic with a myraid of dancing numbers and outrageous costumes and dazzling stage backdrops. She acknowledged her humble roots by relating how she used to sit in the nose bleed sections watching other performers played at MSG and she was grateful that she was now the performer on stage.

The HBO crew was there filming the concert for a special (which was shown a couple of weeks ago). Lady Gaga sang her signature tunes including Telephone, Alejandro and Bad Romance. She also debuted her latest single "Born This Way"  from her new album to the thunderous cheers of the crowd. She later acknowleged several celebrities in the audience including Liza Minnelli and Marisa Tomei.

The audience certainly had a blast. While exiting the stadium, we took the stairs instead of the escalators to the street level. On the way down, our fellow concert goers started singing Bad Romance gleefully in unison. We later checked out the souvenir stands. The T-shirts were expensive at around $40 each. My teenager ended up buying one with her own money. We have just witnessed the meteoric rise of a star.