Achtung Baby

I stumbled onto something funny today. While flipping through the Entertainment Weekly website, I discovered I've been quoted sort of. Click here to take a look.

I had responded to this thread on "Your Great Pop Culture Regrets and Missed Opportunities". A week later, I've found my comment has been used in a photo gallery on the site that basically picked a dozen comments and put them with accompanying photos.

What was the anecdote?

The story goes that when I was in high school, I had a pair of tickets to go see U2 on their first round of the Zoo TV tour. It would have been early 1992, the "Achtung Baby" album was huge, and they were playing Maple Leaf Gardens.

The problem was me. I was pretty insecure as a teenager, so I waited until the last minute to ask someone to go. Everyone I asked couldn't make it, girls and "just friends" alike. I thought about asking this one girl from work. She had been the target of my misplaced, socially inept teenage affection. That is to say, I had a big old crush on that girl. But as a teenager, I didn't resemble the more confident gentleman caller you know today. It was a harmless crush, but I had a tendency to feel clumsy or goofy, saying the wrong thing if I managed to blurt out anything at all. Anytime I was around her, my brain would short out.

I knew U2 was her favourite band and I think I remember giving her a cassette of "Achtung Baby" for her birthday. But with days before the concert, I chickened out and never asked her. I had never seen an 80s teen movie, so how was I to know the geek could get the girl? I ended up selling the tickets to a classmate at face value and never saw the show.

The two punchlines:

#1 - The opening band, who I had never heard of at that point, were The Pixies. Seeing the Pixies (and U2 for that matter) in their prime would have been great.

#2 - Months later, that crush girl gave me a ride home from work one night. We got around to talking about that show and how I had sold the tickets. She said "I would have gone with you if you had asked."

Normally I say "Ha! Good one God, you got me again." But you know, that was my own damned fault, wasn't it?

The lesson, albeit years later, has been learned: I don't want to miss out on anything just because I didn't ask, or because I was too self-conscious to go by myself.

It's not "Degrassi Junior High" quality drama, more of a "Wonder Years" episode: just a story about a shy teenager, and the dumb things kids do.