IJMC - Mentos Anyone?

   Someone sent this to me a while ago, however I can't find the author's 
name. They claim it is a true story. If so, I wonder if they've thought 
about contacting Mentos to do a short film for them?                -dave



 
   On Labor Day Weekend of 1995, my friend Jason and I (both 
18 years old) had nothing to do. We were both unemployed, so on the 
upside we had no responsibility, but on the downside, we had no money.
   We were listening to the radio on Friday when we heard that the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame was opening in Cleveland. Since we had nothing 
to do, we immediantly got in the car and drove there, taking 
nothing with us but a cooler full of beverages, a baseball bat, a 
knife, and around $30.
   On the way down, we stopped at a radio station and got some
t-shirts. They gave them to us after we told them we were going to the 
Hall of Fame. (This may seem trivial now, but it is an important
part of the story.)We weren't making very good time, so we 
compensated for this by flashing our brights and honking the horn.
   Everyone got out of our way, so we got to Cleveland at about midnight.
We walked around Cleveland until about 2:00 in the morning, then we 
started looking for a place to sleep. This was a very hard thing to
do, since we offended everyone we came into contact to and were afraid 
of being stabbed in our sleep. We finally slept in a deserted parking
lot, where we took turns sleeping and watching for people who would
kill us.
   When we woke up the next morning, we smelled really bad, so
we decided to swim in Lake Erie to clean off. We couldn't find a public
beach, so we swam in someone's front yard. They chased us off 
because we were naked. (We only had the clothes we were wearing when
we left, plus the t-shirts the radio station gave us).
   After we had cleaned off, we went to Ticketmaster to buy some
tickets. It was there that we ran into another problem. The cheapest
tickets, the ones were you sit behind pillars, were $80. This was a 
little over our budget of $15 apiece. So we devised a plan.
   At this time it was 12:00, and the concert didn't start 
until 7:00. We put on our radio station t-shirts and put a hole through 
our college i.d.'s, making it look like a media pass. We then walked 
into the stadium restaraunt, where they were setting up. We told the 
people there that we were looking for a man named Mike Kirkhoff.(This
is the name of a building on our campus.) When he went to ask his boss
if he knew the man, we took off down the hall and went through a door
that looked like it went into the stadium. They had anticipated that 
people would do this, though, and an alarm went off. We ran around the
stadium with security guards chasing us, and finally jumped into 
some port-o-pottys. They ran past us, but we didn't dare to come out.
We had 7 hours to kill, so we sat there until about 3:00. Then someone
came to clean the bathrooms, and we were afraid that they might clean
the port-o-pottys next. So we snuck out and climbed up a ladder to 
the roof. It was cool up there, so we started waving to people down
below. But some security guards down there spotted us, so we got
down in a hurry. We ran into the bathroom this time, and pretended
that we were taking a dump. Every time someone came into the bathroom.
we had to sneak out and find another bathroom, since they might 
suspect something if the same person was in there three hours later.
   Finally, it got around to seven o'clock. We walked around 
until about 8:00, when we were sure that the empty seats were going
to stay empty. We didn't want some usher coming up and asking for our 
ticket stubs because some other person had our seats.
   We finally settled down in some nice center-stage seats 
about 200 feet out from the stage. We asked some people next to us, 
and they said that had bought their tickets for $400 apiece. We must 
have looked hungry( and we were, we hadn't eaten since Friday),
because they bought us some popcorn and hotdogs and beer.
   The concert was one of the greatest I have ever been to. 
There was a bunch of old hippies there smoking pot and dancing. It
was insane. The concert got over at about 3:00 AM, and we ran out to
the car to get going. Jason was wasted, so I took about 4 N0-Doz and
drove home. We got back at about 9:00 AM Sunday, spending only $24 on gas 
for the entire time.