As if you were never a teenaged noob?

I'm assuming your 2 shows in '97 were a lot like mine. Wide-eyed and bushy-tailed. Wondering at these exotic people saying "Six Up" instead of "Five Oh" - marvelling at the ingredients in a Ganja Goo-Ball and reminding yourself not to tell that cute hippie girl how your mom would also toss in a few butterscotch chips to brighten things up a bit. The music was great! Except Bouncin' - such a lame song and you knew you were destined to be more than one of "those people" who just came for Bouncin and Sparkle, lame pop radio megahits that must have been a lot more popular somewhere else, probably out on the west coast. That's probably where they say "Six-Up" too, come to think of it. You saw that look in their eyes. People knew what was real. What was happening. You wanted in.

Oh the first day back at school, you're riding in the backseat of Robbie Freeman's Gallant, he lights a joint up and you proclaim the herb to be quite "heady" and at Robbie & Donnie's perplexed looks, you sigh and raise an eyebrow. Slight condescension tints your tone as you explain the finer points of marijuana to these squares. And what is this music? 311? Not quite so heady. You like the song with the bass solo thats 7:15 but the rest is just kind of schwaggy. You gave them the 2nd disc of A Live One, because Wilson was a badass metal song. The CD skipped into the middle of the Tweezer jam and they laughed at you. Tears were burning your eyes as you explained how much better it was on LSD. They turned around and fixed eyes on you, LSD? You've never eaten LSD, they smelled your fear and called your bluff so you told them you could get some in December when Phish played Rocester. You had a guy. You got his pager number. He's from the West Coast and if you saw the guy you'd totally know he wasn't Six-Up. Those confused looks set your heart a-flutter and you calmly explained that out on the West Coast they called Cops "Six Up" instead of "Five-Oh" - they reluctantly bowed to your superior wisdom and started listening to Phish with you. Phish came back, you told Donnie & Ronnie that you were going to go meet your guy. You were running around the lot trying to find LSD. You ended up in a porta-pottie ripping up tiny pieces of notebook paper and hoping they didn't notice the difference. 4 hours later, Ronnie totally peaked during that song about the Ghost and saw a cartoon zebra dancing on the ceiling. Donnie saw the devil emerge from this white guy's dreadlocks during that heavy metal song and wouldn't talk about it for years. He wasn't ever the same again and last you saw him was in 2009, he was the bursar for the local episcopalian church.
He saw your Phish t shirt and asked you why didn't you listen? He saw the devil that night. God spoke to him through his LSD haze and showed him the light. You started to tell him the truth, but what if the tour kids found out? Big Sky Tony and Mississippi Mary might not let you on the bus if they knew you used to be a bunker!

Granted, perhaps you were more respectful of the scene?. Maybe you studied the Phish archives and parking lot anthropology for years before you felt that you were astute enough that your very presence at your first Phish show wouldn't be an affront to the older fans. You sneered at the first cop you saw and shouted "Six Up!" as if that scream had been building in your lungs during your entire two year training period, as if all the nights spent developing a tolerance towards any potentially cool-threatening performance enhancing drugs and painstakingly ciphering out the differences between the intros to Maze & Bowie had finally came to fruition. You produced a Samuel (Sammy!) Smith Oatmeal Stout and a set of flash cards from your backpack and quickly refreshed your memory on the Secret Language cues through a complicated system of mnemonic devices. Some guy asked you what you wanted to hear tonight and you replied "Destiny, Alumni, Sneakin Sally, Long Cool Woman, Fuck Your Face, Letter To Jimmy Page, Flat Fee. In that order." He gave you an odd look and said he hoped they played Disease. You scoffed and blew off this obviously MTV-obsessed teenybopper and roared "Who do I have to blow around here in order to hold a single rational discussion about why they framed Tela?"
At some point during the night you got dosed and they found you in the woods curled up in a ball apparently speaking in tongues. You wouldn't stop so they took you to the hospital. You regained full consciousness the next day and a pretty Doctor came in and asked "Can you please explain to me what 'Buffalo Bill 10/31/94. 204 Shows. Dog Faced Boy. 8/12/96. 109 Shows. Boogie On Reggae Woman. 9/13/88. 989 shows. BBFCFM. 8.6.96. 118 shows means?" You had been repeating it for hours. You knew the future. You called the rest of the bustouts for summer and fall tour before they happened.
The world is your oyster.