Posted to rec.music.phish and/or submitted to the legacy Phish.net site...

O.k. I was talked into this one. It doesn't usually take much to get me to go to a Phish show under a hundred miles away, but I knew that this one was sold out. But Kelly kept pleading, and my resistance wasn't that strong anyway, so up to Saratoga we went. Now the thing about Kelly is that she is very pretty and enjoys to flirt. So when we got there and the bouncer told us the show was sold out, she took a deep breath batted her eyelashes and said, "But we came all the way from Baaaaah-rd." It worked; he told us to pay the cover price and in we went.

We arrived at around 10:02. Much to our surprise, Phish were already on stage playing the opening song (Dinner and a Movie). I immediately understood why they didn't want to let us in. The place was packed. Wall to wall people. This was true not just by the stage, but all throughout the club. Completely insane.

The first set was quite good. The highlight was probabally Page playing the Andy Griffith Theme during the Antelope intro. During the break, the club let everyone outside, and- since it was really cold- I went to talk with Claw Me Down. I was wearing a shirt that I had made with various possibilities for the line in YEM. He promptly grabbed a sticker, wrote the correct line on it, and handed it to me. Ah for the good old days, when I never had to pay for Phish merchandise.

During the second set, The First Phish Equation kicked in: Cold weather = hot show. For this set, I moved to the back of the arena. Claw Me Down had set up some cups and pennies and made a little drum set. We were playing along with Phish on that for a while, and then I whipped out my ocarina and we were styling. During the amazing Lizards they played that night, Claw Me Down sang the mystery lyrics to the song. Apparently, during the jam in the end (the part on the album where Trey talks about Rutherford being saved) there is a set of lyrics about a dog. He sings about all of the things he would do if he were another animal, but then concludes that he's glad he's a dog. I only heard them that one time, so I don't remember the words very well.

Towards the end of the second set, there were some electrical problems. Claw Me Down went up to fix it, and told me to staff the booth. Fortunately, the band was playing Curtis Lowe and no one wanted to buy anything. So I just sat behind the desk and pretended I knew what I was doing. Finally he fixed the problem and came back.

The encore was quite nice: Good Times Bad Times and Contact. After the show, I went up to talk to Fish. I had just met him the week before at the Wetlands. I got to hear the stories behind the lyrics to My Sweet One and You Enjoy Myself. Finally I found Kelly and we headed out. It was 2 in the morning and I still had a long drive back to Bard, but I didn't care in the slightest.