Posted by 
I have an old friend named Patrick, a guy who always seemed a little too grown-up to have a nickname though/so we all called him The Geez (short for “Old Geezer”, a clear nod to his adultness relative to the rest of we).
Anyway, way back in the early-to-mid ’90’s it was announced that the great Ray Charles (1930-2004) would be playing the Ottawa Civic Centre (I believe that was the venue). I wanted to go and so did The Geez, and though back then I was always the guy who was the one buying the concert tickets for me and all my friends I guess I had to be in class or something when these tickets were going on sale so it was left to The Geez to buy them. “No problem,” he said, all adult-like. He had a credit card and everything, so I had confidence in him.
So imagine my shock and horror when I called him later in the day and he tells me the show sold out and he didn’t get us any tickets. What?!?! Why not?
“I couldn’t believe it,” he told me. “The tickets went on sale at 10am and when I called at 11:30 they were already gone!” All of a sudden The Geez sounded like a silly little child.
For a moment I was speechless. Immediately following that moment I suddenly became very speechful. “Are you crazy?!?!?” I pondered with a scream, holding the receiver two feet in front of my face. “When tickets go on sale at 10am you get on the phone at 9:45, not 11:30!?!?! My gawd man!?!?!”
In between gasps of air I was barking retroactive instructions like I was explaining to a baby how to poo in a diaper but mostly I remember just screaming raving variants of “Are you crazy?!?!?” while his tiny adult-sounding squelches and squeals emitted from the earpiece that I was holding in my extended hand. I’m aghast all over again remembering it now, all these years later.
But check this out: there was never a show, and there never was going to be one in the first place. The concert had been a scam, one that didn’t involve Ray Charles in any way other than using his name as the bait. Someone had booked the venue and a few radio commercials (all of which probably remained unpaid), took all the ticket money from a sold-out 10,000-seater and left the country headed to somewhere in the Caribbean. It’s the only time anything like that has ever happened to me which is odd when you consider how easy of a scam it is.
Oops…I mistyped. As we all know, due to the utter ineptitude of The Geez when it came to ticket-purchasing skills I didn’t actually get scammed, so this didn’t “happen to me” at all. Now didn’t that work out well?
And much more importantly, on July 3rd, 1998 I got the chance the see Ray Charles anyway. It was also in Ottawa but even better than the Civic Centre, this concert took place outside on a beautiful summer’s evening in Confederation Park. Not only that, it was part of this newfangled Ottawa Bluesfest thing, a thing that would come to grow into a thang and then some. Now let me see, this would have been just my second year attending Bluesfest, and the first time that I attended on multiple evenings, having seen Mahogany Rush, Delbert McClinton, and Jimmie Vaughan on other nights.
But to the show at hand! Oh, it was so good, and the crowd was huge. I stood way back, essentially on the sidewalk of Elgin Street, which borders the park. I recall the stage being setup at the halfway point of the park, not near the canal like it always is at jazzfest, but still, the crowd was huge. But even from way back, there was no mistaking the vast enormity of talent that Ray Charles possessed. His timeless, comforting voice soared atop the backing vocals of his ever-present Raelettes and his signature piano playing spoke volumes, but it’s possible that the man’s sheer presence was his domineering feature.
In other words: Ray Charles sounded like he was a hundred feet tall. Disabled? Yeah right, I don’t think so.
I’m so, so glad I had this opportunity to see him perform. I don’t think The Geez was there.
Todd Man Out 