white folks, shake your hands like the black folks, you might get some tonight

Happy Prince's birthday! Yess, Emma, you tricky tomato, you know me (or Prince) too well. But today is more than just my beloved's 49th anniversary of his squishy little birth.Today is the beautiful day where I reveal some news that has been bubbling inside me near a month. You have heard of his two-month concert series in London, yes, London, Engand, the one true and only spectacular London of all excellence and fantasticness, not to mention some pretty great blogger (and you surely must know who you are)

Well, I, yes I, Molly, who you know and hopefully love, happen...no, not happen, it's too casual...I do...I'll just spit it out:
I am going to see Prince in London on August 17th, 2007.

My sincerest apologies if that news excited you so much that you happened to faint, overeat or lose control of your bowels. I know I would've done it all simultaneously if I hadn't been simply to exhausted.
Let me tell you the story of my quest for Prince tickets.

The ticekts went on sale at 10 am British time, which is 1 o'clock in the morning in my time. Still, like the loyal Prince fan I am, I got up, ten minutes early to be sure and went to the computer. I continued to refresh the page until the tickets went on sale. Immediately I hit "Purchase Tickets". The next page says "Sorry, no tickets are available."
The freaking concert had sold out in under a minute.
Obviously, I'm disappointed, but at one o'clock in the morning, I can't think straight. After trying all the concerts and realizing they're all sold out, I just went back to bed.
Oh, you might be confused. I live in Canada, and though I'm a huge huge Prince fanatic, I'm not going to fly to England just to see Prince (I would if I could afford it though). My family is going to Europe this summer, France mostly and I would drive from France to England just to see Prince, or at least finance that trip for my family. We needed to get the tickets for a show before August 16th because then we'd be going to Holland and then home.

The next morning, I visited the Ticketmaster website to check what was going on...and, okay, sulk a little. I saw that there were still tickets left for during September. I figured I could get some tickets and then try to trade them for ones in August. At worst, I would likely just re-sell the tickets (at face value, of course, as I'm morally against scalping). So then I had some tickets to the September 9th show. Great...even though I'd been in Canada then. Then I was visiting prince.org, the faithful fan website when someone posted a frantic thread called "NEW AUGUST DATES ADDED". I rushed to the website: tickets were available for August 17th! But...that was a day after August 16th, the latest concert my parents said would work.

I began looking all over the house for my mom to make sure it would work, but she wasn't there, when I remembered she had walked up to the mailbox, about a half-mile away. I sprinted out of the house, barefoot and in my pajamas, screaming at the top of my lungs, but she was too far away so I ran back and got my old bike out of the shed. I also have exertional asthma, so I was having a little bit of an asthma attack, nothing really serious, I don't need a puffer or anything, but I'm supposed to just lie down and it stops. Obviously I couldn't lie down at a time like this! I finally got to the mailbox and there was my mom. I told her there were tickets available for August 17th and could I get them? She said of course and so I went back, completely exhausted, went online and got the damn tickets.

Are they good seats?
Ah, no, not at all. You know the Upper Balcony? Well, they're in the Upper Upper Balcony, pretty nosebleed.
BUT that is not the point. The point is, I am going to see Prince, in London.
And it's his birthday today.
So Happy Birthday Prince.
And Happy Happy Day to me.