A tongue-in-cheek article about a Prince concert which appears in the August 6 issue of The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/...uts_wagner


Best Seats
by Bruce Wagner
August 6, 2007

A friend called to tell me that Prince was giving one of his chicly innovative, exclusive concerts on Friday night, at a venue yet to be disclosed. The cost: three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars per ticket. Having recently come into an inheritance that dwarfed that amount, I mulled it over for about two seconds before deciding to splurge on this prestigious event, the likes of which hundreds of V.I.P.s have experienced in the past six months. I wanted to be one of them.

The performance began at two in the morning and took place in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was amazing. I was so close to Prince that I was injured during the six-and-a-half-hour set. A few lucky ones, who paid an additional hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars—twelve of us, to be exact, including Simon Cowell, the body of Christopher Isherwood, Shia LaBeouf, Michael Moore, the lissome Emma Watson, and the physicist Stephen Hawking—milled about after the show. We were all gregarious and high from the experience. As it turns out, Mr. Hawking is as sparkly and svelte as Nicole Richie, and extremely droll. It took a while before I was able to understand what he was mischievously typing into his sophisticated little voice machine: “Women, not girls, rule my world.” We all laughed and laughed. Then Prince reappeared and played for fourteen more hours. Fortunately, I had brought along a bottle of Adderall, prescribed for my A.D.D., and I courteously offered my stash to the group. But, perhaps because Prince’s boundless energy seemed genuinely contagious, everyone declined. (I should have asked Mr. Moore how much the pills would have set me back had I bought them in Cuba.)

After Prince stopped playing, the two of us had brunch together. I was sitting so close to the diminutive legend that, as he ate, flecks of his omelette fell into my mouth. The privilege of this intimate meal cost an additional eighty-five thousand dollars, but it was worth every penny.

For a few weeks afterward, I was depressed. Going out to dinner with friends—for, say, two hours of convivial overfamiliarity and banal, rehashed conversation—seemed like idiocy, and the emptiness was only exacerbated when my friends jumped for the check. Even my normal morning ritual held no joy. Usually, one assistant comes into the bedroom with a pot of Indonesian coffee (the brew, six hundred dollars a pound and DHL’d from England, where it is rumored to be a favorite of the Royal Family, is sifted from the dung of wild civets) while a second factotum presents me with a freshly bound volume containing selections from every blog and Twitter and Facebook entry that has mentioned my name in the past twenty-four hours—hundreds of pages, with “BRUCE WAGNER” in convenient boldface—but even this lost its allure. It was then that I had an epiphany: there was only one thing that would bring me out of my doldrums.

Not long ago, I received a call from a friend who works as a private chef in Sun Valley, who had cooked for Rupert Murdoch and his wife during Herbert Allen’s annual moguls conference. He said that the opportunity to lunch with Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, was regularly auctioned off on eBay, and the money was given to charity. At first, I thought he was kidding, but a bit of online research confirmed that it was true. People had bid as much as six hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the honor. There was a catch: Mr. Buffett never talked business over lunch. That didn’t concern me. The cachet of breaking bread with the greatest capitalist the world has ever known was, as they say, priceless.

Within a week, I had made a successful bid—$1.15 million—and lunch was set at Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Beverly Hills. (Mr. Buffett had to be in California on business.) Needless to say, I felt like sharing the experience. Word had quickly got around that I was part of the select group that had attended the Prince “bungalow concert,” and this had the effect of lending me enormous credibility; when my people contacted Shia LaBeouf ’s representatives to extend him a luncheon invitation, they jumped right on the phone.

So there we were, at a round table, so to speak, with Mr. Buffett: me, Shia, David Milch, the disembodied cartoon voice of Antonio Banderas, the cable star Kyra Sedgwick, Jim Lehrer, Daniel Radcliffe, and the newly minted singing sensation Hannah Montana (I’ve forgotten her real name). I learned that everything they say about Mr. Buffett is true: he does not travel with an entourage, he is witty and concise, and he does not put on airs. He was wise, cordial, and au courant. The thing he said that I liked most (Hannah Montana seemed to like it, too, but I wasn’t sure that she completely understood) was a quote from Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself—but it rhymes.”

At the end of the lunch, I asked Mr. Buffett how much longer he would be in town. Warren (he insisted I call him that) said that although he’d originally planned to leave that evening, his grandson wanted to go to a concert by “a fellow named Prince.” When I asked what the venue was, he got a twinkle in his eye and just said, “Undisclosed.”

Later, I learned that the concert had taken place at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. A new technology had been developed by Johnson & Johnson—Berkshire Hathaway already has a fairly large stake in the company—that allowed people to be so close to Prince that, for seven hours, the singer was technically inside their bodies. In other words, the audience “became” the superstar singer-songwriter on a multicellular, organic level. Warren’s grandson later reported that he had been able to “think Prince’s thoughts.” The price of each ticket was fifteen million dollars.

Well, my heart sank. To cheer myself up, I bought a $59,750 Hästens horsehair bed, though I assure you I haven’t slept well in days. I don’t know if I ever will.

oh yes!

Funny shit!!!!

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Oh my god, ORG, how do I get all this coffee & danish off my flatscreen???

Although, I would pay 15 anything to think P's thoughts for an hour...

RenHoek said:

Save your money for another Prince concert. I can tell you he is thinking about SEX! SEX! SEX!

Hilarious. People outside my office are wondering what's going on in here.

And then when I copied and pasted it into an email to send to a friend, my spellchecker wanted to know if it should change Simon Cowell to Simon "Cowbell."

After Prince stopped playing, the two of us had brunch together. I was sitting so close to the diminutive legend that, as he ate, flecks of his omelette fell into my mouth. The privilege of this intimate meal cost an additional eighty-five thousand dollars, but it was worth every penny.


I love this article. Thanks for posting!

So for 15 million dollars I can get Prince inside of me, eh?

Super Sale in Berkley! EVERYTHING MUST GO!!

Thanks for posting!

pplrain said:

Well if that's the case then it's good to know I just saved a A$$LOAD of cash because apparently the diminutive one & I think alike... phew!

is this story true??

i mean, simon paying 2 c prince doesnt sound right

Gotta finish reading this article later. So far it's pretty funny though!

This is humor at its best!! Such a great spoof!!

what in the hell?!??

Clearly, this guy has been reading some of the concert reviews over at HQ.

LesGrinds said:

Simon "Cowbell"...

Now WE know why he changed his name!

A new technology had been developed by Johnson & Johnson—Berkshire Hathaway already has a fairly large stake in the company—that allowed people to be so close to Prince that, for seven hours, the singer was technically inside their bodies. In other words, the audience “became” the superstar singer-songwriter on a multicellular, organic level. Warren’s grandson later reported that he had been able to “think Prince’s thoughts...

Either I'm dumb or 2 far out from Scientific Advances! Wot does this exactly mean? Can any1 please put it simply so i can understand?

this was SO funny to me . . .

Too funny! Well done.

DevotedPuppy said:

i WOULD'NT pay Rodge 1000$ to play with theTyme in my backyard!
That little Nut-?Job has lost his wits!
Trust me!

Two people so far weren't able to tell it's a joke.

I don't know if that's tragic, or if I should be glad it's only two...

This is just too funny for words.... lol awesome... =)

Diosuni said: