Weeknd Last Weekend

Stephen H Stein
6 min readAug 2, 2022

Judah loves Abel Tesfaye. You may know him as The Weeknd. Or as the guy who got lost in the mirror maze during halftime at the Super Bowl. You may also know him from TikTok and his song Blinding Lights, which has over 3 billion streams on Spotify — way way way way way way way more than anything by The Beatles.

Judah loves him. LOVES him. I think he’s ok.

Long story less complicated Pam and I got tickets for The Weeknd months ago. We got them for Judah’s birthday which is at the end of August. The concert was last night. (Close enough.) We had an idea to tell him when we bought them…

HOW MANY DAYS TILL THE WEEKND?
NOW HOW MANY DAYS?
HOW MANY MORE DAYS NOW?
NOW HOW MANY?
NOW HOW MANY?
NOW HOW MANY?
NOW HOW MANY?

…but we quickly ruled that out.

Then we thought we’d surprise him on the way to the show, but took that off the table as well because sometimes a surprise can be very unexpected…

WE’RE DOING WHAT?! WHEN?! NOW?!

So we told Judah last week. He had plenty of time to process, but not too much as to drive everyone crazy.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a concert. Probably since before they started adding spandex to mens jeans. I am not a concert person. Two reasons mostly. Too many people. And too many people. I don’t like crowds. And in a related note, I also don’t like parking, standing in lines, and paying $10 for a Kirkland hotdog I know I can get at Costco for considerably less. Sure, seeing the artist is nice, but they’re a postage stamp on a screen that’s an index card and, again, just too many people.

But this isn’t about me.

Doja Cat was supposed to open for The Weeknd. I don’t know from Doja, but she apparently retired a few months ago. Yeah, she gone. So they found a DJ to warm up the crowd. Warm might be too strong a word. We got there around 6:45. The DJ came and left by 8…