​Yeah, first off; it’s totally a concert.

The show begins…not with a full house.  About 5/8 of the theater is occupied.  With the balcony closed.  But people seem to be very excited to see the NYC debut of this band.  Then the realizations begin to pile up.

It’s an Austrian band.  Not Australian, Austrian.  Which maybe explains the name of the show; It probably sounded better in the original Austrian.  The lead singer, Monti Beton, looks like the American actor Robert Webber.  The surprise presence of European football (soccer) icon Johann Krankl is a big surprise because we’ve never heard of him.  And he played in the 80s.  Apparently he had a hit song in Europe after his soccer career and now fronts this band.

It’s going to be a trip through American’s song book, except they lost the book.  They kick it off with Elvis and that rockin’ number, “King Creole.”  Who opens up with “King Creole?”  Then, to change things up, one of Dean Martin’s Italian songs.  No, not “That’s Amore.”  A full song in Italian.  It seems the band is big in Italy, because they did like four more Italian songs.  Some Neil Simon, some Supremes, some Kinks.  Actually, a lot of The Kinks.  Krankl is a huge Kinks’ fan.  They tossed in a couple of Beatle songs late in the game (causing an audience member to blurt out loudly, “About time!”—like, what was she expecting??) Basically I felt like I was watching Austria’s greatest wedding band in action.

They had some of the crowd up on their feet.  A couple of ladies in front of me seemed to be watching the whole thing ironically, live-posting the whole show.

The band featured their two female back-up singers.  Their female percussionist sang lead a couple of times.  When the soccer player got a solo, the lead singer would dash around the band, joining in wherever he could.  And all the between song patter was heavily accented.

It was a bizarre show.  Like a Will Ferrell sketch, only sketchier.  They finished with the Beatles “All You Need is Love” and exited.  But the lights didn’t could up.  They then did a 3 song encore.  They took a band selfie with us in the background.

We left the show with goofy grins, all trying to sort out what we had just scene.  I mean, they weren’t awful, but they weren’t great.  And the tickets were free, which makes me wonder how many comps they had to hand out to semi-fill the house.  Not that I’d tell anyone to watch out for their show, but they apparently headed back home to Europe after this show.  I hope they left the plane running.

Staten Island is usually the butt of jokes.  I get it, Staten Island is the red rash on the bottom of Blue York City.  We were the final destination of the great white flight from Brooklyn.  We’re deeply blue-collar and red-hat.  And now, as the pandemic works its way into its third year, we’ve been the hot spot for embarrassing videos of mall-marchers and bar-busting protests about COVID quarantine.  I don’t know how this happened. Staten Island started on the right side of the pandemic.  The virus hit New York City hard.  Everyone knew someone who died.  The hospitals were overwhelmed.  As were the morgues; They were stacking bodies in refrigerator trucks like so-many fish sticks.  We saw the deaths. We saw the first responders being worked to their limits and beyond.  The sick kept coming. Only fools would deny that we had to take the pandemic seriously.

I don’t know if anyone remembers, but one of the first videos that went viral during the earliest days of the pandemic was from Staten Island.  And it was a video of angry people in a supermarket chasing a woman out of the store FOR NOT WEARING A MASK!  Yes, that was us.

Then came the fools.  And the politics. 

​Here we were, on the front lines of the plague but we were also waist-deep in Trumpism.  Once the twice-impeached, classified-document stealing, liar, fraud and FORMER NEW YORKER declared that the virus was a hoax and we could cure it with horse paste so that it would be gone by Easter because he cancelled some flights out of China, the mood in Staten Island started to shift.  Bars decided they didn’t want to be closed.  Restaurants-goers didn’t want to wear masks.  They didn’t trust the vaccines that Trump claimed credit for discovering.  It was a very confusing time.  But Staten Islanders did want they do best; blame the mayor and the governor. 

The new viral videos were now “protestors” invading food courts and declaring the pandemic over.  Their new news outlets were more than willing to support that worldview.  Masks were the new oppression and mandates their new obsession.  People literally told me they didn’t get the vaccine because (and I quote) they didn’t like “being told what to do.”  These were firefighters who are told to run into burning buildings, but the vaccine was where they drew the line.

So, in a land where traffic lights are ignored, stop signs are merely “suggestions” and turn signals are “none of your business” we can now add health mandates to the list of things that are oppressing us here in the county of COVID.