I've been to see Barry Manilow, Live, in Concert, and I have the glow-stick to prove it!

One of the perks of working for a large organization is that once in a while, you get something for free. My husband occasionally gets emails from his department administrator offering tickets for various sporting events to the first person who replies to the message. I wouldn't say that it completely offsets the suffering and agony joys and frustrations challenges of his job, but hey, free tickets to a Tigers or Red Wings game are better than a swift kick in the head!

However, when a message flies over the cyber-transom offering tickets to a Significant Music-Historical Event, it's really something to get excited about — especially for the employee who's married to your friendly neighborhood Music Nerd!

Imagine my delight, then, when I learned on Friday that my hero had indeed been the early bird who got the worm, namely: free tickets to Barry Manilow: Music and Passion on Saturday night!

Now, I was expecting the event to be purely a research expedition for me; sure, I used to like some of Barry Manilow's songs back when I was a little kid, but he was kind of uncool then, and he's even more uncool now. Right?

Wrong! For Miss Music Nerd, not only is nerd the new cool, but cool is in the eye of the beholder! And anyway, the performance, which was a touring version of his show that's been playing at the Las Vegas Hilton for nearly three years now, surprised me in more ways than one.

Could it be magic? Read on to find out!

During the day on Saturday, I tried to imagine what the evening might have in store for us, scanning my memory banks for snippets of Manilow songs from way back when. (It's scary; I'm just starting to get to the point where, although I can remember what I wore to every major concert, graduation, or other significant event in my life, I can't remember what I had for lunch yesterday.) I realized that in many ways, Manilow is a Music Über-Nerd. Even if you disregard the fact that he first made it big in the 70's, and was therefore subject to the clothing and hairstyle tragedies emblematic of the era, he had some nerd credentials all his own:

• He was a big fan of Big Band, before it was cool (again)


• He used Chopin's Prelude in C minor as the intro/outro and harmonic inspiration for his song, "Could it be Magic"


• He wrote commercial jingles (including "You Deserve a Break Today" for McDonald's), and performed a medley of them in concert (I remember him describing trying to write a jingle for Hoover vacuum cleaners, but all he could come up with was "Hoover really sucks!")


• He's not afraid to use the medley and the dramatic ascending key change as weapons of mass destruction