Dear Sting, great concert. It would’ve been nice though to have known that it was starting an hour early. I realize that on the ticket it does indeed say that the time printed on it may change, kind of like what happens to planes and trains, but one really does assume when reading the disclaimer that if the time changes it’ll be later, not earlier. Oh, sure, you put out a press release on La Stampa di Torino, but, and okay you may not know this, you're actually a pretty famous singer, so sometimes if your concert is in one city people from neighboring cities will come too, and one measly press release (which incidentally I haven’t found yet) is really not enough. Also, and this is just for your information, Italy has a pretty burgeoning journalistic community, so, you know, people actually have a choice between more than one newspaper, we truly no longer live in fascist times. So for the future, please assume that not everyone reads the newspaper of the city where the concert is being held and you should probably put out press releases in ALL THE MAJOR PAPERS as well as on the internet. I mean, I know you’re all zen and in touch with your spirituality and such, and if you need information you have an assistant that finds it for you, but the rest of us, we use the internet. In fact, yesterday afternoon I did a search on “Sting, concert, Torino” cause I couldn’t remember the name of the venue and the address, it’s a pretty specific search, I’m thinking that your “press release” on the concert starting an hour earlier should really have come up.
And honestly, I wouldn’t have minded getting there an hour early, I mean, since I went to the trouble of arranging childcare for the kids, getting them set, making sure they and the husband had dinner ready, and all. Also, there was a lot of fog last night, and I live an hour away, so actually it would’ve been nice to leave when there was still daylight out, had I known that it started at 8 rather than 9.
Oh, and one last thing, since you did start the concert early, I totally would have appreciated it if you had altered your song roll and played the really great, more famous songs in the second half of the concert rather than right at the beginning, just as a gesture of goodwill to all your fans who don’t think to show up an hour early for a concert, just in case. And I realize that it’s not just you out there deciding stuff on the spur of the moment, you’ve got the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, but I bet that if you asked them to shift the songs around for one concert they’d mange to, you know, rearrange their sheet music, they are professionals after all. Anyway, good show, I wish I had seen the whole thing, those tickets weren’t cheap after all, but hey, you must have had your reasons. As the husband says, it is understandable that at your age you may want to hit the sack a little earlier every once in a while, I definitely appreciated that unexpected extra hour of sleep, I just wish it hadn’t cost quite so much in anger and negative vibes (sorry about that, but you get it, right?). Anyway, I’ll post on my thoughts about the concert next, I just felt you needed to know that though you are famous and all, your actions have consequences too, in this case you just really pissed me off.
