There are five seats in the row that appear to empty. Tony says that they’re all taken except for one. “They’re out smoking” he says. I sit in the empty chair. My hair is wet. I think that I have a hernia.

The singer in the opening band forgets the words to a song he wrote a decade ago. There are people down the middle aisle dancing and they know the words. They shout out the words, and the singer acts as if he knew them already. The nature of memory is forgetting entirely, then being reminded and remembering that you knew all along. A camera is rolling in the middle aisle behind the last row of chairs.

The singer in the opening band says that their set is filler and that they are taking up time. Mr. Porkchop is a singer and guitar player in the opening band. He dedicates a song to his mother and then he sings about his girlfriend. At one point Mr. Porkchop jumps from the bass guitarist’s amplifier and accidentally unplugs the bass for a bar. He plugs the bass guitarist’s bass back in and smiles apologetically. When the opening band says that they are taking up time, they mean to say that the headliner is on his way, but his flight is delayed. Their tone also implies that they revere the headliner.

The headliner is introduced by a man in a Hawaiian shirt and cat eye glasses. The headliner looks the same as he does in the promotional photos that he took at McDonald’s and that now hang on the venue’s bathroom wall above the left urinal. He has a black mustache that starts to loop around his mouth but it stops just below the corners. His hair is white and his hands are shaky. When his hands shake he hides them in the pockets of his sweatshirt.

He plays three songs on a guitar. He plays three songs on the piano. He reads from a three ring binder that he sets on a music stand and he flips the pages back and forth as if they are in no order at all. He asks if this is Minneapolis. When his manager comes out, he confers with the headliner: is it time for a break? Yes it is time for a break. I am sitting on the floor and taking pictures with my phone.

The opening band comes back out, and they play the rest of the show with the headliner. They do not turn to the audience when they play; they all huddle around and watch the headliner as he fiddles with the bottle caps on three different bottles of water and turns the pages in his three ring binder. They ask if they should play the next song after each one is finished. He says yes even when the next song is a song that the headliner already played in his solo set.

“That was the piano version,” the headliner says. “This is the rock and roll version.” A violinist comes out and plays for just one song. She cannot hear herself in the monitor and she is afraid that she is out of tune. She is not.

At the end of the show, most of the crowd stands up and the house lights stay down. The opening band and the headliner come back onstage for a one song encore. The lyrics say that while we are looking for love, true love is also looking for us and the only way it can find us is if we are open to that path.