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11:00 AM: The day is September 21st and I had a ticket to Jane Remover opening for JPEGMAFIA, with doors slated for 9PM at Radius. A month earlier Jane Remover announces she's opening a show for JPEGMAFIA, which happened to be the same month I lost my wallet and ID. Although I have a passing interest in JPEG, it was Jane opening which made me buy tickets, one for me and one for my friend for a total of $120. At 8:00 I was to be joined by two of my friends.
8:30 PM: We leave mine for the line, arriving at 8:45. At first glance the line appeared to spill out of the Radius parking lot, creating a 200 foot line down Cermak. At the time I didn't have a good view of the lot, so I assumed majority of people were waiting in there in some sort of queuing system, much like you would see at every single place and event with a line longer then twenty people.
9:00 and the line starts inching forward, weirdly slow, only a few feet every 5 minutes. Soon my friend joined us in line and around 9:20 we reach the parking lot, letting me awe at the albatross that Radius called a "line".
To fully point out the absurdity, Radius first opened it's doors in February of 2020. While it isn't a veteran music venue, this show is not it's first rodeo. Ever since the opening of the Disney parks in 1955, handfuls of civil engineers have been hired for the sole purpose to decrease the wait times in lines. The science of line organization has been figured out for decades at this point. So imagine my shock when what I thought to be long wrapping line like those seen in six flags, was actually a huddled mess of over 200 people shoving each other for the door.
10:10 PM: After an entire hour, Jane starts performing to a fraction of the fans who she'd been told have bought tickets, whilst I was still over 100 people away from going in with at least 150 more behind me. While the mosh-pit slowly pulsated forward, handfuls of people are doing the walk of shame after being denied for a lack of ID. This got me a little worried about my own lack of an ID, which I quelled by pulling up a photo of my ID and reassuring myself that a 20 year old man won't be denied at the doors of an 18+ show.
11:10 PM: Two hours after the doors opened, an hour after Jane started, ten minutes after Jane finished her set, we finally reach security. I explain to them my ID being lost, not to mention this is an 18+ show, and show them the photo of it on my phone.
By the time my friends were waving at me and I was doing the walk of shame I'd seen so many other before me, I was agnostic towards the situation. Jane Remover, the only reason I came, had already preformed and finished before I got close to the door. I wasted two hours of time for nothing because some security guy thought it'd be cute to cosplay as TSA. I wasted 60 dollars on a show which I only cared enough about seeing half of. Despite all of that I wasn't upset, merely dumbfounded on the amount of mismanagement shown by this garbage venue. In a world post COVID, post AstroWorld where 10 people were killed by crowd-crush from similar mismanagement, why did this happen? Were they too cheap or too lazy to rent steel barriers and make anything close to a line? I had time to think on this while I walked home, only periodically interrupted by my jaw hitting the sidewalk, still astounded by atrocious experience Radius just put me through.
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