Think Kit Dec. 3 - That Strange Experience at the Hoosier Dome

photo via Artur Silva on nuvo.net

This past summer, I caught a show at the Hoosier Dome. Yeah, I thought it was a typo too when I first read about it.  One of my favorite bands of late, The Menzingers, came to town and I was really pumped up about it.  They came to play at he Hoosier Dome, a low key music venue in Fountain Square.  I use the term music venue loosely because the show could have been in an abandoned corner store and we wouldn't have known the difference.  With full disclosure about what we were getting into, my wife also attended making it a date night.  Yeah, I took my wife to a tiny, smelly all ages club for a date.  Don't get me wrong, she knew what she's getting into and was down for the experience.  This is the woman that I took to Rhino's in Bloomington, another all ages club, to see Against Me! while pregnant with our second child. She loved it and because of that show, loves Against Me! to this day. But I digress.  At both Rhino's then and the Hoosier Dome earlier this year, we were the oldest people in the joint (outside of the band).  It was a quick flashback to the 80s in that we were surrounded by surely teenagers and the Hoosier Dome was a real place.

Being a 35 year old in an all ages club like the Hoosier Dome is weird.

The Hoosier Dome, unlike its original namesake, is not known for its spacious accommodations. It's hilariously small.  If the place had a bathroom, we never saw it, and probably wouldn't want to use it anyway.  If you've not been to an all ages club nor have been around teenagers in awhile, you're going to either have a good time people watching or be really challenged with the experience.  We had a great time and as a result, I've got a soft spot for the Hoosier Dome.  I'd like to think most of those kids were decent, meant well, and were just trying to cope with adolescence.  Regardless, they're funny to experience in the wild.  The awkward cool things they say and do when they get together away from authority figures is something that I've been so far removed from, it's a little strange to experience.  When it got to be too much, I just looked through the crowd for the dude with the shaved head to obscure his male pattern baldness (i.e. one of the band members) and mentally projected a sympathetic connection.  This guy has probably seen dozens of 'Hoosier Domes' while on tour and that's...something.

This isn't meant to be a show review, but I do want to talk about The Menzingers.  They're a fantastic band and you should check them out.  The show itself was electric.  They seem like a group of guys in good spirits, despite some downer lyric material.  The crowd was animated, to the say the least.  All in all, it was a fantastic show.  They did not play one of my favorite songs, but I don't hold it against them.

Between songs, all the band talked about was going across the street to the bar and getting beers. Damn it!  They didn't have to keep reminding us that we're stone cold sober at a show, standing in what amounts to a cramped storage shed with a bunch of teenagers for a couple of hours.  Not to worry, we headed to La Revolucion for tacos and beers soon after the encore.  Away from the surreal all ages club experience we went and back to that tiki bar that had just appeared out of what seemed like thin air in the rear of La Revolucion.  That's another weird experience when you don't know it's there.  I went to the bathroom and before I walked in, I looked to my left and said, "hey there's a doorway to an entirely different bar - a tiki bar - that wasn't here the last time I was back this way."  For some unknown reason, it reminded me of Pee-Wee's Playhouse.  What a weird way to accentuate a strange evening at the Hoosier Dome.