If someone told me 20 years ago I was going to do this, I would have said they were nuts.

Today I bought concert tickets for two different concerts at the RBC Center. As I grow older, I become more eclectic in my music taste. In my CD collection and on my iPod, I have praise and worship music, Johnny Cash, classical, show tunes, heavy metal, 80's pop, Sinatra, Manilow, new stuff like Daughtry, Maroon 5, and others. Today I forked out for tickets to see Trans-Siberian Orchestra on Dec. 20th and Barry Manilow on Jan. 20th.

I have a friend I am going to take to see Trans-Siberian Orchestra and probably the same friend will accompany me to see Manilow, even though my friend is not that familiar with either.

Quite honestly, I have a hard time relating to not being familiar with Barry Manilow, considering that the was probably the most prolific song writer of the 70's and 80's. He was the one who made us "stuck on Band-Aids 'cause Band-Aids stuck on me" and "would like to teach the world to sing". Within the last year, I bought The Essential Manilow CD collection and have been listening to a lot of stuff I heard 30 years ago.

Manilow bothered me recently in his dissing of Elisabeth Hasselbeck, but not enough to pass up the opportunity to see a music legend in concert. Tickets ranged from $10 to $200. I could not get my choice seats, but still got decent ones for $100 each. Trans-Siberian Orchestra tickets, by comparison, were half that. Manilow, being who he is, can command that much for tickets, though.