better late than never?
One of the little inconveniences we encountered during ACL-fest was our general inability to contact and reach one another within the relatively narrow confines of Zilker park. Due to the enormous crowds packed with thousands of people there, it would have been impossible to find one another without some sort of plan.
Many persons attempted to solve this problem by carrying unusual banners with them. Just as fighting for the honor of the flag must once have provided cohesion and direction during the confusion and mayhem of early warfare, so too did these proud standards provide rallying points for lost travelers in search of old friends. Of course, the more unusual and unique your flag, the better. It would help to avoid discussions such as, "but which jolly roger are you standing at the base of? I've already been to three, and the concert is almost over..."
The next ideal strategy would be to meet one another at distinctive landmarks at prearranged points and times between acts, but to push through the press of the crowd sometimes made it difficult to meet such deadlines. Those same crowds could pack people so densely that you could be standing less than ten feet from your party, but never see them through the forest of strange faces. Even being able to see them might not help, for a particularly popular act might present an audience so dense in attendance and so rapt in appreciation that it would be impossible to greet your friends without being extraordinarily rude, and just shouldering through the crowd.
In the face of such difficulties, we could try to turn to modern technology for a solution. Cell phones have done wonders for the ability of two lost and misplaced groups to find one another in the modern world, but they are only useful so long as one can hear what the person on the other end of the receiver is saying. Crowds and rock and roll make this exceptionally difficult, and so we were forced to fall back on text-messenging between phones. Of course, text-messenging only works so long as there is a network line available to carry your signal. When ten-thousand people suddenly want to see each other all at once, some things tend to get lost in the æther for a little while. As an amusing example, I am only now receiving messages that were sent to me on Sunday afternoon...
Better late than never, I suppose...