Upset with Rick Caruso

I suppose it might seem churlish to be upset at the handling of a free event, but I’m not very happy with Rick Caruso and the Americana. We took the kids there last night to see Ashley Tisdale sing songs off her new album. If you don’t know who Ashley Tisdale is, she’s one of the stars of “High School Musical” which means that if you have kids of a certain age, you’ve heard this girl sing — a lot. Given who she is, one would expect then that there would be a lot of young girls at this free concert and take precautions and do a decent job of crowd control.

In fact, the exact opposite happened. First, the stage was set WAY too low. This was an audience comprised mainly of young girls four-feet tall or less. You can guess what happened, right? Yup, every dad in the audience had their daughter on their shoulders so they could see the stage. This combined with the brownian shuffling of the crowd caused more than a few falls and young girls to get stepped on. That shuffling could actually have been elininated had the Americana management thought to put up a big screen so people could actually see the show. Nope. Therefore there was a ton of pushing and shoving as people moved around trying to actually see the stage and get up to the front.

In short, it was a fiasco. Yeah, I know. It was free. Still, if you’re going to do something like this, you need to make it a pleasant experience. The whole point of promo events like this is to bring customers in to spend money. After last night’s nightmare, I don’t know that I ever want to back to the Americana, a place that up until now my family and I quite enjoyed.