Here's my ticket debacle story. I feel like I've told this before. Maybe it was on the old site. Anyway, I posted this in a fb phish group on the 20th anniversary of this show.
12/4/99 - FirstStar Center - Cincinnati, OH
We had a crew of 8, and had stayed at some shitty hotel in Northern Kentucky the night before, after the 12/3 show. We woke up on 12/4 and headed back to Cincy, prepared for a full day of lot partying and of course, another night of Phish. Before the lots opened, we went to BarrelHouse brewery for lunch and beer. Apparently their stout spoke to us, so we decided to buy a 1/4 barrel and drink/sell it on the lot to recoup weekend expenses. 143-245, of course. We also had cans of Ice Cold Natty Light for $1. It was a warm day for early December, and we had a great day on the lot, especially compared to the year prior (11/14/98) where we'd been hassled (and ticketed) by undercover cops for possession and underage consumption. Fuckers.
Anyway, probably about an hour before showtime, we decided to head in. We had eight mail order tickets. As we were packing up, we realized we only had four tickets. Fuck.
Four. Were. Gone.
No idea where they went. All of them had been together in a FedEx envelope. Our only thought is maybe we somehow left half of them at the hotel. Seems really unlikely. Doesn't matter, we don't have time to go look. We head to the venue with no plan, eight people, and four tickets. On our walk from the lot, we crossed beneath an underpass, and heard that very familiar hiss. We immediately decided that nitrous was the best idea under the circumstances, and I'm not sure I can argue it wasn't after what happened next. We inhaled and headed for the gates.
The weird thing about FirstStar is that there's a first layer of gates a couple hundred yards from the actual venue where they check for tickets. It's a crowd control barrier that resulted from the infamous 1979 Who concert disaster. So if you didn't have a ticket, you weren't moving on to the entrance. Now, with only four tickets and eight people, here's where it got tricky. How do we all get through? You can't pass them back right in front of security immediately after you show the ticket. We concocted a plan. Four of us would go through the preliminary gate, and once through, we'd stick the tickets in a cigarette packs and toss them back across the security perimeter to our ticketless friends on the other side. Since there was a big crowd on the pre-entry side, we knew security wouldn't notice some flying detritus. They didn't. After a couple minutes and some tense ticket-tossing, we all made it through. But we also lost another ticket in that operation, and still had to get through the main entrance. Luckily, we had some time & space to scout.
The venue seemed like it was all doors, but only a few were in use. We could see yellow-shirted security guards manning the non-entrance doors on the inside. Three of us used the remaining tickets to get into the venue, while the rest of our crew tracked our movements around the perimeter of the concourse from outside. Pretty soon, we spotted a big section of doors being covered by only one security guard. While our buddy "shady" Dave distracted the guard, we slyly propped the door open & let the rest of our crew in. We quickly intermingled ourselves with the rest of the crowd and headed to our seats undetected and totally jubilant. It was a serious rush to pull off such a hastily-concocted scheme, but we were in and stoked for the show that was about to take place.
Funny thing is I don't have any specific recollections of the show itself. But the turmoil of getting into that show is something I'll never forget.
TL;DR we snuck 8 people into a Phish show with 3 tickets.