You know those Publix commercials with the oh-so-happy family setting the oh-so-perfect Thanksgiving table? Do you remember the music? No? Well, that’s Pat Metheny, jazz guitarist and turkey hawker extraordinaire. It may be a little smooth for college tastes, but the crowd at Mizner Park ate up Metheny’s music.

Maintaining a professional attitude at a concert does not come naturally. To your right, the neatly bearded ponytail is shaking with anticipation. To your left, the shyster Usher is eyeing your extra tickets with disturbing aggression. The crowd is as restless as they are homogenous. The pastel walls around you look as if they are closing in. It’s Friday night in Boca, and you really need a beer.

Pat Metheny lurches onto the Mizner Park Amphitheater stage, under a sweaty, concrete sky. All of you reading this who have heard of Pat Metheny, raise your hands. Now, all of you over the age of thirty put your hands down. No? Never heard of him. The likelihood of college youth discovering this outstanding guitar player is about equivalent to the likelihood that Pat will discover what a distortion pedal is.

Who is Pat Metheny? Imagine Neil Young and Yanni mixed together with a terrible case of Social Anxiety Disorder and a Van Halen-tight grasp of the jazz guitar vocabulary.

As a musician, Pat Metheny is a trailblazer. His imitators cannot be counted. That smooth jazz sound you can’t stand, Pat revitalized the genre by inserting his lightning fingers and technical wit. The spectacle of them on stage required absolutely no visual participation on the audience’s part. He and his band were all obviously very talented, but there was a sickness in each one of them. They were all completely possessed by their instruments, incapable of any real audience interaction without them. They weren’t just concentrating, they were immobile. The roadies took more total steps on stage then did all of the seven musicians put together.

Pat’s state is by far the worst. He has a grandmotherly hunch over his guitars, staring bleakly at the beast as if it has tormented him to the point of Stockholm syndrome. His grandmotherly voice, which matches his grandmotherly hunch, would likely do little to arouse a crowd of twenty-somethings.

Still, the people, mostly middle-aged men, cheered, their ponytails waving, well-cropped beards gleaming in the artificial lights. Their screams of glee were far too loud raucous to make sense in that scene. It was as if many of the people attending the concert were proud to be there, and wanted to laugh loudly at the really smart joke or aaaah obviously at the really clever word use. I saw more than a few berets, and I saw grown men buying concert t-shirts for twenty bucks, something I stopped doing in high school. The venue, too, is obviously not designed for students or young people. There was a real estate booth near the entrance, which was great because I am in the market for an apartment. Unfortunately, they didn’t have anything in my range.

A bottle of water cost significantly more than a gallon of gas, which costs more nationally right now than it ever has before.

The one time when the band rocked out at a medium volume for about a minute before they lost steam, one person cheered. The crowd was otherwise silent, and there were more than a few faces that looked grumpy and uncomfortable with the loud noise. By the end, though, Pat seemed to have made up with them, and as the final note fell, the ones that could, stood.