Riff 100 - When concert tickets required survival skills and we learned how to socialize with Pickup Sticks [The Comedian Next Door]

This is our 100th riff session! To celebrate, we're including this sentence announcing our 100th riff session! The conversation starts with an unexpectedly serious debate over the difference between tin whistles, recorders, and the people who insist on using the correct musical terminology, revealing that musicians have an entire vocabulary devoted to preventing anyone from casually calling the wrong instrument a flute. That attention to detail quickly collides with stories about orchestras, concert etiquette, and the realization that some instruments carry far more cultural prestige than others, despite all of them ultimately requiring someone to blow into them. From there, the focus shifts behind the curtain of television and concert auditions, where the advertised search for raw talent turns out to involve a surprising amount of pre-screening, strategic casting, and carefully managed storytelling.  Then into memories of buying concert tickets before everything moved online. Waiting in line becomes its own form of live theater, producing strange conversations, questionable life decisions, and the shared optimism that standing outside for hours is perfectly reasonable if it eventually leads to decent seats. The same perspective extends to modern stage productions, where even legendary bands rely on lighting, effects, and carefully engineered spectacle that is seems to treat music as kind of an afterthought.  The discussion eventually drifts back to childhood, when entertainment required little more than a box containing pickup sticks, a Spirograph, or some other object that encouraged creativity instead of software updates. Those toys become reminders that entire afternoons could disappear without batteries, Wi-Fi, or downloadable content, even if the rules occasionally ended with someone insisting everyone else was playing incorrectly.