I am a 5-foot-8 man who is in the habit of singing the same song, the same bar of the same song, over and over in a never-ending—”Make-it-stop!”—loop so, yeah, I know what it’s like to be rejected.

I have been rejected by people, by pets, educational institutions, credit card companies, employers and employees, but it wasn’t until last weekend, that I felt what it was like to be rejected by the 39th largest city in America.

Here’s how it, and I, went down.

On Thursday, April 25, at 8:45 a.m., I received an email from Molly Sinnen. It went as follows:

Hello Steve,

I bought tickets to Storm Large almost a year ago for tonight’s show and cannot attend. I was hoping to read a review. Her music style has changed, but she remains an exceptional performer. She is phenomenal and hilarious. It’s something you have to experience to fully understand her talent. I believe this is the first time she has ever played in my home town of LB, so it would be nice to see our local paper do a write-up.

I’m not in the habit of taking listener requests, but there was something sweetly desperate in Molly’s email, plus a quick check of Ms. Large—that really is her name, Susan Storm Large—on YouTube revealed hints of what Molly was talking about. So, I called the folks at Cal State Long Beach’s Carpenter Center where Large was playing that evening, got a couple of tickets for that evening’s sold-out performance and tried to get in contact with the person I planned on taking. They said it sounded great, but they were busy.

It was at that moment that myself and Long Beach Post social media czar Natalie Grageda thought of a wonderful idea. Why not advertise the fact that we had this extra ticket to this sold-out gig and offer it to the public? We even came up with a contest to decide who would get to go from the hundreds, nay thousands, who were bound to apply for the honor of not only attending a sold-out show, but attending it with me.

We posted the contest and its rules and waited for the reaction, which was immediate.

Nothing. Nothing immediately happened, followed by nothing immediately happening after that, soon to be followed by nothing happening the next hour or two or three, until nothing happened until I was standing at the Carpenter Center Will Call desk, giving my name, being handed two tickets, handing one back, and trying to avoid the will call person’s sad, sad stare.

It was Tony all over again.

The Large show was part of Carpenter’s Cabaret series for which they construct a nightclub-like feel with folks sitting around the performer, squeezed under small little tables. Except me. I was all alone at my table, stretched out in loneliness, visited time to time by empathetic Carpenter staff who wanted to know, “How are you doing?”

OK, this next part is just for Molly, so, if you’re not interested in hearing about the show, you know, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

Molly, you were right. She is a fantastic singer, with unbelievable range, and I’m not just talking vocally. Stylistically, she sang everything from Cole Porter to the Pixies, Johnny Cash to Cheap Trick. And then there is her personality, which is also large and wide-ranging so, at times, she affects the persona of a classic lounge performer only to morph seamlessly into the kind of modern confessional art that touched on issues ranging from marriage equality to mental health.

It was rather amazing, and I enjoyed it. By myself.

I found myself by myself at Cal State Long Beach the following night, this time on the upper campus in the Studio Theater. I was there to see “In the Penal Colony” a collaborative production between CSULB’s Cal Rep and the Long Beach Opera.

I was OK being by myself this time because I could not be certain that whoever I would invite to the production would be amused. Long Beach Opera does not exist to amuse. To challenge, confound, confuse, anger and exhaust, yes. The company has always strived for higher things and continues to do so today, witness the fact that its present season is themed under the umbrella of “Social Justice.”

The opera is by Phillip Glass and based on a short story by Franz Kafka—two other well-known amusement phobes—but what makes the opera one of the best things to happen artistically in Long Beach in the last few years is the decision by director Jeff Janisheski to include interviews he did with former prisoners, now students, about their experiences being incarcerated.

Janisheski layers the answers of those people, recited with Greek Chorus-like empathy by Cal Rep actors, over long stretches of musical interludes. In doing so, he lifts the material from existential, musical horror porn to something deeply felt and, frankly, rather accusatory. Of us. The incarcerated’s stories do not reveal a broken American penal system—we already knew that—it forces us to confront it through lenses both concrete and other-worldly; a heady mix.

Well, actually no. If there is a criticism of Long Beach Opera, it is that, at times, their productions can get stuck in the head, be all about the mind and pay less attention to feeling; i.e. the heart. “Penal Colony” bashes away at both, so much so that the audience was left virtually limp by the final note. One female patron, in a question and answer period after the performance, said she had been to every LBO production over the last few years, but that this was the first time she had cried.

Now, if you read this and get all excited and go on the Long Beach Opera website and look for tickets for “Penal Colony” you’re bound to see the entire run is sold out. BUT, Cal Rep has just made available some special side view tickets on its website. I advise you to click here.

My weekend ended Saturday at the Long Beach Symphony. It was under rather more relaxed circumstances. For one, I actually got someone to attend with me. For another, the featured work in the evening’s program was Mozart’s “Jupiter.” It was lovely. Perhaps too lovely, given that I still had a good deal of “Penal Colony” coursing through my veins.

Naw, probably not, because, come to think of it, I had an immediate and intense connection with the evening’s first work, “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten” by Arvo Part, a gorgeous, meditative work that brought my companion to tears. We each agreed we had similarly strong reactions to “Sidereus” by Osvaldo Golijov. What the two works have in common is that each was created in the 20th century; Golijov is still alive.

I talked this over with my colleague Asia Morris who also attended the performance: why were we more moved by these newer works and not the acknowledged masterwork by Mozart. While I can’t remember anything Asia said, I do remember I surmised that the problem with Mozart is that he’s basically classical music’s Beatles; his music so well-known, so ingrained, so much a part of everyday life whether we know it or not—movie soundtracks, cartoons, commercials, elevator accompaniment—that one, at times can be made immune to feeling the music as much as recognizing it.

One thing I recognized immediately upon sitting down that evening was that my colleague Asia Morris had better seats than me. This wasn’t because she had paid more, we each had received press tickets from the symphony and they had given her the better seats. Two rows better seats which, if you know anything about music theory, means that she was able to enjoy the music 18% more. That’s science.

Why Asia received better seats, I do not know. I had requested seats earlier and, by virtue of my rank as Asia’s editor, I am a more important person than Asia. Again, science. Perhaps the symphony people figured Asia was more likely to get someone to come with her—she did—and therefore they wouldn’t have to worry about some pathetic scene of a man, sitting all alone, bumming everyone out.

Anyway, here’s a picture of Asia, sitting two rows in front of me, right before she flipped me off:

OK, she didn’t flip me off per se, but, look at those eyes, that smile. She’s flipping me off.