My love for Celine will go on and on

The power of love is a strange thing. It can drive you to do unreasonable things. It can also drive you to buy really expensive concert tickets.

When Celine Dion announced she would be performing in New Zealand for the first time in 20 years, there was no way I was missing out on this event.

To understand my desperation to go to this concert, you need to understand my passion for Celine.

I don’t post that often on my Facebook page, but in 2018 alone, at least 70 per cent of my posts have been Celine-related in the lead-up and reveal of her concert dates.

My love for music, and for singing, begins and ends with Celine Dion.

She is the whole reason music is in my life and when she sings, it’s like we are one heart through the sheer emotion she conveys in her voice. When her concert was announced, there were two presales before tickets to the general public went on sale.

I knew those presales were my way in.

The day of the first presale started off bad.

I was at home sick, feeling a bit miserable for myself.

Things went from bad to worse and from noon to 1.15pm, I tried in vain to secure tickets.

Eventually, I had to concede defeat and I shut my laptop lid and shuffled over to the couch to drown my sorrow in the depths of Netflix. That’s the way it is. No Queen Celine for me. A couple of days later, it was time for the final presale and I wasn’t taking chances – I’d even blocked time out of my work calendar so I wouldn’t be disturbed while trying to get tickets.

I thought to myself, a new day has come and I’m going to get tickets to this thing, no matter what.

The clocked ticked over to 2pm and I was away.

I don’t think my heart has ever beat that fast before, not even on the day I went into a flute performance exam, genuinely expecting to fail it.

As I waited for the site to process my ticket request, an unwelcome but familiar sense of dread began to fill me.

‘‘Oh god, it’s all coming back to me now, that feeling of knowing I’m probably not going to get tickets.’’

But I couldn’t bear to say goodbye to the possibility of scraping some tickets together because goodbye’s the saddest word. And then, a miracle happened. The message on the next screen flashed brighter than the Las Vegas sign of the town where Celine has a performance residency at Caesar’s Palace. ‘‘You’re going to Celine Dion!’’ I’m alive, and this is really happening.

It was like Celine herself was saying to me ‘‘because you loved me, I will see you at the show’’.

It’s important to acknowledge here that I’m very grateful to be going to this show.

Given the amount of social media discussion and stories about tickets being available on reselling sites while genuine fans were still trying to buy tickets, I definitely count myself as one of the lucky ones who managed to book tickets without paying thousands of dollars for them.

Ticket scalping is a horrible practice.

I hope the surrounding scrutiny which has been generated from this particular event puts into a motion some changes to the industry which will help genuine fans get to see their favourite artists without paying for ticket that’s been more than doubled in price.

There was a time where I was little embarrassed to declare my love for Celine’s music, but those days have been and gone and I can assure that I will probably cry at least four times at her concert.

If you don’t believe how much I genuinely love the queen of the power ballad, then go back through this column and count how many Celine Dion song titles I included in the text.

My heart will go on for Celine, forever.