Vox is a general interest news site for the 21st century. Its mission is simple: Explain the news. Politics, public policy, world affairs, pop culture, science, business, food, sports, and everything else that matters are part of our editorial ambit. Our goal is to move people from curiosity to understanding.
This story is part of a group of stories called
The Goods devotes a lot of time to thinking about what it means to spend money: what we choose to buy, what it says about who we are as individuals and as a society, and why it all matters. That’s the focus of our essay series The Best Money I Ever Spent, where people write about the purchases they’ve made, big and small, that affect their lives.
To close out 2020, our staff wanted to take a swing at the notion of spending and value from a different angle, examining the items, experiences, and services that we may well have bought in another timeline, but certainly not in this one. Whether it was a gym pass or a year of preschool, a cheeseburger or a plane ticket to a friend’s funeral, the things we couldn’t buy this year marked how radically different our lives became compared to what we might have imagined and raised the question of how they’ll be on the other side.
Andrew Marino for Vox
The only concert I actually got to see in person this year was sold out. But a sold-out show in a parking lot filled with cars is a much different scene than a typical sold-out indoor or outdoor venue show. Especially when that show is a drive-in concert held in the middle of a pandemic.
In October, I watched the cult-favorite heavy metal group GWAR perform live in the parking lot of the Diamond, a baseball stadium in Richmond, Virginia. GWAR is beloved by their fans for their over-the-top concerts, at which they wear grotesque costumes and put on skits about having sex with babies in between performing singalong anthems like “Fuck This Place.” I’d never seen the band before; scatological humor and thrashcore aren’t really my thing! I don’t think I ever expected to find myself here seeing a band known for spraying fake human (or alien) blood on the audience, on a pitched-up stage atop concrete, amid honking car horns and a backdrop of bleachers an