Pair Help Keep the Show on the Road : Concerts: Backstage caterers at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre keep rockers and roadies in M & Ms, drinks and spaghetti.

IRVINE —  “Thank you. Thank you.” The two young ladies stand on stage, bowing to the left and to the right. They wave majestically to the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre.

But the seats are empty, and they start laughing. It’s 5:30 a.m. and the two have work to do. Irvine Meadows backstage caterers Sara Medico, 17, and Amy Baggs, 20, will help pull together a concert that thousands of other teens will only watch. They will set up the dressing rooms for that night’s band, fix breakfast and lunch for the group’s roadies and remain on call for food and drink throughout the day.

Jon Bon Jovi, Rush, Michael Jackson and George Michael come and go, but Medico, a San Clemente High School senior, and Baggs, a 1989 graduate of Capistrano Valley, stay on as constant participants behind the scenes at Irvine Meadows.

While their friends learn to sell clothes on commission or pump frozen yogurt, Medico and Baggs get the inside scoop on different artists’ tastes and personalities.

Members of Van Halen still like the brown M & M’s picked out of their bowls of candy, and the band Rush favors $70-a-bottle Dom Perignon champagne. Medico and Baggs set up the entertainers’ dressing rooms with the help of a contract rider that details every item that should be in ready supply. Some lists are three pages long with hundreds of requests. Concert promoters Avalon Attractions pays, and seemingly no price is too high. The total bill for Rush’s champagne topped $2,000, Medico reported.

Stryper, a Christian heavy metal band, is one of the few groups that did not ask for alcohol. “We didn’t even sell it out (in the concession area),” Medico said.

Bands most often ask for items that the women can buy at a grocery store or make in the kitchen: fresh fruit and flowers, nuts and deli and vegetable trays.

Sometimes, a band will request food and then forget how to eat it. “Skid Row was the worst,” Baggs recalled. “We gave them spaghetti and they totally threw it all over the place. It was hanging on the wall and all over the furniture. They were rude and obnoxious.”

Medico added: “Then they came back at the end of the season and my father (the head backstage caterer) said, ‘Well, if you people act like babies, I’m not going to give you spaghetti.’ ”

Medico, who started working with her father during her freshman year at San Clemente, is not awed by the big names that entertain at Irvine Meadows. “I barely recognize any of them,” she confessed. “Then they look at me weird like I’m supposed to recognize them.

“I don’t feel uncomfortable talking to the people I don’t know. But if I’ve heard of them, it’s like, ‘I can’t believe I’m talking to him.’ Sometimes it does faze us a little bit.”

Baggs admitted that occasionally a star will impress her enough to make her feel uncomfortable. She felt awkward talking to Axl Rose, she said, because she thought he would be weird. “He is,” she confirmed. “He kind of kept to himself.

For Medico, even the big concerts start to blend together after a while. “I don’t get excited about it. After concert after concert, it’s like, ‘Wait . . . did I work that concert?’ ” Some of the shows, though, are hard to forget.

Last year’s annual Oingo Boingo Halloween concert was one of the best shows Medico has worked, she said. Baggs disagreed, however, complaining that she had to blow up all of the skeleton balloons the band used in its act.

Neither thought much of a Slayer concert, though, where rowdy fans ripped seats, vandalized cars in the parking lot and set fires.

Grateful Dead concerts are always fun, they said, because the real entertainment is watching the Deadheads wander in. “They’ll just stand there and spin,” Baggs said. One year, the group’s dedicated fans swarmed past the guards and over the hill behind the stage.

Sometimes it is the performer’s backstage personality that makes an evening memorable.

George Michael, despite his lusty songs, declared his dressing room a no-female zone. Baggs explained: “Because when they see him, he said, they go all gaga over him.” Medico worked that night’s concert but was not allowed in the tent that housed the dressing rooms south of the stage.

Irvine Meadows also gave Michael Jackson special treatment, converting a large storage shed into a special dressing room. Medico described the interior: “He had a throne. It was this big, red-velvet chair thing and a mirror, like he could just sit there and look at himself or something.”

Jackson, Poison, Ratt and a few other entertainers have played host to huge post-concert parties in tents in the back parking lot or in the beer garden at Irvine Meadows. Jackson’s tent sported a separate room for his family. “I had to sit in his family’s room and pick up everything they dropped,” Medico said. “It was such a mess.”

The girls find other performers, such as Ziggy Marley, more endearing. “I met Ziggy and I met his brother,” said Baggs, smiling. “They had tons of kids running around backstage.” The band made itself at home, whipping out a soccer ball before the show and playing a cramped match on the half-court basketball court backstage.

The lead singer for Fine Young Cannibals, Roland Gift, practiced a different sort of exercise before his concert: tai chi, a Chinese relaxation technique. Baggs does not remember him fondly, recalling how upset he became when something was missing from his dressing room. She said: “The guy just went off on me: ‘I want this! I’m the head guy!’ ”

Simon Le Bon, lead singer for Duran Duran, left an impression on the girls when he fell in love with their commercial kitchen at the amphitheatre. “The day before (the concert), when they were shooting their video,” Medico said, “he kept running backstage and raving about our kitchen. It was so funny.”

Le Bon is not the only performer to behave unusually before playing in front of 15,000 fans. Baggs recalled that Sebastian Bach, Skid Row’s lead singer, “kept hopping around all over in these real short shorts. After the sound check, he sang. He sang the whole time during dinner, all different songs.”

Even considering Bach’s messy eating habits and short shorts, Baggs said she thinks that the best people to work for are the heavy metal performers. “Everybody thinks they’re hard core and all mean, but they are nicest people.”

Another friendly band, though definitely not in the heavy metal camp, was Tears for Fears. “The lead singer was talking to everybody,” Baggs said. “He didn’t leave until we left. They were really nice.”

Some of the more established entertainers, like Jackson and Michael, often are not as friendly. “Some of the big people just stay in their dressing rooms,” Mediso said.

“You get to become friends with some of the performers,” Baggs said. “I got to be friends with the drummer (Bobby Blotzer) from Ratt. I saw him at Thanksgiving in a grocery store in Redondo Beach. He was standing behind me in line. He goes, ‘You look familiar.’ I said, ‘You do, too.’ He said, ‘You work at Irvine Meadows, don’t you?’ It was cool he remembered me.”

Baggs said she also became friends with drummer Mike Bordin from Faith No More and shared a protein drink with Rudy Sarzo, Whitesnake’s bass player, after she brought him a blender.

More often, the girls become pals with the roadies, who will sometimes try to push the limits of their new-found friendship.

“They say, ‘I’m never going to see you again. I’m never going to come back to Irvine Meadows. Why don’t we go someplace and be alone?’ ” Medico said. “Then you tell them how old you are, and they’re like, ‘See ya!’ ”

Neither the roadies nor the regular Irvine Meadows crew treats the two like teen-agers. “They assume that we’re adults and that we know what we’re doing,” Baggs said.

Baggs, who has worked at Irvine Meadows for three years, said the endless stream of stars is not as exciting as some would imagine. She said that friends would constantly come up to her and ask who she had met the past weekend. When they told her how cool those bands were, all she could do was agree halfheartedly. “You get tired of it,” she explained.

Though Medico and Baggs are used to the parade of celebrities, they still collect autographs and other concert memorabilia. Medico said, matter-of-factly, “I have tons of autographs.” Her collection boasts the scrawls of members of Judas Priest, Tina Turner, the Jacksons and Adam Ant, among others.

Leftover concert T-shirts often go to amphitheatre employees, and Baggs and Medico both have impressive piles of them at home. Baggs’ most prized T-shirt is from Metallica with “local crew” written on it. The girls also bring home backstage passes, empty champagne bottles from the dressing rooms, magazines, posters and tapes.

One of Baggs favorite souvenirs is a little blue guitar key chain that Jon Bon Jovi’s brother bought her when she took him to get his car fixed.

Sometimes Medico will bring home memorabilia for her friends. “I’ll bring them a guitar pick or something and they’ll go, ‘Oh my God! How cool!’ ” she said, laughing. “(The band will) have boxes of them just sitting around.” The picks usually feature the group’s name and signature.

Baggs said her friends often are envious of her job: “My friends tell me how lucky I am. ‘Nuh-uh!’ I say.” Because while Baggs and Medico may have what some teens would consider the perfect summer job, the work is not without its pitfalls.

Workdays can begin as early as 4:30 a.m. and end at the same time the next morning. Usually, though, they arrive at 6:30 a.m. and leave closer to 1 or 2 a.m. “I’ve been here one time for 22, 23 hours a day,” Medico said. “It’s especially hard if there’s three different bands back to back. It’s not so bad if it’s the same band for two nights.”

After setting up the dressing rooms, which usually have to be ready by 4:30 p.m., the girls have some free time--”unless,” as Medico said, “somebody finds something to complain about.” So, unless they make a drastic mistake, such as bringing someone the wrong wine, they have a few hours in the evening when they can watch the concert. “If my friends are here,” Medico said, “I’ll go out and sit with them.”

The girls work from two to 16 concerts a month and are paid $100 for each one. Medico pointed out that while the amount seems large at first, it works out to about $5 an hour.