SCREEN AT THE STAGE DOOR : It’s Not Who You Are, But What Credentials You Have

D. R. (Buzz) Elliot, the burr-headed cowboy wearing Wrangler jeans and a tan Southwest Concert Security T-shirt, stood nose to nose with Minnie Mouse.

“You got a pass?” he demanded.

“She’s with me,” answered Minnie’s escort, a stocky young woman wearing a Farm Aid II T-shirt and a blue laminated plastic badge that identified her as a Farm Aid backstage staff member.

But that didn’t cut it with Buzz.

Thirty minutes earlier, he had denied photographer George Rose and me access to a water fountain. He scanned my media pass closely for some secret sign that would let me pass beyond the gate, but found none. Thirst, he said, was no credential.

At times, marathon events like Farm Aid II seem to drown in their own high-security system of passes. A complex numerical and color code of dots and squares and stars required the posting of a 3-by-3-foot explanatory chart at every checkpoint in the Farm Aid backstage area.

Buzz the Cowboy studied his chart, but it didn’t help when the crowds began approaching with more than 100 different kinds of dotted, squared, starred and numbered passes to get from one backstage area to another during Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July farm benefit concert.

Buzz finally had to rely on his own good sense.

“Sorry,” he said, blocking the way. “She doesn’t have a pass with a star on it. Can’t let her through.”

“But it’s Minnie Mouse! He’s going on in five minutes!” said the mouse’s exasperated escort.

“ He ?” said the cowboy, raising his eyebrows behind his opaque Texas Ranger style sunglasses. “Thought this was Minnie Mouse.”

And it was Minnie, of course, decked out in polka dots and radiating a permanent, patient Disney grin. Inside the six-foot mouse suit, Minnie’s escort explained, was a human male, baking in the Texas sun. If he could get by, he would soon dance up on stage with Willie Nelson. Then he could get out of his mouse uniform and into an icy cold beer.

“No pass. Can’t get through, m’am. Sorry,” said Buzz.

After the Minnie episode was settled, she/he went through the gates and on stage. But it was not the last security crisis.

“Any way I can get to that toilet?” asked an anxious TV news reporter a few moments later.

“You got a star on your pass?” asked Buzz.

He didn’t. The reporter starred at the Port-a-John with the awful overheated expression of a dyspeptic refugee. Having dined the previous evening at the Texas Chili Parlor in downtown Austin, I felt nothing but sympathy for his predicament.

“I’m Dr. Lehman and I’m trying to get through to the first-aid station,” said a man with a stethoscope around his neck and a black satchel at his side.

Buzz could not be fooled. Dr. Lehman had the wrong pass. He stayed behind the same fence as the TV reporter.

A couple with the proper passes came through, dragging their 7-year-old son behind.

“Hold up there,” Buzz said, straight-armming the youngster. “He got a pass?”

“He’s with us,” said the pop.

“Sorry,” Buzz pronounced with a sad grin.

“But he’s our son!” said the mom.

Charles Haid, who portrays Renko on “Hill Street Blues,” sauntered by, flashing his proper three-star, red-white-and-blue laminated pass.

“More generals than there is army,” he muttered.

By the time Minnie Mouse got off stage and tried to come back through, yet another crasher was preparing to bull his way past Buzz.

This time, however, the interloper got through without any pass. It was “Miami Vice” star Don Johnson, wearing the same impenetrable sunglasses and the same sad, stubborn grin as Buzz.

“Why’d you let him through?” demanded one of the half dozen people without the proper card.

Buzz drilled him with a hard look as he stood at parade rest.

“Personal recognition,” he said.