That is the question being asked by concert professionals and HMO actuaries alike. How many tour dates, whether they be for Nikka Costa, Insane Clown Posse or the Gaither Homecoming, can a person handle without going over the edge?

Up until 1989, medical science believed that a person could hold about 210 tour dates per year, or four dates per week for such acts like Ian Moore or My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. However, thanks to prescription drugs such as Allegra, Viagra, and Niagara, the body’s capacity for date, city, state and venue seems almost limitless. At least, that’s the way it appears on paper.

But reality is always something different. It’s one thing to theorize that a body can handle a never-ending stream of dates for Zen Guerrilla, Fairport Convention and Big Sugar, but it’s quite another matter to lock that same body in a soundproof room, strap him to a table, point a gun to his head and force him to read aloud every single tour date on record. Unfortunately, there are too many local ordinances and zoning restrictions on the books that forbid the recitation of dates for artists like Bob Schneider and Kim Carson while in the presence of firearms. Damn liberals.

But politics and Pat Haney & The Well Readnecks dates aside, we have a vested interest in mapping man’s tour date capacity that harkens back to the days when our founder, Festus Pollstar, had a dream that each and every one of us would become a walking, talking repository of tour information. Old man Pollstar’s vision was that mankind would evolve into organic tour databanks, and like a Thanksgiving turkey stuffed with stale wet bread and ready for the oven, the human race would transform itself into bipedal beings whose every pore, every sweat gland and every orifice would drip with the routings for bands such as Oleander or Little Feat. Needless to say, we at Pollstar.com do not take such grand perspirations lightly.

So we will continue with the experiments. We’ll insert, stuff, ram and jam every tour date we can find into our test subjects. We’ll watch as their bodies expand to accommodate the routings for Tantric, The Bacon Brothers and Garaj Mahal. We’ll ignore their pleas for pity, their screams of agony and their cries for mercy as we force them to mainline the dates for Saliva and Sum 41. Make no mistake about it, we are on a mission. We are chasing our founder’s dream of expanding mankind’s tour date capacity, and every bloated belly, every swollen cranium will attest to our dedication and perseverance. Have no doubts, the experiments will continue.

Besides, our researchers are having way too much fun to quit.