| I was at a week-long Al festival in California. (Echoes of the Orange County Fair…) Al was playing one concert a night inside a theatre that looked an awful lot like the Adler Theatre in Davenport. I had excellent, excellent seats-front row center! The concerts rocked. I don’t remember the exact setlist, but it was something along the lines of the OC Fair combined with TWS and a bit of BHT as well. Al noticed right away that I was sitting there, because on the Monday concert he kept shooting me little looks every once in a while, like he was trying to place who I was. Tuesday, he remembered me from the night before and started looking at me a lot more. Wednesday, he was pretty much playing right to me. ;) It was now Thursday night. Al had just sang a wonderful rendition of Melanie-and you KNOW I was Melanie-and he was offstage changing into his next costume. Or so we thought. The speakers crackled, then we heard “Attention. It has begun to snow. We are closing the theatre so that all of you can make it home safely. Drive carefully.” I figured, okay, it’s a blizzard, and if we stayed for the whole concert we’d be snowed in. Ha. I stepped outside and saw a whole quarter of an inch of snow on the ground. Yeah… THAT warrants the end of the concert. I went back to the hotel, grumbling all the way. When I got back, I was informed that Friday’s concert was canceled as well. Well, that ruined my whole trip. I left the hotel (and now it was bright and sunny out, even though when I had left the concert it was already dark and still snowing) and I walked a bit down the road to a Burger King. I got myself some breakfast-a Raisin Bran bagel-and sat myself down at a table which happened to have a computer on it. I logged onto STUPID and into Yahoo IM. There was a Bobchat going on, and I asked if there was any late-breaking Al news that I had missed. Debby said “Yes! Al finally quit lurking at STUPID and he started posting! And he told us where he lived!” She told me his address, and said that he’d invited all of us over whenever we were in the neighborhood. (Al had also said, while describing his house, that there was a handy little ravine behind it that people sometimes hid in.) A new Stupid member who was in the Bobchat volunteered to take me over to Al’s, since she was going over there later that day anyway. She said she’d come get me at BK, so I sat and chatted while I waited for her. When she got there, we left. As we walked, I suddenly realized that the sidewalk had split, forming on-ramp style curves. For some reason, we couldn’t go backwards on the sidewalk, but the other gal’s sidewalk curved around and met mine later on, so we continued on our merry way. We finally got to Al’s place. It was an old apartment building-not what I would have expected at all. As we stood and looked, A.J. and some of his pals wandered up and asked if we’d like to see his ferrets. We went down the street to the local zoo, where we got the ferrets out of the display case and started playing with them. The one I was holding was named Cookies-n-Cream and she was very sweet. There was one that no one wanted to hold, named Shnee. Shnee had teeth that looked like sharpened pegs, and her head was oversized. She was also evil, so she was lurking in the corner. Suddenly I noticed that Shnee had a tape recorder. She’d been recording our entire conversation! I tried to take the recorder away from her, but she bit my hands. My Take On It Next Dream |
| Fantastic Festival 08/18/02 |