This concert was at Turning
Stone again, a casino about an hour from where I live. It's run
by the Oneida Indians (......or the Onadaga.
One of the two).
I went with the folks, my sister, and
a friend of ours, James. Three out of the five of us were very poor on
our
collective Voodoo knowledge, but that
was alright. It's cool to see people's reaction to their first concert.
About fifteen minutes before the show started I was standing out by the merchandise table with my Dad (No Dirk to be found). However, I did notice a pretty tall, thin guy with funky glasses and a backstage pass go by, looking out of place in his shorts and looking straight ahead...I decided against my first reaction, which was to yell, "KARL!!!" as loud as I could, and instead whispered to my Dad who he was. The man behind the table smiled and said, "You know your Daddies."
Indeed I do.
The show, as always,
was great. In typical on-line fashion, I'll just give
highlights:
~When Scotty introduced Dirk, the already
drunk woman behind me yelled, "Dirt? What kind of
a name is that? He's hot, though......Whoooooo! Yeah, Dirt!"
~I thought Karl was the one who jumped
off things, but Andy has really taken a liking to Josh's piano
platform. He kept running over to it, climbing up, running behind
Josh, then doing this leap thing off of it. He landed somewhere beyond
Dirk.
~ Mike and Ron have developed some serious
choreography back there. During "King of Swing"
they acted out the entire, "When you see those fires buring..." part of
the song, and during Go Daddy-o during the loud "Go!"'s
at
the end, Ron threw Mike in the air for each one.
~ During the parade
through the audience, James and my sister were dancing, and rather oblivious
to what was going on. Suddenly James felt this tapping on his shoulder
and he looked back to see that they were kind
of in the way. They jumped back, embarrassed, but when I heard about it
later, I was like, "Andy touched your shoulder!"
~Kurt's drum solo. 'Nuff
said.
I was kind of disapointed with two things: 1) the audience was dead for at least the first half of the concert. You had your Voodoo Heads that were just bouncing in their seats, waitin' to get up and dance, and then you had everyone else, who looked like they were there for a corporate meeting. Everytime Josh wasn't playing, he'd stand up and clap to the audience, trying to get some reaction. I think someone threw peanuts at him, but that was about the best he got. And 2) during the goodbye song, they didn't play the cut in from "Smells like Teen Spirit". But oh well.
After the show everyone had kind of cleared out early, but we hung around in the room where the concert was to get our stuff together, grab a setlist (I got Josh's), stuff like that. I was walking towards James and Stephanie when I saw a man in a blue shirt and glasses who looked familiar walking behind them. Yup, it was Mike.
James and Stephanie kind of looked at me blankly as I asked him if he had a pen to sign my set-list. He didn't, so he spent the next five minutes asking all the waitresses for one. While we waited for one we talked about the show, and of course, introduced ourselves once I finally realized that oh yeah, I should tell him my name.
I gotta tell you, this was one nice guy. Really easy to talk to and polite. He said he was trying to find a local band leader who had lent him a mouthpiece before the show, because when he opened his case his was either missing or stolen (the nerve of some people!) I asked him if Andy had liked his hat, and I got the general impression that he did. He wore it at the concert, anyway :) While I think of it, he said he never noticed much about himself on the forum or in the chat room, so everyone write stuff about Mike!
It was time to head back over to Mom and Dad, but Mike (who introduced himself as Michael, so which do I call him?) was going that way, so he walked with us. But not without offering me his arm. How sweet is that? He then spent another ten minuets or so talking with my parents, mostly about the upcoming show in Plainview and how we all have family on the island. I knew he had to go meet that bandleader, but he never acted rushed or impatient in the slightest. Finally, though, he really did have to go, so we said goodbye.
On the way out of the casino, James ran into his roomate from school, so they stopped to talk for awhile. Meanwhile, I ran back to where the concert had been in pursuit of more Daddies. Mike (Michael?) has said they were meeting with the tribal elders, so there wasn't going to be a meet and greet, but a huge crowd had gathered around the coatcheck, and somehow I didn't think they were all that excited to get their coats, soooo...
Of course, Dirk was out there, signing autographs and talking to people. I waited...and waited while a huge group of boys in full zoot suits and hats ("the posse" as Dirk called them) told him about their band, how much they like swing, where they go to school, when they were born, their favrite colors, which Monopoly piece they like to use...My eyes were just about glazing over when they left and it was my turn. Here is another prime example of a very nice guy. He shook my hand and introduced himself, which was obviously unnecessary, but I collected my second autograph of the night, without making too large of an idiot of myself, but I won't go into that here (I do have some pride. Not much, but some).
Dirk said that if we were just patient a little longer, the rest of the boys would come out, but I had already made everyone else wait long enough, so i headed back to my party and we got outta there. Now there's only a week and a half until my next concert.....
-Beth