~Saturday~ At a little after 12:30, I met Jen at the Hillsborough Building where we work on NC State’s campus. We left her car there, and I drove us to The Diner in Glenwood South, to which Jen had never been, and where we had lunch and bookend cocktails. Hey, it was after noon.
Jen had a Mimosa and I had a Bloody Mary. We each had their Rapid Fitness Club sandwich, Jen’s with pasta salad as a side, and mine with cottage cheese. We finished up with an Irish Coffee, because we were eating at the bar, and we saw them pouring several of them and they looked yummy. Jen only had a little-dollop of whipped cream on hers. I had a whopping-dollop. What I really would have liked on it was some Whipped Lightning.
We got to Memorial Auditorium in time to park free on the side of the building and proceeded to our seats in Meymandi Hall, or should I say to our “seat” in Meymandi Hall. We had seats in the first balcony, seats B-205 and B-206. Problem was, the row ended with seat B-206. There was a 205 seat in the row up from us, and I said to Jen, “I guess they split us up. There’s 205 up there.”
It wasn’t until I said it about the third time that it sunk in to me that that was C-205, not B-205. Different row. Get it? D’oh.
Jen asked an usher—or are they called usherettes when they’re female—where B-205 was, and the lady said, “Oh,” while grabbing a big cushiony chair and pulling it over next to B-206. Evidently that spot was one where someone can park a wheelchair if they need to, and when not, they sell as another seat. Whew. This could have had something to do with the fact that when we went to buy our tickets, they were sold out at the price we were willing to pay, but then my friend Steven—who works in the box office—did something, and suddenly two seats together appeared. Sweet.
I thoroughly enjoyed this concert! The guys had great voices and such good rapport with the crowd. And they just had a lot of fun with their music, with a wide variety of different genres of music, as well as a good mix of holiday vs. non-holiday songs.
Another thing I really liked about them is that they waived the theater’s usual policy of no photos, videos, or recording of their concert. They started of saying, which I didn’t know, “Some of you may know that we got our start about three years ago, when one of our videos when viral on YouTube. We went from 77,000 hits in one week to over 7,000,000 in the next one”:
“So, we’re big fans of social media. You can take pictures, videos, or sound bites and Facebook us, Tweet us, or post them on MySpace, YourSpace, OurSpace, whatever space you want.”
I took advantage of the ability to take pictures, even if they were just with my phone:
The concert ended—before the standing ovation number which everyone knew was going to be their famous version of Twelve Days of Christmas—with one of the singers saying something to the effect of, “Every once in a while an entertainer comes along of such immense talent, so as to innovate and rock the music world in profound ways, and we would be remiss in not doing some rendition of such a phenomenon as we have in the world today parading around in meat bikinis and crustacean creations”:
and then they proceeded to do a medley of Lady Gaga songs. And one other thing that they did that was kind of fun was to take pictures of the audience, which they do at every concert and then post them to their website. Here’s one from their Atlanta concert.
I got to the gym at about 5:15, where I did 300 (15 sets of 20) ab crunches, followed by 30 minutes of cardio.
There was a funny minute on the TV up above my elliptical machine, when the program was running through the top stories coming up on the evening news, and the closed captions made for an interesting juxtaposition that me me laugh out loud. It went from a news announcement right into a weather announcement with no break: “The Senate voted 65-31 today to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, defeating a 17-year policy of banning gay and lesbian service members from serving openly in the military. Storm coming.”
I went to Steve and Stephen’s annual holiday party, which is always a good time catching up with people I don’t see often enough, and enjoying good food and hospitality.
At one point, Will reminded us of a picture that he, me, Joe, and Steve took together in P-town in 2002, and we got the bright idea for a “reunion picture,” which we ended up taking. Once I get a copy of it, I’ll post it here for comparison. Could be funny. Could be sad.
Joe and I stopped by Flex on the way home, where it was Otter Night, although overall, it seemed at best unclear what characteristics otter’s are really comprised of, and there didn’t seem to be very many of them about fitting what most of us thought those characteristics were.
Oh well. Another theme night gone bad at Flex. Let me put a look of…
