About Me

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I am a twenty-something second year teacher living in the midwest. I am a Christian woman and proud of it! I am the middle child of three girls. I am the proud aunt of the very beautiful Lil E and Lil C!! I love TV, movies, reading, and baseball. I am in my second year of teaching , but my first year teaching kindergarten. It has been quite the journey!

14 March 2013

AVPSY

The time has come, the walrus said to detail Lil Sis and my epic adventures at Leaky Con and seeing AVPSY. As AVPSY is (finally!!!) being released on youtube on Friday, I figured it was as good a time as any to revisit our fantabulous weekend in Chicago.

It started one day last July when I was perusing twitter and saw a tweet that Starkid would be performing A Very Potter 3-D: A Very Potter Senior Year at LeakyCon in Chicago in August. I immediately texted Lil Sis at work. Chicago is not far from where I live and I knew that we must be there to see it live. Not satisfied when she didn't respond immediately I also left her a voicemail. She called back shortly thereafter and we ordered tickets right away. It was seriously such an exciting day; this show has been years in the making and Darren's fame and schedule just didn't make it possible for them to do the show until then. (Darn you G.L.E.E.) We didn't care that it was only going to be a "staged reading," we were psyched. We would get to  see Darren and our other beloved Starkid's perform live in the roles that made us fall in love with them in the first place!

The show as set to be performed on Saturday, but we decided to head out Friday and spend the night because we didn't want to run into traffic or something and miss the show (and yes we're paranoid like that). We rocked out to Starkid tunes all the way to Chicago, managed to find our hotel fairly easily and get checked in. Then we decided to do some shopping downtown, which was just down the road from our hotel, except we went the wrong way the first time and ended up going at least a half a mile in the wrong direction before we realized it... But we managed to find the shopping and perused some stores; the American Girl Doll store was a must!

After walking around all afternoon, we decided to get dinner and not at some place we could eat anywhere, an only-in-Chicago type of place. Except we were really hungry and the first place we passed that looked good was a Bennigan's, so we stopped there. But we did sit out on the sidewalk, which we couldn't do back home, so we claimed that as a victory. It was fun to people watch all of the people dressed in their Harry Potter and Starkid gear.



Then we went back to the hotel and decided to check out the merchandise. As chronicled in my Denise Donovan blog, we took a long time deciding what Starkid merch we wanted and met Denise Donovan! I ended up with a Granger Danger T-shirt, JMOMS DVD and powder blue sweatband.

This was our first taste of living in a world where people loved Starkid. I got lots of compliments on my Keep Calm I'm a Starship Ranger t-shirt. It was so fun to be surrounded by people who got all of our random Starkid references and geeked out over powder blue sweatbands. We overheard someone saying that their mom saw Joey Richter at the ice machine, so of course our eyes were peeled for Starkids whenever we left our room ;)

We also checked in to the Leaky Con (since we only had passes for the conference for Saturday) and got our Leaky Con swag.

After making our purchases we decided to hit the pool, with about half of the other people there :) But it was fun and we got to relax our muscles that were sore after a day of a lot of walking!
Here we are rocking our homemade A Very Starkid Summer T-shirts. Mine says "I'll see my friends, gonna laugh til we cry" from Goin' Back to Hogwarts and Lil Sis' says "We've got these days  of Summer" from Days of Summer. The back lists the dates for Apocalyptour and Leaky Con.

The next morning we got up bright and early to attend some conference sessions before AVPSY which was "scheduled" to start at noon. They had said that if you attended a session from 11:00-11:50 you would be let in before people who just stood in line, so we had planned a full morning. We also packed our nifty Leaky Con bags full of snacks because there would be no time for lunch! 
Rumbleroar!


Our first session stared off pretty humorously. First off all, the wrong lecturer showed up. He started trying to lead us in yoga and we were all like, "What?!  Isn't supposed to be about how no one in Harry Potter has any parents or parental figures or something?" Then they got that straightened out and our lecturer never showed up. But being the true fans we are, a few people just started running it like a panel. 

Then we went to a simply fabulous session about Snape and whether he is truly good or evil. The place was packed! But what made the whole thing, was that a Snape impersonator showed up and started taking part in the discussion, in character! It was so much fun :)

I think the next session was the 11:00 that we really had no interest in, but we had to pick something so that we could get into AVPSY first... I felt bad for the guy because, seriously, no one really wanted to be there and everyone was counting down the minutes to noon. Lil Sis and I munched on some snacks. Then some workers came to get us in line... and we stood in line for like at least half an hour... It was excruciating, but we had some lovely Starkid sing-a-longs to tide us over. Then they marched us through the Chicago Hilton like a giant conga line! I'm sure we looked crazy to the legitimate guests. When we got closer they made us put our badges on our foreheads so it was easier for them to check. At that point we would have done whatever they told us!!

We finally got seated, discovered some lovely 3-D glasses under our seats and tried not to freak out! I won't spoil the show, yet, except to say that it was amazing. Very few people left without tears in their eyes (cast included). It was funny, touching, full of amazing songs and clearly more than a staged reading. Yes, there were tons of goofs and everyone read from the script, but it wouldn't be a Starkid show without mess-ups and they really only had like 48 hours to rehearse. It was amazing to see Darren (and everyone else) perform live. It was perfect.

We got out and realized that it was after 5:00! A show that was supposed to go from 12-3, went from 12:00-5:00! Again, not a Starkid show if it wasn't super long, and to their credit it didn't start until at least one by the time everyone got into the room.

Since the schedule was all out of whack, Lil Sis and I just skipped any more sessions and headed to get food. On our way to McDonald's, we got several really strange looks and possibly a comment about us being hippies, when realized that we had re-entered civilization while still wearing our sweatbands :)

We took our Mickey D's to Millenium Park to eat and debrief on the awesomeness that we had just experienced.

Next we went back to the hotel and took part in a rockin' Starkid sing-a-long. So fun to be around people who had the words memorized just like us!

Then there was the ball. We hadn't really been sure if we would attend, since we were driving back home that night, so we didn't bring any ball type clothes, but we still went anyway. It was so much fun to just dance the night away, even if we were carrying around our large bags the whole night! The DJ played "I Wanna Be" and some Disney songs! I saw Dylan Saunders wandering through the crowd and we said hi and gave him hugs.

After awhile a bunch of the Starkids came out and were dancing, which was fun to see.  We were sort of far away and it was dark, so my pics aren't very good... Some of the Warblers were there and started dancing when some of their songs from Glee came on :)


Oh, Joe Moses (wearing the hat)


Joey is in red on the far right of this pic and Darren's a tiny bit right of center wearing a blue short sleeved shirt and black vest...



We were pretty pooped from a seriously long and emotional (very, very exciting!) day.

Around midnight we had to decide, were we going to stay until 2:30 for the traditional singing of Total Eclipse of the Heart or leave then. We decided, you only live once; we were staying. This is also when we saw Matt Lang, but decided he looked uncomfortable enough that we didn't approach him.

So we stayed and rocked out to Total Eclipse of the Heart with a few hundred of our people and then hit the road. They usually play the song several times, so after the first playing we left to beat the rush. Which led us to meeting the adorable Nick Lang in his purple tracksuit. One of our biggest regrets is not asking him for a picture, but we did tell him we loved the show and he thanked us for coming. 

Then we almost didn't get let out of the parking garage, but thanks to a nice garage attendant we did and were on our merry way!

It was an epic and, dare I say, magical weekend!







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