Here's a link to one of our favorite songs. click here to watch/listen
Before we attended the concert, Dode was a good sport and ate at the Veggie Grill with me, a chain of vegan restaurants on the west coast. He got a chef type salad with an assortment of their plant based proteins. He liked the vegan steak and chicken pieces but wasn't too keen on tempeh. Tempeh is a fermented soy product that can be an acquired taste!
The concert was held at the Neptune Theater with general admission seating. We wanted good seats so we got there 45 minutes early in order to wind up in the third row from the back in the balcony. It was a full house. Thankfully, it's a pretty small theater with a capacity of 800.
view from our seat
We really enjoyed the show. It was two solid hours of music. There was no intermission, when one performer took a break, the other did a solo. What surprised Dode and I was how many people appeared to not be YouTube fans like us. They showed clips from their YouTube videos on a big screen and the audience reactions to some of the gags and images seemed to be like someone seeing it for the first time.
(I do realize that not everyone is the kind of fan like our family, who have viewed each video dozens and dozens of times.)
Anastaya loves The Piano Guys and made us promise to get their autographs after the show. I told her I'd see what I could do, but no promises. Well, when the show was over they announced they'd be doing autographs behind the balcony so I scooted right down to the autograph table and was one of the first two or three people there. People kept bunching in, forming a mob of at least 100 people with no real line or way to make sense of it. When the musicians came up to the balcony, they realized there was no way to turn the crowd into any kind of order so they decided to use the balcony we'd just come from. Dode was standing at the balcony doors when they went by and I was quickly at his side, just the third person in line.
I'm sure glad we were that close to the front of the line because it took us 20 minutes to get to shake hands with the musicians because someone in front of us was very chatty. When we left the theater, the line of autograph seekers wound all the way through the theater, it had to take hours!
John Schmidt made this pose for every photo we saw. Dode says maybe he's showing off
how flexible his fingers are as an inside piano player joke.
Getting my poster signed by Al Van der Beek.
He works behind the scenes as a producer, song writer and sound engineer.
Standing with cellist Steven Sharp Nelson. He's a pretty little guy, we're standing on an incline with me on the uphill side.
I didn't feel too bad about Anastaya missing the concert because I knew that the pianist, John Schmidt, was coming to our church building for a Sunday night meeting. You had to get (free) tickets to go attend. Anastaya was able to get tickets for herself, a friend and Elizabeth. Dode and I were able to get some of Dodes's brother's extra tickets. We knew it would be another general admission event so we got there an hour early. They didn't open the doors for another 30 minutes but when they did, Dode and I had to wait outside because our tickets hadn't arrived yet. We asked Anastaya to save us seats if possible and wandered around the outside of the building for a while until we were able to go in.
John Schmidt divided his time up so it was about 75% talking and 25% playing the piano. We'd have liked that ratio reversed but it was wonderful for Anastaya to see him in person. This time we weren't third in line but we were about 10th in line. When we got up there, Anastaya was so excited she could hardly stand it. Her legs were shaking and she kept fanning herself while trying to talk. She thought it was great because he shook her hand twice.
No comments:
Post a Comment