SPN--SeaCon 2018--Day 1
For my daughter Adrienne's Christmas and birthday present I got Gold tickets for the two of us to go to the Seattle Supernatural Con. Caveat--My recollection of the panels are not necessarily in the exact order of the questions.
Supernatural Seattle Con--Friday 3/23/18
Intro-Rob Benedict
Rob was flying solo on Friday because Richard was still filming in Vancouver. Rob had done a bus tour of Seattle with fans on Thursday and it had jokingly been suggested that since there are multiple Friday t-shirts featuring Rich and Rob together that there needed to be a ‘Frobday’ shirt just for him. Rob’s mind was blown when he showed up today and someone handed him a Frobday shirt with his picture on it, which he was proudly wearing:
Rob talked about how Jared and Jensen smell so good even when they’ve just finished playing basketball…And Jensen is perfect in everything he does-when they had an ear doctor fit Jensen’s in-ear monitors for the Saturday night concerts, the doctor fell on his knees and had a moment because Jensen had the most perfect ear canals the doctor had ever seen!
Since Hawaii the band has come up with t-shirt that features the bassist Mike Borja for each con. For Hawaii there was ‘Borjaloha’-Orlando has ‘Borjalando’ (his face weariing Mickey Mouse ears) and for Seattle, since it is the home of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, they reproduced one of Nirvana’s famous album covers and christened it ‘Borvana.’
Rob then pointed out they even kept the penis-then said he was sorry if he offended anyone by saying penis, but they are just part of the body-after all, he had created them.
Rachel Miner
The big impression from Rachel’s panel was her gratitude and love.
She rode her power chair up a ramp at the side of the stage and her first reaction was to tell the crowd that she was about to cry because of there being a ramp-that was huge for her! Several times during the panel when she would look in that direction she would again say how amazing it was that the ramp was there. At one point she discussed how being disabled is just what it is, and every day she spends a lot of time figuring out how to accomplish things that other people take for granted--coming home, being tired, needing to get something from here to there and she can’t carry it, so ‘what if I throw it and then roll over there and I can pick it up?’
Her power chair is adorned with a unicorn named Clarence.
She loved the character of Meg. She hadn’t seen Nikki Aycox’s performance of Meg and was glad for that so she wasn’t influenced. Meg’s dialog was pretty much as the writers wrote it, they gave her amazing lines. Asked if Meg was good or evil, Rachel said that it wasn’t the context of her being good or evil but that she was loyal. She was loyal to Lucifer and did things for him that weren’t good, but when she switched that loyalty to Cas her actions changed accordingly. The romantic in her thinks that Meg and Cas would be together if she hadn’t died, and they would even have connected in the alternate universe.
She says that being involved with Random Acts has changed her view of the world-she sees so much good every single day that it is impossible to believe the world is a terrible place, that it can and will be changed by all the good people doing one thing at a time.
What she loved about acting was using her physicality to be another person. Since losing her physical control she hasn’t acted, but she is contemplating returning to acting sometime to give representation for the disabled, to present them as normal and show how they interact with the world differently and yet are still living life every day.
Jason Manns
He’s had a song on the show (it was playing on the iPod Sam had installed in the Impala while Dean was in Hell) and is an absentee truck stop owner (the truck stop in the episode with Sheriff Donna’s niece was ‘Mann’s)-could be the same person…
Adrienne’s experience in her own words:
So mom and I spent one of the breaks brainstorming questions for Jason's panel, and I came up with one, but told mom she should ask it. So she gets up to the microphone and goes ‘I’m asking this question for my daughter because she didn’t want to come up to the microphone.’ Jason goes ‘where is she?’ and asked me to raise my hand and the house lights came up so he could see me. He said ‘oh yeah, this is happening’ and I had a very panicked internal ‘meep!!!!!’ as he jumped off the stage and sat down next to me and goes ‘Hey, how’s it going? I hear you have a question for me. Don’t worry, it’s just me and you’. I was definitely a nice shade of beet red when they were trying to get me to raise my hand.
And of course I was at the microphone cracking up…
Adrienne’s question was what was Jason’s favorite music genre to cover. He said that was a good question and he didn’t know…but then he said probably blues and Motown because they do so much with just a few simple chords and put all the emotion in the singing. He returned to the stage and asked if I also had a question, so I asked how the songs the guests sing on his albums get chosen. He said ‘Good questions run in the family’ and then explained he usually picks three to five songs that he thinks the person would sound good doing and sends them an email so they can choose. Sometimes, though, he just sends one song because he thinks it would be perfect for them. He then proceeded to sing an exquisite version of ‘Stand by Me’ and said that is an example of how 4 chords repeated 50 times can sound incredible.
Later he elaborated on the songs Jensen sang on the most recent album, joking that he emailed Jensen if he’d sing on it and Jensen emailed back ‘No’ so Jason emailed ‘Please?’ and Jensen emailed ‘Maybe’ and then Jason begged. Then he said actually it was easy, since he and Jensen have done so much together. Jensen asked if he could sing something edgier, out of his comfort zone this time, and that is how they chose ‘Funk 49.’ ‘The Joker’ was a fun song in the vein of ‘Crazy Love’ which was one of the first songs they performed together, and ‘Cripple Creek’ was the big ‘everybody sings’ song.
Asked how what he’d like to play if he could be on the show, Jason wants to be in a big climatic scene where he pulls up in a big bad car, jumps out and saves the day, and everyone goes ‘who is that?’ and he’s the unknown cousin Jack Winchester. Someone called out there’s already a Jack on the show and he shot back two people can have the same name! But realistically he’d end up as cop #2 who gets eaten by a chupacabra in the first 40 seconds, and he’d be happy to do it.
He ended with Rob Benedict and Billy Moran joining him on stage for a truly haunting version of ‘Hallelujah.’
Adam Fergus and David Haydn-Jones
This panel left my sides hurting from laughing! It started with Adam coming out and no David to be found, so Adam claimed he shot David in the head-he’s still bitter about Ketch shooting him! When David finally showed up, he said he’d been stuck in a stairwell in a real Spinal Tap moment.
David was asked what his favorite thing about Adam is, and David said he admires how, when Adam comes into a room, within minutes he is friends with everyone.
David admitted to a major fanboy moment when he saw Paige Davis from Trading Spaces in an ordinary situation. Adam was at an event where he saw Leonardo DiCaprio and then Toby McGuire-he went up to Toby and said ‘hey, I saw you DJ’ and McGuire said ‘I don’t fucking DJ!’ Awkward…(He’d actually seen Elijjah Wood DJ and had mixed them up.)
Adam clarified that ‘craic’ in Irish means fun, that he’s not saying he’s having ‘crack’-this led to multiple instances of David teasing Adam about being on crack for the rest of the panel…
David has his own headcannon for Ketch, that he really had a twin brother and his trial at the BMoL school ended with him killing his brother.
If they weren’t BMoL, what would Ketch and Mick be? Ketch would be a psychopath…maybe a psychopathic dentist, with a torture chamber in his basement… Mick would be Fagin in Oliver Twist, out on the streets.
What would AU Ketch and Mick be? Ketch would be knitting and sipping tea. Mick would be Jason Bourne/Indiana Jones combined and he would kill Ketch. Still mad about Ketch shooting him in the head…
If they could be any monster on Supernatural? David would be a Goth vampire-he revealed gleefully that he had been a very emo Goth teenager, complete with long bangs over one eye (which he proceeded to demonstrate by holding one hand over his face and then ‘flipping his bangs’-it was hysterical) and the back of his head shaved like a checkerboard. He then used the bangs gesture several more times in the panel. Adam would be Lucifer-since he got shot in the head he’s had ‘feelings.’
Favorite charities? Adam supports a program that provides kids growing up in hard places the opportunity to play football (do not call it soccer in front of him!) David says that his family has been affected by Alzheimers and he is honored that fans supported his t-shirt campaign to help caregivers for Alzheimers sufferers, that they are the unsung heroes dealing with it.
Of course they were asked the prank question…Adam said his first scene with Jared, Jared kept going ‘what did he say?’ because of Adam’s accent-Adam was getting worried till the director told him to ignore Jared. David said that in an upcoming episode Sam and Ketch are putting a spell together and Jared has a large bowl with a pestle and 2 globes…and just picture Jared handling a stick and two balls…
Asked if they had any idea of what this fandom was like before they came to a con, Adam was very effusive on how amazing it is. He said he was signing autographs and the fan he signed for asked for a second autograph ‘to Lisa.’ He inquired who Lisa was, and the fan explained Lisa was her friend that couldn’t be there, then further explained they’d never actually met, were just online friends, but the fan knew Lisa would love having Adam’s autograph. Adam was blown away by the generosity he’s seen.
I think part of what made this panel especially funny was that the two actors were in the same episodes/season arc and could riff off their characters’ interactions-Adam brought up several times that David had killed him and how he wanted to get payback.
Kim Rhodes and Lisa Berry
This was Lisa’s first con appearance. She walked out on stage with the biggest grin. Since Brianna couldn’t come at the last moment, she was represented by a donut cushion that had its own chair.
Lisa was a big fan of Supernatural before she was cast as Billie, and was over-the-moon excited to get the (what she thought) one episode role. The hardest day of shooting was the first one when she had to separate Lisa-the-fan from Lisa-the-actor. But now when she goes in to shoot an episode, she gets her ‘photo ops’ and hugs, and her hugging philosophy is ‘hug till they let go first.’ Kim’s hardest scene was in an episode where she had a bunch of expositional dialog that she didn’t know what to do with, so she said it really fast to get it over with, and after the first take the director asked her what she was doing with those lines. She said she had no idea. The director said he thought so, and reminded her of something from an earlier scene that tied in to this dialog, and suddenly it was clear how she needed to say it. She found that getting a reminder of the story rather than being told how to say it was invaluable. ‘And that director was Jensen Ackles.’
Kim actually called Lisa before Lisa heard from the studio that Billie was coming back as Death. Kim protested that she sat on the news for a bit and assumed Lisa had heard when she called to talk to her about it.
Lisa has her own headcannon about (Julian’s) Death and Billie-she thinks that every time Death was talking with Dean and cutting Dean a bargain, Billie was there, visible only to Death, giving a running commentary on how that was a bad idea and Death was letting Dean get away with all kinds of things…only to realize, when she was promoted to Death, that there was a reason the Winchesters get a free pass to break the rules- because the universe needs them.
One of the things Lisa appreciates about this fandom is the positivity. She wants to use her social media presence to promote positivity but was getting a pushback from her other connections about always saying upbeat things and was feeling hesitant to post, but now she loves that she has a platform where that is welcomed.
Kim hasn’t ever used her ‘mom voice’ on Jared and Jensen-‘not fair to fight the boys with weapons they don’t have access to.’ However in the episode where she was helping Sam find Dean (who had been taken into the past by Chronos) she did use her mom voice and Jared jumped back in awe.
If Jody hadn’t met Sam and Dean would she still have become a hunter? No, she would have died because she wouldn’t have known how to handle the supernatural. She had lost herself until Sam came along and said ‘we need to do this and this’ and she followed his lead.
None of the girls in Wayward Sisters, as much as she loves them, will ever replace her child-she was only a mom to one kid who is now dead. She isn’t jealous that Mary has come back to be the boys’ mother, nor is she judgmental as to how Mary is doing-Jody has come to know there are many shades of gray.
A lot of the panel involved Lisa and Kim singing the praises of each other and the rest of the SPN women, how they are each other’s unwavering support, and how it is simply amazing the gift SPN has given them, so far beyond anything that could have been expected!
The most emotional moment of the panel came when a young woman said that she hadn’t ben parented very well and that she wanted Kim to be her mother. Kim, with great passion, explained that if you can see a quality in another person, then you already have it, you just need to find and nurture it…if this girl could see in Kim how she wanted to be, she had those qualities already. I actually teared up a little at the emotion and conviction as Kim was speaking.
It was fascinating to me how the tenor of the womens’ panel was so opposite of David and Adam’s-both were hugely enjoyable, but the guys gave a comedy show while the women gave an Oprah-like emotional feel-good presentation. I loved them both!
Karaoke
Adrienne and I signed up to sing at karaoke but didn’t get picked. However we ended up staying for the whole 2 hours because we were enjoying ourselves (though I have to admit I did not know half the songs.) The cast leading the audience were Rob, Matt, Adam, David, Kim, and Lisa, who all got into the spirit. The most fun to watch was David-he did not hesitate to make a fool of himself with 80’s dance moves…and then near the end he did a solo karaoke of the song he said Ketch would have sung for Mary: ‘Faith’ by George Michael (which is about lovers playing games.)
The moment that sticks in my mind was almost at the very end, when a man came up to sing ‘Eye of the Tiger.’ He was in a wizard costume and I couldn’t tell his age, but Kim seemed to recognize him. Unfortunately he was very out-of-sync with the lyrics-obliviously so-but giving his all to the performance. And every one of the actors on the stage circled around him protectively and took turns putting their heads next to him to guide his singing as best they could. They didn’t have to do that-they could have backed off and let him die up there-but they all were giving him support for getting up and trying, acknowledgment that he made the effort. That really showed just what caliber of people the SPN cast are!
The final karaoke song was a rousing rendition of ‘Carry on, Wayward Son,’ after which we crashed at the hotel for a little sleep.
Supernatural Seattle Con--Friday 3/23/18
Intro-Rob Benedict
Rob was flying solo on Friday because Richard was still filming in Vancouver. Rob had done a bus tour of Seattle with fans on Thursday and it had jokingly been suggested that since there are multiple Friday t-shirts featuring Rich and Rob together that there needed to be a ‘Frobday’ shirt just for him. Rob’s mind was blown when he showed up today and someone handed him a Frobday shirt with his picture on it, which he was proudly wearing:
Rob talked about how Jared and Jensen smell so good even when they’ve just finished playing basketball…And Jensen is perfect in everything he does-when they had an ear doctor fit Jensen’s in-ear monitors for the Saturday night concerts, the doctor fell on his knees and had a moment because Jensen had the most perfect ear canals the doctor had ever seen!
Since Hawaii the band has come up with t-shirt that features the bassist Mike Borja for each con. For Hawaii there was ‘Borjaloha’-Orlando has ‘Borjalando’ (his face weariing Mickey Mouse ears) and for Seattle, since it is the home of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, they reproduced one of Nirvana’s famous album covers and christened it ‘Borvana.’
Rob then pointed out they even kept the penis-then said he was sorry if he offended anyone by saying penis, but they are just part of the body-after all, he had created them.
Rachel Miner
The big impression from Rachel’s panel was her gratitude and love.
She rode her power chair up a ramp at the side of the stage and her first reaction was to tell the crowd that she was about to cry because of there being a ramp-that was huge for her! Several times during the panel when she would look in that direction she would again say how amazing it was that the ramp was there. At one point she discussed how being disabled is just what it is, and every day she spends a lot of time figuring out how to accomplish things that other people take for granted--coming home, being tired, needing to get something from here to there and she can’t carry it, so ‘what if I throw it and then roll over there and I can pick it up?’
Her power chair is adorned with a unicorn named Clarence.
She loved the character of Meg. She hadn’t seen Nikki Aycox’s performance of Meg and was glad for that so she wasn’t influenced. Meg’s dialog was pretty much as the writers wrote it, they gave her amazing lines. Asked if Meg was good or evil, Rachel said that it wasn’t the context of her being good or evil but that she was loyal. She was loyal to Lucifer and did things for him that weren’t good, but when she switched that loyalty to Cas her actions changed accordingly. The romantic in her thinks that Meg and Cas would be together if she hadn’t died, and they would even have connected in the alternate universe.
She says that being involved with Random Acts has changed her view of the world-she sees so much good every single day that it is impossible to believe the world is a terrible place, that it can and will be changed by all the good people doing one thing at a time.
What she loved about acting was using her physicality to be another person. Since losing her physical control she hasn’t acted, but she is contemplating returning to acting sometime to give representation for the disabled, to present them as normal and show how they interact with the world differently and yet are still living life every day.
Jason Manns
He’s had a song on the show (it was playing on the iPod Sam had installed in the Impala while Dean was in Hell) and is an absentee truck stop owner (the truck stop in the episode with Sheriff Donna’s niece was ‘Mann’s)-could be the same person…
Adrienne’s experience in her own words:
So mom and I spent one of the breaks brainstorming questions for Jason's panel, and I came up with one, but told mom she should ask it. So she gets up to the microphone and goes ‘I’m asking this question for my daughter because she didn’t want to come up to the microphone.’ Jason goes ‘where is she?’ and asked me to raise my hand and the house lights came up so he could see me. He said ‘oh yeah, this is happening’ and I had a very panicked internal ‘meep!!!!!’ as he jumped off the stage and sat down next to me and goes ‘Hey, how’s it going? I hear you have a question for me. Don’t worry, it’s just me and you’. I was definitely a nice shade of beet red when they were trying to get me to raise my hand.
And of course I was at the microphone cracking up…
Adrienne’s question was what was Jason’s favorite music genre to cover. He said that was a good question and he didn’t know…but then he said probably blues and Motown because they do so much with just a few simple chords and put all the emotion in the singing. He returned to the stage and asked if I also had a question, so I asked how the songs the guests sing on his albums get chosen. He said ‘Good questions run in the family’ and then explained he usually picks three to five songs that he thinks the person would sound good doing and sends them an email so they can choose. Sometimes, though, he just sends one song because he thinks it would be perfect for them. He then proceeded to sing an exquisite version of ‘Stand by Me’ and said that is an example of how 4 chords repeated 50 times can sound incredible.
Later he elaborated on the songs Jensen sang on the most recent album, joking that he emailed Jensen if he’d sing on it and Jensen emailed back ‘No’ so Jason emailed ‘Please?’ and Jensen emailed ‘Maybe’ and then Jason begged. Then he said actually it was easy, since he and Jensen have done so much together. Jensen asked if he could sing something edgier, out of his comfort zone this time, and that is how they chose ‘Funk 49.’ ‘The Joker’ was a fun song in the vein of ‘Crazy Love’ which was one of the first songs they performed together, and ‘Cripple Creek’ was the big ‘everybody sings’ song.
Asked how what he’d like to play if he could be on the show, Jason wants to be in a big climatic scene where he pulls up in a big bad car, jumps out and saves the day, and everyone goes ‘who is that?’ and he’s the unknown cousin Jack Winchester. Someone called out there’s already a Jack on the show and he shot back two people can have the same name! But realistically he’d end up as cop #2 who gets eaten by a chupacabra in the first 40 seconds, and he’d be happy to do it.
He ended with Rob Benedict and Billy Moran joining him on stage for a truly haunting version of ‘Hallelujah.’
Adam Fergus and David Haydn-Jones
This panel left my sides hurting from laughing! It started with Adam coming out and no David to be found, so Adam claimed he shot David in the head-he’s still bitter about Ketch shooting him! When David finally showed up, he said he’d been stuck in a stairwell in a real Spinal Tap moment.
David was asked what his favorite thing about Adam is, and David said he admires how, when Adam comes into a room, within minutes he is friends with everyone.
David admitted to a major fanboy moment when he saw Paige Davis from Trading Spaces in an ordinary situation. Adam was at an event where he saw Leonardo DiCaprio and then Toby McGuire-he went up to Toby and said ‘hey, I saw you DJ’ and McGuire said ‘I don’t fucking DJ!’ Awkward…(He’d actually seen Elijjah Wood DJ and had mixed them up.)
Adam clarified that ‘craic’ in Irish means fun, that he’s not saying he’s having ‘crack’-this led to multiple instances of David teasing Adam about being on crack for the rest of the panel…
David has his own headcannon for Ketch, that he really had a twin brother and his trial at the BMoL school ended with him killing his brother.
If they weren’t BMoL, what would Ketch and Mick be? Ketch would be a psychopath…maybe a psychopathic dentist, with a torture chamber in his basement… Mick would be Fagin in Oliver Twist, out on the streets.
What would AU Ketch and Mick be? Ketch would be knitting and sipping tea. Mick would be Jason Bourne/Indiana Jones combined and he would kill Ketch. Still mad about Ketch shooting him in the head…
If they could be any monster on Supernatural? David would be a Goth vampire-he revealed gleefully that he had been a very emo Goth teenager, complete with long bangs over one eye (which he proceeded to demonstrate by holding one hand over his face and then ‘flipping his bangs’-it was hysterical) and the back of his head shaved like a checkerboard. He then used the bangs gesture several more times in the panel. Adam would be Lucifer-since he got shot in the head he’s had ‘feelings.’
Favorite charities? Adam supports a program that provides kids growing up in hard places the opportunity to play football (do not call it soccer in front of him!) David says that his family has been affected by Alzheimers and he is honored that fans supported his t-shirt campaign to help caregivers for Alzheimers sufferers, that they are the unsung heroes dealing with it.
Of course they were asked the prank question…Adam said his first scene with Jared, Jared kept going ‘what did he say?’ because of Adam’s accent-Adam was getting worried till the director told him to ignore Jared. David said that in an upcoming episode Sam and Ketch are putting a spell together and Jared has a large bowl with a pestle and 2 globes…and just picture Jared handling a stick and two balls…
Asked if they had any idea of what this fandom was like before they came to a con, Adam was very effusive on how amazing it is. He said he was signing autographs and the fan he signed for asked for a second autograph ‘to Lisa.’ He inquired who Lisa was, and the fan explained Lisa was her friend that couldn’t be there, then further explained they’d never actually met, were just online friends, but the fan knew Lisa would love having Adam’s autograph. Adam was blown away by the generosity he’s seen.
I think part of what made this panel especially funny was that the two actors were in the same episodes/season arc and could riff off their characters’ interactions-Adam brought up several times that David had killed him and how he wanted to get payback.
Kim Rhodes and Lisa Berry
This was Lisa’s first con appearance. She walked out on stage with the biggest grin. Since Brianna couldn’t come at the last moment, she was represented by a donut cushion that had its own chair.
Lisa was a big fan of Supernatural before she was cast as Billie, and was over-the-moon excited to get the (what she thought) one episode role. The hardest day of shooting was the first one when she had to separate Lisa-the-fan from Lisa-the-actor. But now when she goes in to shoot an episode, she gets her ‘photo ops’ and hugs, and her hugging philosophy is ‘hug till they let go first.’ Kim’s hardest scene was in an episode where she had a bunch of expositional dialog that she didn’t know what to do with, so she said it really fast to get it over with, and after the first take the director asked her what she was doing with those lines. She said she had no idea. The director said he thought so, and reminded her of something from an earlier scene that tied in to this dialog, and suddenly it was clear how she needed to say it. She found that getting a reminder of the story rather than being told how to say it was invaluable. ‘And that director was Jensen Ackles.’
Kim actually called Lisa before Lisa heard from the studio that Billie was coming back as Death. Kim protested that she sat on the news for a bit and assumed Lisa had heard when she called to talk to her about it.
Lisa has her own headcannon about (Julian’s) Death and Billie-she thinks that every time Death was talking with Dean and cutting Dean a bargain, Billie was there, visible only to Death, giving a running commentary on how that was a bad idea and Death was letting Dean get away with all kinds of things…only to realize, when she was promoted to Death, that there was a reason the Winchesters get a free pass to break the rules- because the universe needs them.
One of the things Lisa appreciates about this fandom is the positivity. She wants to use her social media presence to promote positivity but was getting a pushback from her other connections about always saying upbeat things and was feeling hesitant to post, but now she loves that she has a platform where that is welcomed.
Kim hasn’t ever used her ‘mom voice’ on Jared and Jensen-‘not fair to fight the boys with weapons they don’t have access to.’ However in the episode where she was helping Sam find Dean (who had been taken into the past by Chronos) she did use her mom voice and Jared jumped back in awe.
If Jody hadn’t met Sam and Dean would she still have become a hunter? No, she would have died because she wouldn’t have known how to handle the supernatural. She had lost herself until Sam came along and said ‘we need to do this and this’ and she followed his lead.
None of the girls in Wayward Sisters, as much as she loves them, will ever replace her child-she was only a mom to one kid who is now dead. She isn’t jealous that Mary has come back to be the boys’ mother, nor is she judgmental as to how Mary is doing-Jody has come to know there are many shades of gray.
A lot of the panel involved Lisa and Kim singing the praises of each other and the rest of the SPN women, how they are each other’s unwavering support, and how it is simply amazing the gift SPN has given them, so far beyond anything that could have been expected!
The most emotional moment of the panel came when a young woman said that she hadn’t ben parented very well and that she wanted Kim to be her mother. Kim, with great passion, explained that if you can see a quality in another person, then you already have it, you just need to find and nurture it…if this girl could see in Kim how she wanted to be, she had those qualities already. I actually teared up a little at the emotion and conviction as Kim was speaking.
It was fascinating to me how the tenor of the womens’ panel was so opposite of David and Adam’s-both were hugely enjoyable, but the guys gave a comedy show while the women gave an Oprah-like emotional feel-good presentation. I loved them both!
Karaoke
Adrienne and I signed up to sing at karaoke but didn’t get picked. However we ended up staying for the whole 2 hours because we were enjoying ourselves (though I have to admit I did not know half the songs.) The cast leading the audience were Rob, Matt, Adam, David, Kim, and Lisa, who all got into the spirit. The most fun to watch was David-he did not hesitate to make a fool of himself with 80’s dance moves…and then near the end he did a solo karaoke of the song he said Ketch would have sung for Mary: ‘Faith’ by George Michael (which is about lovers playing games.)
The moment that sticks in my mind was almost at the very end, when a man came up to sing ‘Eye of the Tiger.’ He was in a wizard costume and I couldn’t tell his age, but Kim seemed to recognize him. Unfortunately he was very out-of-sync with the lyrics-obliviously so-but giving his all to the performance. And every one of the actors on the stage circled around him protectively and took turns putting their heads next to him to guide his singing as best they could. They didn’t have to do that-they could have backed off and let him die up there-but they all were giving him support for getting up and trying, acknowledgment that he made the effort. That really showed just what caliber of people the SPN cast are!
The final karaoke song was a rousing rendition of ‘Carry on, Wayward Son,’ after which we crashed at the hotel for a little sleep.