SO. THIS HAPPENED.
Okay, first, watch this video. PSYCH. I cannot find a way to make this video work to actually share online at this time. My computer is young and stupid and doesn't know how to do things right now. Fortunately most of what was in the video is in the post anyway.
Just...read it.
THIS IS THE STORY OF HOW ME, EMILY, AND MY SISTER TRISHA BECAME ROCK STARS WENT TO CHICAGO TO SEE STARSHIP. It is about Starship a lot. Therefore, if you really do not want to know ANYTHING about Starship before it hits YouTube, maybe don't read this. I talk a LITTLE bit about specific characters, musical elements, things we've already seen in released photographs and a couple of one-liners. I do NOT talk about roles people play and how, great big spoilery stuff, plot elements, actual lines of dialogue in context or anything big and crazy like that, however, and I have tried to write this in a way that keeps as much concealed as possible and does not blow the punchlines to any jokes. You can probably read this and still come away EXCITED!!! about all the new stuff I said rather than upset that I have ruined things, js. This is more about our experiences than it is about the show itself. (With relevant tweets included.) If you DO want to know more about the show than I have said here, ask me privately! BECAUSE I COULD TALK ABOUT IT FOREVER OKAY. that is all.
/DISCLAIMER AND SPOILER WARNING OKAY SERIOUSLY DON'T GET MAD AT ME IF YOU READ BEYOND HERE.
So I guess it all starts at the Norfolk airport! We made it there relatively harmlessly with about half an hour of extra time that we didn't need. Printed our boarding passes, made it to our gate and just chilled! Since we were packing so light for something so AWESOME we kind of didn't think to bring stuff that would keep us occupied in our dead-lull boredom spots. This was probably a bad idea, in hindsight. Sigh.
We took this dumb picture to pass the time, and to mark the beginning of our adventure:
Right.
Our gate was busy, but not necessarily crowded, and there were plenty of empty seats. But of course some old, creepy guy is going to decide to sit in the seat right next to Trisha instead. (that awkward moment where there are a ton of open seats in a public place but a total stranger decides to sit RIGHT NEXT TO YOU #poortrisha) Fortunately another flight left, a TON of people cleared out, and eventually he moved to the section across from us instead.
I tried to keep myself occupied by hovering around on Twitter. Ahaha. Since Steph from Side B had already messaged me telling me that Brosenthal, Lily and Nick Strauss were gonna be there the same night as us, I wasn't surprised to see them tweeting about it - but I was super-excited to see that Corey Lubowich was also going to be riding down with them!! Because you may have picked up on my Lubo-creepstatus. (@CoreyLubo @Brian_Rosenthal @LilyMarks can't wait to see you guys and all the other @TeamStarKid superstars tonight!! :) TO WHICH COREY ACTUALLY RESPONDED. hence the retweet and the YES YOU WILL.)
Our plane was really tiny and also very boring. My boarding pass took forever to actually scan - not a worrying amount of time, but enough that I could tell I was holding up the line (OF COURSE ME!!!) and feeling like a jackass lolol. We finally got on though and I sat in the window seat. We poked through the in-flight stuff and found....this:
EMO HORSE. I promptly picture-mailed it to Avery before we took off and I had to turn off my phone. ahahaha. Other than that we just kind of hung out and I almost fell asleep, considering how badly I had slept the night before out of omg fucking anticipation. By the time we got to O'Hare we both had to pee REALLY BADLY so we raced to a bathroom, where we regrouped and also put our coats on because Norfolk had been nearly 70 and Chicago was...nowhere near that. (But at least it was like, manageable-cold. Our constant mantra was basically IT'S NOT 7.) At this point we realized that my hoodie was the same color as Trisha's sunglasses and her jacket was the same color as my sunglasses. Which was stupid. sigh.
We were both pretty hungry too, but we didn't want to get expensive airport food, and it was probably smarter for us to wait until closer before the show so that we didn't get super-hungry again while the show was still running. The plan we eventually made was to take a taxi to the theater, and then find food within walking distance of the theater so that we could get back to it asap when we were done. I like going places with Trisha I have decided because we basically just make chill plans and then do them, no trying to be super-structured and no fussing about whether or not what we're doing is a good idea and arguing about it. It was so solid. :D
Our taxi ride took about a thousand years and cost us about a thousand dollars because we were stuck in traffic like FOREVER. Ugh and we were in one of the minivan ones okay, so there's this obnoxious video screen in the back that's only playing like the same couple of things over and over: it was like a Jimmy Kimmel spot with Adam Sandler, a news bit on how energy drinks are bad for kids, a news bit on how some caramel coloring in cola might be causing cancer, some stuff about a technology conference with Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs in attendance, some bit about this ~car of the future~.... we were stuck in this taxi for so long Trisha and I had them all practically memorized. ugh. The only thing that sort of livened up our ride a bit was the moment when our driver suddenly decided to start TAPPING ON THE WINDOW FOR NO REASON oh my god it was so weird and we were like "!!!! wtf" and freaking a little. So not cool. I have never wanted a car ride to be over more and I was heinously relieved when it was.
We hopped out on the street right around where we needed to be, but on the wrong side of the road. However, because we had only just gotten there, we hadn't really figured that out yet. We were semi-lost and looking for something to help us figure out what was going on, when we saw these two girls across the street. They were definitely in our age bracket, and one of them had a Hufflepuff backpack, and they were kind of looking at us...and we were easily identifiable by the bright-ass sunglasses propped on our heads. They were there for the same reasons we were. I tried to make some dramatic "oh, okay! :D" hand gestures across at them and then we crossed the street and joined them.
Me and Trisha were like, "Oh hey! What's up! StarKid! Fuck yeah!" (well, attitude-wise, anyway. This is most likely not what we actually said.)
And these two chicks were like, "Hey. Yeah. We've been here forever. /pokerface"
Annnd that was basically all they said to us. Okay, look, we appeared noticeably lost, and were also obviously trying to find a place to eat, and get excited about the show. And these chicks were just...LAME about it. Fortunately for us there was this like "hey find stuff!" directory post RIGHT next to where they were, and we could just consult that instead. When an inanimate post/sign is more personable and helpful than an actual human being? You are doing it wrong, bitches. And you are not in Hufflepuff. Because jesus christ, we needed to FIND something. :/ that fucking girl. (First stop: the only two girls who are stupidly in line yet, who were awkwardrude & very unhelpful. Second stop: IHOP. STARVING. #starship)
The IHOP was like a block and a half from where we were and wasn't very crowded when we got there - I guess it was still right around 5 when we got there, but that meant it was 6 Norfolk time and that is an hour later than I usually eat dinner. Considering the two of us had had a yogurt parfait apiece to eat that day, we were ready to srsly eat. I got Nutella crepes and some hash browns (which I ate ALL OF, srs IHOP food baby). Our waitress was like, cute and bubbly to the point of us kind of wanting to punch her in the face after a while. (Slightly-overenthusiastic-to-the-point-of-being-annoying waitress just told us Darren & a bunch of other dikrats were in this IHOP recently. To which naderegen responds LICK THE FLOOR MAYBE YOU CAN TASTE THEM ahahahaha I love this fandom)
But seriously, she was so like...into us. Chatting and wanting to know EVERYTHING about what we were doing and we were just like "...." Her nametag said Ly. Like, okay, that is the name of the fairy in Ray-Man. And that's about how annoying she was. When she finally got it out of us that we were doing the StarKid thing, she was like "Oh...is that those guys - from YouTube? :D" and we were like "yes..." and she was like "You know, a bunch of them were all in here the other day! :D That one guy and then a bunch of the rest of them! :D" and we were like "...what one guy?" and she was like "Darren Criss. :D" It was like every time she said something really vague like she didn't know a whole lot about what she was talking about, all we had to do was follow it up with a question or another little bit of info we had and SUDDENLY SHE KNEW EVERYTHING. I couldn't tell if she was being deliberately fake to like, try to cover up how much she actually knew or if she was just super-weird. She asked us some questions about Starship which we answered, and said "I only know what they told me lolol," but then was like "So have you been following them since they were at Michigan?" and we were like "Yes..." YOU ONLY KNOW WHAT THEY TOLD YOU. BUT YOU KNOW THEY CAME FROM UMICH. asldkjfahksd we were just so disoriented by this crazy waitress girl. She was nice but MAN. (We figured they were probably in there for/shortly after Darren's birthday. Drunk/hungover people like breakfast food, right? lolol)
She wasn't even the craziest thing that happened during IHOP, though. The craziest thing that happened during IHOP was when Jaime Lyn, Corey, and Amalea walked by out the window.
FIRST CONTACT.
Oh god we both kind of noticed them at the same time, Jaime was wearing this super-awesome teal coat and they were just kinda bustling along toward the theater space and Trisha and I literally eye-followed them like when you run a toy slowly in front of a cat. FUCKING HYPNOTIZED. I will forever remember this moment as the first time I saw a member of Team StarKid in real life. The fact that it was probably two of my favorite people from the group (and Amalea too I love her don't get me wrong ♥) made it that much more insane. I think this was when it kind of hit us that THIS WAS ACTUALLY HAPPENING OH MY GOD. and from then on out we were just crazy.
We escaped Ly the IHOP Fairy and walked back in the direction we had come from until we got to that guidey post again. We were really baffled as to the actual location of the theater though because nothing had the actual name OF the theater on it...yet eventually I remembered "oh, wait, it's in this LGBT center." We found the center on the directory, and used Trisha's iPhone to figure out how to get to it. And then realized it was seriously right there and we were just retarded. Whomp whomp. Once we got inside, however, there were nice idiot-proof signs that were like "Starship is on the third floor!" We took the stairs up to the second floor but then the stairs we were on kind of...stopped so we got in the elevator. These tweets happened.
:: lol so forgot this was an lgbt center...sup black drag queens #starship
:: Also Nick Lang just got on the elevator we just got off...I was like PLAY IT COOL OH JEEZ
(He totally did that creeper!elevator thing people do sometimes where they like slink around the corner to the door rather than just walking straight in. Also he is just as little as he always looks, kind of around my size, crazy.) THE BLACK DRAG QUEENS THO. we were in the elevator with a queen and then just another regular black dude and they were laughing the whole time and I couldn't help but feel like they were laughing at us, because we were so obviously Not From Around Here and going to the stupid nerd thing on the third floor. WELL WHATEVER FOLKS. /dealwithit
There were a good number of people up there when we got there but we were definitely in the first wave. We stopped to regroup, take off our jackets and stuff, scope the place out. FREAK OUT BECAUSE WE WERE ACTUALLY THERE. I spotted Corey almost immediately, hovering at the front-of-house table looking dapper as fuck (srsly, red button-down and a vest and just stylin' on errbody). I was slightly creep-status, ngl, I really wanted to go take a picture with him but I didn't want to be That Guy and by the time Trisha had psyched me up to do it he was bustling off somewhere down the hall with a srs bizness On A Mission face so we just decided to check out the merch table instead. (We also saw Julia walk by! ugh she is pretty, it's not fair.)
The merch was all pretty cool but was only available before the show, which I think was kind of a mistake, eve though I realize it had to do with their time constraints. I think people would have been way more likely to by Starship-related stuff after watching it, still high from how awesome it was, rather than getting it before they even knew what they were getting into! It also didn't help that two of the things I most would have wanted to buy, the kickass belt and the limited-edition hoodie, didn't look like they really came in sizes that weren't for skinny sixteen-year-olds. (It didn't help that 80% of the people there were skinny sixteen-year-olds.) The best part about the merch table, to be honest, was the big blankety thing they had running around the bottom of it, that anyone who came to see the show could write all over and sign. I definitely did that because I am a goober.
(I know I know I cannot come up with anything profound on the spot like that ugh I am stupid.)
The FUNNIEST part about the merch table, meanwhile, was the sign advertising the hand puppets. The sign said that they were signed by "Joey Richter." Like, it had the quotes on it. fffff. Trisha and I were just kind of making faces at each other like "...'Joey Richter'? Airquotes? That is super-dubious...." We think what they were getting at was that it's got his signature on it but he didn't individually sign every single one. I studied on it and it could be authentic but it could also just be mass-produced. Who knows. (I bought one.)
stuff, y0.
While we were hovering around the merch table this girl in a Gryffindor scarf goes, "Hey, I love your earrings :D" And I was like, "FUNNY YOU SHOULD MENTION THAT!" Because singingblonde16 sent along with me a bunch of extra pair to try and sell. This girl was so excited about it, and it was SO cute, because she was like "I don't even have my ears pierced...but I will get them pierced to wear these earrings." ADORABLE. Her awesomeness made up for the fact that I didn't sell any of the other ones.
One of their staffy housey people jumped up on a chair and got us all to quiet down and listen and was like, "Get in this line to pick your tickets/programs up and the order of that will be the order you can go in the theater!" So we scurried to definitely do that. But while Trisha was holding our spot in line I did buy the buggy hand puppet (which really looks NOTHING like ANY of the bugs in the show idgi) and a few buttons for myself, singingblonde16, neonrainbow913, and nwkd. We made it through the line very quickly and ended up being numbers 54 and 55. Corey was RIGHT THERE and I finally just had to say something to him ahahahahaaaa I was like "lol I've been tweeting at you for like half an hour." Which was kind of true because I tweeted ABOUT him from the IHOP and also at him from the airport but really just made me sound creepier than I actually was.
Although maybe I am really that creepy because as soon as we were out of the line and sitting back down to regroup again I went @CoreyLubo no, seriously. :) And I swear to you I saw him check his phone, scan the room for me, spot me and smile a little. GUYS I CAN'T ♥♥♥
So then we had time to kill for a while because they weren't seating till like 6:40. We checked out our programs!
Adorable.
The programs are really funny, everyone's bios are so sweet (Darren's is forever long and half about Blaine though, I was like OVERACHIEVER) and like...just looking at the names of characters was enough to get me more excited about the show. Like Jim Povolo playing a part called "The Overqueen." RIGHT? RIGHT.
When that stopped holding our attention I decided it would be a smart idea to take this stupid 47-second video. There were a lot more people there than there had been when we got there and I was hoping to get kind of a "WHOOHOO WE'RE ALL GOING TO SEE STARSHIP!!" screaming room reaction. Sadly that did not happen. To be honest, I was expecting the whole thing to be way more like an anime convention-type atmosphere than it was. Instead, people there seemed really new to this whole "large fandom gathering" thing and were kind of boring - or else just really socially awkward or something idk. That girl with the Gryffindor scarf who bought Jessi's earrings was really cute and nice though (at the very beginning), and the girl with the curly hair and the green Keep Calm shirt (:16). That Girl with the Hufflepuff backpack who was unhelpfulrude is also in this video. askjdf.
So since that got me absolutely nowhere, and since I really, really wanted to make some new friends here you guys :(, I decided to try to jump into the game of Ninja that three girls from about :21 in that video were playing. I sucked pretty badly because I've never actually played before, just watched other people play some, but it was a fun way to kind of start a conversation with them. They were all probably younger than me, and were from the area, so they were really impressed that we came from Virginia. We all introduced ourselves but I literally remember no names except for possibly...Ellen. That was the girl that kind of looked like blonde Panda I think. While we were chatting another girl jumped in, and she was there all the way from Florida, so that made us feel less weird for being from Virginia. It was cool to just kind of pal around with some people. WAY COOLER THAN THAT OTHER GIRL WHO CLEARLY WANTED NOTHING TO DO WITH US ugh.
While we were talking to these chicks is I guess when people figured out Brian, Lily and Nick were there...whomp whomp. I told them, I was like "Oh yeah I got this message from Stephanie from Side B and she totally said they were gonna be here, that's exciting." They were over hugging on Corey and Amalea and the rest of them but they were quickly drawing a hovering crowdcircle and I was like "really people? way to be tacky." We were at least going to wait until it looked like they were actively acknowledging fans rather than trying to bro around with the people they actually knew. Jeez.
(Does that mean I didn't creep?
ch, no. what do you take me for.)
AROUND THIS TIME I finally managed to make myself actually talk to Corey and get a picture with him. The other three (and Gordon Granger!! seriously!!!) had ducked back into the theater I think to maybe see some other people so the crowd was thinner and I was able to get up to him. He was really nice and cute and just everything I expected asdjfaskdjf
Amalea was nice enough to take one with both of us yaaayy
And so when I'm talking to him he's like "yeah sorry I guess I wasn't getting @replies. Oh guess what. They're filming tonight."
FILMING. THE NIGHT I'M THERE. I JUST. THEY ARE FILMING TONIGHT. cue my obnoxious laugh all over youtube. #starship Seriously, I know Friday night cannot possibly be the ONLY night they filmed - and they probably did it because they knew Nick, Brian and Lily were going to be there - but when this hits the internet? it is seriously going to be a game of CAN WE HEAR EMILY LAUGHING OR CLAPPING. ;alsdh;fakjsdf I was so not prepared for that to be happening. Like, I had kind of wistfully DREAMED of that being the case but never thought it would be real and oh my god.
So as a result of broing around with Lubo, we ended up just...right at the front of the pack by the doors! Imagine that! :D Brian and Nick came back out again, don't remember if Lily was with them, and in the process of trying to tweet something or text Nicole about meeting Corey or something I just...managed to creep some.
Nick was so fine all night ugh.
They finally started letting people in!! The same girly from before was calling out by the numbers on our programs in groups of like 10 or 15. We got KILLER seats kind of far stage right in the third row. The stage-right camera was off behind our left shoulders. Legit. I sat next to this adorable little boy who couldn't have been older than 11 or 12 (about :08 in that stupid video). He looked like he was probably there because his older sister was into it, but he turned out to be totally into it too, and seamlessly nailed in this 'totally awesome' joke at the first opportunity, good for you kid. On Trisha's other side was the girl at about :30 in the short video, in the corner with the grey sweatshirt on. She becomes kind of relevant later. Lily, Gordon, Nick and Brian were in the row behind us - Lily was on the stage-left aisle, and Brian was the one who ended up sitting next to a fan. It was that cute girl with the curly hair in the green Keep Calm shirt! Oh my god she was ADORABLE the whole time. She was super-nice and super-normal on the outside, but you could tell on her face that she was doing this silent OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG I AM SITTING NEXT TO BRIAN FUCKING ROSENTHAL on the inside. (I found her on Twitter afterward. so cute.) That Girl & her friend got fairly centered seats in the front row and we could see her stupid haircut the whole time. Bitch.
People started figuring out they were there and passing stuff through the audience for them to sign.
Creepstatus.
They were really chill and nice about it, with the possible exception of Lily. I'm starting to get the feeling that the fandom kind of frightens Lily - not that she's a bitch about it, but that she'd rather just stay out of it because it's big and weird. ESPECIALLY Friday night, when she was not there as a part of the show but just to see the show like anyone else, I felt like she really didn't want to get into the fandom stuff. But I can't say I blame her!! She was at least nice enough to sign, along with Nick and Brian, my rocketship. (Also: Lily Marks/Jack Stratton brohug!! #starship She went over to where the band was against the stage-left wall and it was one of the cutest moments I witnessed all night. aahhhh)
They actually still had the rocketship, Brian I think, while a bunch of people from the back section of the audience were coming up to get signatures, and someone goes "whoa that is so cool whose is that???" And I look up, and it's the girls I played Ninja with, so I'm like "That's mine!!" and they were like "OH IT'S YOURS???" Haaa they were so awesome I want to find you guys omg
I was just sending down my scrapbook for signatures too when the lights started dimming. Brian sent it back and was like "intermission!!" so I took it and stuck it back with the rest of my stuff (which I still had all of with me...because we never found a hotel before the show...whomp whomp we looked so dumb) under my seat and turned to face front and like GET THE FUCK EXCITED.
Oh yeah that happened. When I saw the released image of this part of the set, that was basically what sealed the deal on my NEEDING to bring the rocketship with me for signatures. Yeah, it was big and clumsy and breakable. But it was right.
Nick Lang comes on a voiceover to do an house-opening speech with all the standard welcome/don't film this you dicks/turn your phones off/here's the emergency exits kind of stuff. Except you know what he opens with? "Ladies...and gentlemen...and Gordon Granger..." Nick Strauss &co. fucking lost it laughing, and yeah, so did I. I was the only person in the fan!audience laughing with them. Because no one else knew who Gordon was. Because I am a stalker. DEAL WITH IT.
And then the tweet about that was the last tweet because from here on out, it was just...STARSHIP. STARSHIP YOU GUYS!!!!! GUYS I CANNOT. OH MY GOD. There was that video segment we all heard about on Twitter right at the very beginning (I cheered when Pomme appeared, and so did no one else in the theater god make me stop already), and then from the moment I first saw Joey onstage I was just totally enraptured. From the moment the music and the singing oh my god first started I was just fucking...GONE. It was a StarKid production through and through, you guys. Let me just make sure that point gets driven home to you, before I start talking about all the stupid jokey stuff: the emotional part. You think you know what StarKid's like watching it on YouTube but you will never, NEVER be able to synthesize that feeling of watching it unfold right before your eyes. It's the most beautiful thing that's ever happened to me.
...But that didn't mean I wasn't laughing my ass off. WHAHAHA. Seriously, all that stuff about being able to hear me laughing in the video version? That's not exaggeration. There were parts where there were literally only three people laughing noticeably: me, the girl on the other side of Trisha, and Nick Strauss. I felt bad for Trisha because she really got stuck between the two most loud and obnoxious fans in the whole audience. HOW DID THAT HAPPEN HAHA. (The thing about the other girl was though that she would laugh like...not when you were suppose to laugh sometimes. It was kind of awkward. At least I was normal about my obnoxiousness.) And Nick laughing was probably funnier than the show itself at some parts. It was so fucking heartwarming to hear their IRL friends getting excited and loving everything and laughing at all the jokes just as much as the fans were. God, everything was just so awesome. There aren't enough superlatives in the world.
Okay, so remember when Alex Carpenter saw AVPS and he made that funny segment about "here's a list of stuff that will be funny and make more sense to you when you come back and watch this over after you see the show?" Here's the Emily and Trisha Starship version. We broke it down into acts. :D
ACT 1:
- schience officer
- THE OVERQUEEN
- nourishment
- mammal wranglers
- everything Meredith Stepien says, ever
- Farm Planet
- calculus
- Joe Walker's mustache
- dead god
- KICK IT UP A NOTCH
Julia Albain is wearing the same wig she wore as Percy, and Joey is fucking gorgeous the whole time, and Lauren does this hilarious laughing/crying thing, and Jaime Lyn does this depraved thing with her tongue. There was an Outlaw Star reference from the moment Denise Donovan walked onstage. There was the reappearance of the classic headband (and really, how could they leave it out?) that they worked into the realistic plot of the show in a clever, cheeky way. THERE WAS THIS ONE JOKE, OKAY, they planted the seed of this joke at the very beginning of the show, all right? And if you're paying even a dust speck's worth of attention to it, you should get it the moment they introduce it even though they do it in a very oblique way - like me and Trisha did. So then you can hear me laughing at it (when no one else is, as usual) nearly every time they bring it up again for a good chunk of the show. It's not till act 2 that Walker's character finally comes out and says what the joke is, making it obvious for everyone, and that? THAT was when everyone else in the theater got it. And by that time, it was almost not funny, it was almost facepalm-worthy that really, no one else got that yet??? AUGH. XD
But seriously, I'm not kidding when I say Joey is gorgeous the whole time, both voice-wise and character-wise and just beautiful Joey-wise. He especially was a huge part of this being like "IT IS SO NOT THE SAME ON YOUTUBE OMG HOW HAVE I LIVED WITHOUT THIS FOR SO LONG." However...for every one good thing I have to say about Joey?
I have two or three good things to say about Dylan Motherfucking Saunders.
Seriously, folks, this shit is so far from Dumbledore it's ridiculous. I always knew he had it in him but it's another thing entirely to actually see it happening. Congratulations to some of you out there if you have been Team Dylan from the very very start: Starship is your excuse to say I TOLD YOU SO for about a thousand years and go change your panties. seriously. Like, if you ever entertained a pipe dream notion of seeing Dylan as Audrey II in Little Shop, Starship will satisfy your fantasies. JUST SAYIN'.
After the magical Lauren/Walker Bromance and Joey And Dylan Are Fucking Flawless Hour, it was intermission! I saw I'd gotten a text from my mom I'd missed, because I'd forgotten to let her know I made it to Chicago safely, whoops. I texted her back and made sure she knew I was all right. I was then like, "I'm going to make an LJ phonecall post!" Except that turned out to be a fucking awful idea. I wish Tumblr's phone-post feature was fucking working because it would have turned out so much better, but instead what happened was that I don't think my current phone number and current LJ account are synched to one another correctly, and then I accidentally hung up when I was done instead of pressing pound, so what I think I just did was drop in a private post to orenji_shadowix. And since I don't remember the password to that account AT ALL I basically lost my entire shit. Which was just fucking stupid.
So then we kind of went on a mission to find Nick, Brian and Lily to sign my scrapbook! Nick we found no problem, he was standing in the big horizontal break-aisle between the back section and the front section, but when we got up to him he was on the phone. (He does that whole bro-wandering phone thing, it's hilarious, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.) It was apparently an on-air dial-in to Steph from Side B! He was just giving some of his opinions on how it was going so far, and he said the exact words "Dylan is killing it," WHICH WAS EXACTLY WHAT I HAD JUST SAID LIKE EIGHT TIMES INTO MY FAILED LJ THING. We were so all on the same page. Like, you could see it/hear it, coming from them, when Dylan just annihilated it so amazingly. Nick was so fun to have in the audience with us. :3 When he was done with his phonecall he totally signed my scrapbook, and I showed him the Me & My Dick page from when they were in Billboard, and he was really stoked about it. We also tried to get Trisha's shirt signed but we discovered quickly that her shirt and the silver Sharpie Jessi sent with us were just...not friends. This was kind of lame because it meant she had not anything to get signed really for the rest of the night :(. But ugh Nick was kind of the COOLEST guy to hang out with. I love him so much. He is the broest bro to ever bro.
We ducked out into the lobby area trying to find Brian and Lily but they weren't really there, so then I just looked for a water fountain but there wasn't really one of those either. So we just went back in and waited nicely for the show to start again, and it did like REALLY QUICKLY!! Such a short intermission. But I didn't even care because MORE SHOW.
ACT 2!:
- I'm a tough bitch!
- Joe Walker's testicles (I am not even kidding oh my god)
- Junior's bag of weed
- bug muff (trisha will never recover from this oh jesus)
- lifting weights
- Dia de los Muertos!
- do you like shish kebab?
- KILL THEM WITH YOUR HEART
Dude, if act 1 was the Lauren/Walker Bromance Hour, act 2 was the Walker/Joey Bromance Hour. There is just...this monologue speech Walker's character has, and everything about it is just OH MY GOD-inducing. The physical staging when he gives it. The millions of external references he makes in it. The actual plot-related contents OF the speech. I just. I CANNOT. There was also a pretty funny Glee/Darren joke; a moment where Brant Cox really looked like he had just lost the words he was supposed to be singing and had to fumble through to the end of the line and I felt sorry for him; a moment where Brian Holden was wearing the pink sunglasses but then they kind of fell around his face and he spent two lines talking with them sitting on his mouth; a moment where Holden was pretend-shooting the audience and I swear to you he looked me straight in the eye and shot me specifically (and then turned and shot Nick Strauss ahahaha); then the sunglasses were thrown to the stage and Joey was trying to kick them and just...failing and then later Brant tried to kick them off the stage and also failed and just got them in Moses's way; a moment where Holden had a balloon that was supposed to pop and it just totally didn't so he released it and it flew around the stage instead ffff; and okay, the Lauren/Walker bromance was still out in full force and totally adorable. And the culmination of THAT JOKE from act 1 was so hysterical because everyone else in the audience finally GETTING IT was just like...ahahahaha whut. That may be the best most intense joke in the show. Oh god it was so great. XD
But basically by act 2 I was so caught up in the plot and like !!! WHERE ARE YOU GOING WITH THIS that I feel like I missed some more of the aesthetic details I really wanted to soak in, especially with the music. This is DEFINITELY one I need to watch again and again to get everything out of it, and it is SO HARD knowing I can't do that until fucking March!! I swear if this comes out over spring break and we are not all there to watch it together - me, Jessi, Trisha, Cheri, Christine - I will be so fucking upset. They'll just have to pretend I'm there with them by LISTENING TO MY OBNOXIOUS LAUGHTER AND CLAPPING IN THE BACKGROUND ahahaha why do they let me out in public.
To make a short story incredibly long, Starship was fucking glorious and I can't wait until I can share it with everyone. These guys have outdone themselves and put together something amazing. Puppets! DCriss music! The crazy awesome SET oh my god Lubo. just. I feel like I should have more to say here but I don't. I want to keep talking about this forever but I can't. It happened in such a hard-hitting whirlwind and only one other person I know was there to experience it with me and we were just not enough to ground each other into sanity. We came, we saw, we Starship'd. The end.
SO AFTER THE SHOW WAS OVER WE WERE LIKE "FUCK YES LET'S GET OUR MEET & GREET ON." No one was out there yet in the lobby, obviously, they had wigs and puppet harnesses and makeup and costumes to take off, but it was very clear that no one in the audience was leaving until we got us some fucking Joey Richter so we all just kind of...hoverloitered in the lobby area. I saw Lily and Brosenthal trying to sneak out to where fewer people were, ugh I just felt so bad for them getting mobbed like they were. Nick Strauss had like zero problem with it though because he is a bro. :D Trisha and I did our best to regroup and get out all the stuff we had to get signed, Jessi's shirt and Cheri's shirt and stuff.
Joey was out first and it was literally like...the parting of the red seas but in reverse as girls converged on him.
they all have the same color HAIR, what even.
Meanwhile, though, we spotted a relatively accessible Julia, and we were like "HEY!!!" I think we might have actually been the first fans to get to her, she was the only person we ever approached where we weren't waiting for someone else to be done talking to her first. She was SO amazingly lovely in person you guys you just don't even know, like photos cannot convey how beautiful and awesome she is. She was very nice about signing a bunch of things for us (with XOXO J. Albain so cute) and just friendly and SO AWESOME ugh juliaaaaa
one of the pictures I don't look stupid in. sigh.
From Julia we were able to hop pretty easily to Jaime Lyn a couple feet away, although while we were waiting for the girls ahead of us to be done with her I was kind of accidentally in the background of a photo these girls had managed to coerce out of Lily and Brosenthal. And like, it's not even like there was ~CROWD LOL~ behind them and I just happened to be the closest; we were seriously in kind of a dead corner and basically the only people in the background were me...
and Corey.
I had been like "ahh don't want to be in the bg of this pic" and Corey goes "Oh no, actually I like to totally do it on purpose." And I was like, "You know what, you're right, let's do it" and he was like "yess" AND I TOTALLY PHOTOBOMBED THIS PICTURE WITH COREY LUBOWICH, YOU GUYS. WE HAD SUCH AN EPIC ~MOMENT~ AHAHAHAA the greatest. someone find that on facebook for me I am not kidding.
Jaime Lyn tho! She is so beautiful but so skinny omg, I was kind of like eat-a-sandwich status. But she was really friendly, and I wordvomited a little about FYD! and stuff, and then because Jessi said I could if I didn't make many sales, I gave her a pair of the Squirt bottlecap earrings. She was REALLY stoked about them and kind of reached out and touched the ones I was wearing, too, to get a look at them, and was like "you MADE these?" and I was like "my friend did, yeah" and she just seemed to think they were awesome. I hope that was real and not just fan-tolerance-gameface. I hope she actually wears them. XD She signed all my stuff too.
probably the best picture of me, maybe other than the Corey ones.
We could see Jim and Moses from where we were but the next closest person was Dylan, and after how amazing he was I REALLY needed to talk to him. There were other girls with him when we got there but he got to us soon enough, and he was SO nice. (He is ALSO way more gorgeous IRL than in pictures. Seriously, I think all of them are. No photo does these people justice. UGH.) Like, he was RIDICULOUSLY nice though. He signed everything we asked him to sign no problem with "Love, Dylan Saunders," chatted to us about the show, accepted our ridic glowing praise very awesomely... but ugh okay with Dylan there was this moment. I handed him my rocketship for a signature, and he did the whole "oh this is so neat!!" thing that everyone else did when they signed it, but while he was looking at it and checking it out, he kind of...stopped, on the old Darren signature, and just sort of...touched it. And he goes "Oh, wow," with this sort of sadsoft expression on his face, and signs right next to Darren.
GUYS. THEY MISS HIM SO MUCH, GUYS. MY HEART KIND OF BROKE IN THIS MOMENT I CANNOT EVEN EXPLAIN BECAUSE IT WAS SO...OH MY GOD T_____T
In hindsight I really wish we had gotten a picture with Dylan but there were a lot of other girls waiting around, and I knew we needed to be fast to catch 'em all, so we moved on. We had a really nice clear path to Joey for a second but then suddenly shoutygirly from before is on her chair again being like "PEOPLE THE THEATER IS GONNA CLOSE OKAY THEY WANT US TO LEAVE" and some guy in the crowd like a dick started chanting "we're not gonna leave!!" and it was really stupid. And by the time that was over our Joeychances were ruined.
ummm I forget when I snapped this but it was so fucking cute.
JOEY/NICK/GORDON BROMANCE HUG FOREVER. asjkdfalksdf
But like no one was leaving right at first so we plugged on over to Lauren instead, and stood kind of hovering behind her waiting patiently not being rude about it for a LONG time but other people who were less nice than us kept jumping the gun and not letting us in. By that point they WERE getting serious about moving us outside so we got kind of swept up in the current of everything and by the time we were outside we had totally TOTALLY lost Lauren. There is no physical evidence that I was close enough to touch Lauren Lopez. sigh. :( one of the cockblock gun-jumping people? THAT GIRL. THAT FUCKING GIRL.
Once we were outside, however, (which by the way I did not even have my hoodie on and I was still barely even cold because ADRENALINE!!!), Joey's clusterfuck was dissolving A LOT and we could tell that the moment was ~soon. In the meantime literally NO ONE seemed to be talking to Jim, so we went to him instead. SO TALL OMG. And actually despite the fact that he seemed relatively alone, I still kept accidentally encroaching on the chicks before us trying to take pictures. They were not very upfront about it haha they were so quiet and weird. Eventually I stopped being super-awkward and we chatted with him and got stuff signed and I mentioned how I sicced Jose on him at NYCC. He was like "yeah, not a lot of people recognized me there because I was wearing weird clothes..." and I was like "It's a comic convention, that's where you wear weird clothes!" Whatever. Jim was nice.
And then. JOEY!!!!!
He was so cute okay, I don't think you guys fully understand how ADORABLE PUPPYFACE Joey Richter actually is. It was so cute that in hindsight I actually HATE how I interacted with him because I feel like I was just the awkwardest stupidest uncultured jerk and didn't manage to speak to him normally because my brain was going weird, and I probably came off as kind of rude and socially uncool. I really, really need to meet him again in a better setting to erase this past encounter with him and start my track record afresh. CLEAN SLATE STATUS. But I talked to him about the rocketship and how he had already signed it, and I got him to sign my scrapbook on the Me & My Dick page rather than where everyone else was signing, and Trisha made him sign her iPhone because she had basically nothing else, and then we took pictures!!!
There was the one where everyone looked cute that was totally stupid because my flash didn't go.
And then there was the one where it came in clear but JOEY AND I LOOK LIKE IDIOTS. WHAT ARE WE DOING. Trisha is annoyingly adorable in EVERY photo sjkdfahlksd. She was like "Facebook profile picture. Forever. Even when I get married this will be my profile picture."
From Joey we were able to hop easily to Nick Lang and we talked to him for like, two seconds. He was really nice but kind of guarded - I feel like a lot of people were like this, especially him, Jim, Joey and what I managed to see of Lauren. The night was seriously winding down by this point, and I feel like they were all just kind of like GAMEFACE - not "oh ew fangirls let me be fake nice but I really don't want to be here right now" but "oh, I am exhausted from doing a show, all my friends are here and we're going to go hang out soon, I love you all but let's not get too chatty and personal because there's other stuff happening." All of the niceness was genuine, it was obvious, but they just seemed to be running kind of on fangirl autopilot until everyone cleared out rather than putting a whole lot of energy into making serious connections with people they may never see again. Which I think is totally acceptable because there were so many brownblonde sixteen-year-olds. ahahaha. So yeah, I would have liked to spend a longer time really talking to Joey and not just projecting my pre-existing parasocial relationship onto him, but I basically got "HE TOUCHED ME!!!" and then had to leave. And for now I am okay with that.
After we talked to Nick we were like "Lauren's gone, Moses is gone, who is it ABSOLUTELY IMPORTANT we not miss omg omg" and the obvious answer was: duh, fucking Joe Walker!! Fortunately, after we drifted away from Nick Lang, he was literally RIGHT THERE. The coolest thing about Joe (who is also hotter in person, holy shit) was that he WASN'T doing the autopilot gameface thing. A bunch of girls were all talking to him and yeah, some of them you could kind of tell were annoying him a little by not just going away (like THAT GIRL, the biggest cockblock of all, omg srsly just get out of our way), but he was so super-real and chill to everyone and it was cool that he was the last person we got to see of the night. I chatted to him a lot, and he signed my rocketship (the only person to sign in the top pointy green part! lol I was running out of space on it by the time he got it) and then while we were talking more Trisha saved my ass and remembered I wanted him on the MAMD page in my scrapbook and not the other page and she flipped through to find it because my hands were full. TEAMWORK. lol. \o/
This was so the best part omg okay. He signs it, and then realizes it is pretty illegible so he puts "(JW)" underneath it, and then kind of...hovers with the pen. And I am sitting there thinking yes. yes. do it. oh my god. But he goes "...mmm, nah. I won't do it." and I was like "WHAT" and he was like "I can't draw a dick in your book." But we were like "NO WAIT YES DO IT" and a bunch of the other fangirls standing around him were like "YES DO IT!!!" because I could so tell that that's what he was about to do and I was just...WAITING for it and finally I was like "I'm in college, dude, it's okay" and so he goes "...Okay. :D" and then he was like "I drew a dick and a smily face." (And he did.)
And then this happened!
Not as stupid as the Joey one but still nootttt that cute on my part ahaha. I love that he still has his scar and his old-dude eyebrows going. lol no but we were such bitches because we asked if someone would take the picture and this girl was like "I will if you take mine!" so we gave her the camera but then...we got caught up in what was happening and totally left before we actually repaid the favor. WHOOPS.
But Joe was the last person we saw and then we were like okay, fuck, let's regroup. We stopped and finally PUT OUR COATS ON OMG it was cold, and I was like "man I can't believe we missed Lauren and Moses, and I really wanted to see Meredith :(" and Trisha was like "yeah, out of all the girls I really wanted to see Lauren, remember that dream I had" and I was like OH YEAH because lol one time Trisha had this dream that she fell in love with Draco Malfoy but only the Lauren version. whomp whomp. But anyway we're seriously standing there talking about everyone else and we're finally about to leave because Trisha found an in-walking-distance Days Inn for us to stay at on her phone and then I...realized that Meredith was kind of standing behind us the whole time. DAMMIT.
(We also had this great conversation about Joey signing Trisha's phone. She was like "yeah I kind of wanted to dig in my bag and maybe find something else, but I seriously have nothing in there and I'd probably end up like pulling out my underwear or something." And I was like TRISHA I WOULD HAVE PAID YOU SO MUCH MONEY TO ASK JOEY RICHTER TO SIGN YOUR UNDERWEAR YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND. OH MY GOD TRISHA. good times.)
But then I remembered! Before we left! I was like "oh shit I wanted to ask about that Outlaw Star thing!!" because like...yeah, it was an Outlaw Star thing, but it was a pretty obscure one, and it could just as easily have been an accident or a coincidence. Nick was long-gone and I'd never seen Matt or Holden, but I remembered suddenly that Walker had a book-writing credit on the show too, and he was still there with the last few girls, so I ran back over to him, and I was like "I HAVE A QUESTION!!"
And so I asked about it and he was like "Um. ...Yes. It was. Oh wow. I'm gonna have to pass that along to Matt, that someone said something about it." and I was like "Yeah okay Outlaw Star is like my favorite anime of all time" and he was like "Yeah! I like, I told Matt that no one would get that, I was like 'just make something up, it's not important' but he was like 'no....' Wow. Yeah that's one of those jokes, all those jokes that are like...me, and Matt, get them, and that's it." And I talked about how much I loved his monologue with all the references in it, and he nodded and was like "yeah that's so just for the 1% that get them" and laughed some, and I mentioned a joke they'd done on Darren and he was like "I don't even think Darren has gotten that joke yet." WAHAHAHA. Oh mannnnn I just felt so fucking cooooooll I hope someone says something about it, like, really.
So FINALLY, after our long-ass crazy COLD night, we were leaving the theater. We started walking to this Days Inn. In the wrong direction. UGH. We ended up passing that IHOP again and again lol. There were a ton of post-Starship people in there, we were like "bitches we ate at the IHOP before it was cool~" On our cold, slightly-scary walk we realized just how gay the part of Chicago we were in was.
yep. There was also a ~toy store that seriously just had dildoes and shit sitting out on shelves where anyone walking by the storefront window could see them, and a guy inside giving a sales pitch for one of them to some people. And more black drag queens. HELLO WE ARE IN A BIG-ASS LIBERAL CITY AND NOT HAMPTON ROADS. ahahaha. Also at this point I had like, phantom sunglasses-on-head feeling from wearing them propped on my head pretty much ALL DAY (including the duration of the show because I am a fangirl like that). I kept thinking they were still there when they weren't. I can still kind of feel them if I like, think about it.
the walk was very very cold tho. our thighs legit went numb. But finally we got there and this happened in the lobby:
whut.
There was this very nice concierge named Keith who joked with us about the cow though, helped us check in and gave us two room keys even though I said we only needed one (and therefore I could steal one for my scrapbook SUCCESS). And 21 Guns started playing while we were there so we decided it was a sign! The hotel was kind of a fucking MAZE and it took us a good weird while to find our room and then we got there and it was...FUCKING WEIRD as evidenced in the first video that you couldn't actually see so let me try to somehow describe. We were given a room, we were told, with two double beds (he apologized for this being "all they had," apologized, and I was like "...do you think we're dating or"). But we walk in and there is really only one double bed to be seen...?? so we are like WAT but then surprise! there is this creepy back room off the main room that has the other bed in it! AND THAT ROOM HAS NO DOOR TO IT IT IS JUST A DOORFRAME, WHAT. Likewise, there is a weird little like...external lobby chamber to the bathroom, and THAT has a door, but between that room and the actual toilet/bathing area? no door. I have literally never stayed in a weirder hotel room, and I have been to about 15 anime conventions. seriously what. but yea I had to pee bad and when I went and peed my thighs were BRIGHT FUCKING PINK from thawing from the cold, oh god. I love big cities but I might need one that is warmer than Chicago. (BUT AT LEAST IT WAS NOT 7.)
So yeah we rolled around stupid for a little while, took that video that I can't post, decided to go to bed but then couldn't, got up and WATCHED the video, and finally forced ourselves to sleep. But it was really hard to sleep after motherfucking Starship. Like guys. I cannot. I CANNOT. STARSHIP. I TOUCHED JOEY RICHTER AND JAIME LYN LIKED MY/JESSI'S EARRINGS AND JULIA AND DYLAN AND GLKJHEAKFAKSDFBA. okay.
(also I discovered that my rocketship was a little broken :( I fixed it when I got home but that made me sadddd.)
Woke up way earlier than we wanted to, because we were allowing for a) getting breakfast in the hotel and smoothies at the adjacent Jamba Juice and b) taxi time, because after Friday getting to the theater we were not taking any fucking chances. But oh god it was early, dying. Breakfast was aight, smoothies were delicious, and then we were retarded and not from the city and couldn't get a taxi. BUT NO OKAY we were standing there by the side of the road looking dumb and there was literally not a taxi in sight, and then this guy from the hotel was like "do you need help with something?" like we were stupid and I was like "we just need a taxi" and SUDDENLY ONE MAGICALLY APPEARED FOR HIM TO FLAG DOWN. so it wasn't like we were totally incompetent it was just this stupid coincidence. ugh we were so lame.
This cab ride was a) less annoying and creepy and b) really only took like a third of the time of the one on Friday, ugh, so we get to the airport really early. Whatever. We just kind of check in and go to our gate and we're sitting there with a bunch of dressed-up Navy folks, this one funny blonde woman and a couple of dudes, and as we're sitting there we see our flight...get delayed. So not only were we REGULAR-early but now we're EXTRA-early because of the stupid delay, and we are like "we could have sleeeppppppt D:" We occupied ourselves in the airport talking about things we liked from the show, and funny moments that happened, and the weird and/or cool other people there - cruising around on Twitter I found the girl that sat next to Brian Rosenthal and I follow her now. So cute. Then our flight gets delayed even more. UGH. And then like, they move it to another gate? AND NO ONE TELLS US. if the funny blonde Navy woman hadn't gone and asked about it and then come back to tell other people we wouldn't have known at all. I kept saying if it got delayed past 3 (it was supposed to leave around 11:30) that we should just say fuck it and stay another night and go see the show again. lol.
On our way to the other gate we stopped and got pretzels and lemonade because we were hungry. It was a very good idea. Then over at the other gate we just kind of...spaced out stupid because there was seriously nothing to do and kind of people-watched, or -listened mostly, there were these two tiny little boys that were speaking ...not English right behind us and then this woman from Canada chatting to this woman from Richmond about TV shows and part of that conversation was about Glee and me and Trisha were totally creeperlistening to it bahahaha. Finally FINALLY they call us to board the plane and what happens? We stand there in the fucking bridgeway thing between the plane and the gate just...standing there for like another half an hour. The Navy people were SO ANNOYED ahahaha. I watched the girl in front of us play Yahtzee on her phone. When they FINALLY let us on the plane we had to sit there even more before we took off to "burn some fuel so our takeoff weight is in the right place to make our landing weight correct" or something idk idk airplanes. I had the plane song by Jason Mraz stuck in my head the whole time. On the way back, we fell asleep a little more, got hassled by an overenthusiastic stewardess (we really do not want drinks omg omg), browsed through the exact same in-flight stuff as on our way there trying to kill the boredom, and talked more about the show, remembering little pieces of it here and there to try to put it back together. It was so great. *______*
Back in Norfolk, Emily German was stupid and weird in picking us up and wouldn't just pull into a space normally. We had to run like all the way down the pickup drive to get to her, what even. Then it was really bright and I put my sunglasses on again. PHANTOM SUNGLASSES-ON-HEAD FEELING FOR DAYS AND DAYS I AM TELLING YOU. Then back on campus I went to dinner with Cheri and brought her T-shirt to her and spent all night with Cheri and Trisha trying to get all the details for this post together! Jessi was there for a few minutes too, to get her shirt and the button I bought her.
Yeah. So. STARSHIP. That happened. :D
Just...read it.
THIS IS THE STORY OF HOW ME, EMILY, AND MY SISTER TRISHA BECAME ROCK STARS WENT TO CHICAGO TO SEE STARSHIP. It is about Starship a lot. Therefore, if you really do not want to know ANYTHING about Starship before it hits YouTube, maybe don't read this. I talk a LITTLE bit about specific characters, musical elements, things we've already seen in released photographs and a couple of one-liners. I do NOT talk about roles people play and how, great big spoilery stuff, plot elements, actual lines of dialogue in context or anything big and crazy like that, however, and I have tried to write this in a way that keeps as much concealed as possible and does not blow the punchlines to any jokes. You can probably read this and still come away EXCITED!!! about all the new stuff I said rather than upset that I have ruined things, js. This is more about our experiences than it is about the show itself. (With relevant tweets included.) If you DO want to know more about the show than I have said here, ask me privately! BECAUSE I COULD TALK ABOUT IT FOREVER OKAY. that is all.
/DISCLAIMER AND SPOILER WARNING OKAY SERIOUSLY DON'T GET MAD AT ME IF YOU READ BEYOND HERE.
So I guess it all starts at the Norfolk airport! We made it there relatively harmlessly with about half an hour of extra time that we didn't need. Printed our boarding passes, made it to our gate and just chilled! Since we were packing so light for something so AWESOME we kind of didn't think to bring stuff that would keep us occupied in our dead-lull boredom spots. This was probably a bad idea, in hindsight. Sigh.
We took this dumb picture to pass the time, and to mark the beginning of our adventure:
Right.
Our gate was busy, but not necessarily crowded, and there were plenty of empty seats. But of course some old, creepy guy is going to decide to sit in the seat right next to Trisha instead. (that awkward moment where there are a ton of open seats in a public place but a total stranger decides to sit RIGHT NEXT TO YOU #poortrisha) Fortunately another flight left, a TON of people cleared out, and eventually he moved to the section across from us instead.
I tried to keep myself occupied by hovering around on Twitter. Ahaha. Since Steph from Side B had already messaged me telling me that Brosenthal, Lily and Nick Strauss were gonna be there the same night as us, I wasn't surprised to see them tweeting about it - but I was super-excited to see that Corey Lubowich was also going to be riding down with them!! Because you may have picked up on my Lubo-creepstatus. (@CoreyLubo @Brian_Rosenthal @LilyMarks can't wait to see you guys and all the other @TeamStarKid superstars tonight!! :) TO WHICH COREY ACTUALLY RESPONDED. hence the retweet and the YES YOU WILL.)
Our plane was really tiny and also very boring. My boarding pass took forever to actually scan - not a worrying amount of time, but enough that I could tell I was holding up the line (OF COURSE ME!!!) and feeling like a jackass lolol. We finally got on though and I sat in the window seat. We poked through the in-flight stuff and found....this:
EMO HORSE. I promptly picture-mailed it to Avery before we took off and I had to turn off my phone. ahahaha. Other than that we just kind of hung out and I almost fell asleep, considering how badly I had slept the night before out of omg fucking anticipation. By the time we got to O'Hare we both had to pee REALLY BADLY so we raced to a bathroom, where we regrouped and also put our coats on because Norfolk had been nearly 70 and Chicago was...nowhere near that. (But at least it was like, manageable-cold. Our constant mantra was basically IT'S NOT 7.) At this point we realized that my hoodie was the same color as Trisha's sunglasses and her jacket was the same color as my sunglasses. Which was stupid. sigh.
We were both pretty hungry too, but we didn't want to get expensive airport food, and it was probably smarter for us to wait until closer before the show so that we didn't get super-hungry again while the show was still running. The plan we eventually made was to take a taxi to the theater, and then find food within walking distance of the theater so that we could get back to it asap when we were done. I like going places with Trisha I have decided because we basically just make chill plans and then do them, no trying to be super-structured and no fussing about whether or not what we're doing is a good idea and arguing about it. It was so solid. :D
Our taxi ride took about a thousand years and cost us about a thousand dollars because we were stuck in traffic like FOREVER. Ugh and we were in one of the minivan ones okay, so there's this obnoxious video screen in the back that's only playing like the same couple of things over and over: it was like a Jimmy Kimmel spot with Adam Sandler, a news bit on how energy drinks are bad for kids, a news bit on how some caramel coloring in cola might be causing cancer, some stuff about a technology conference with Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs in attendance, some bit about this ~car of the future~.... we were stuck in this taxi for so long Trisha and I had them all practically memorized. ugh. The only thing that sort of livened up our ride a bit was the moment when our driver suddenly decided to start TAPPING ON THE WINDOW FOR NO REASON oh my god it was so weird and we were like "!!!! wtf" and freaking a little. So not cool. I have never wanted a car ride to be over more and I was heinously relieved when it was.
We hopped out on the street right around where we needed to be, but on the wrong side of the road. However, because we had only just gotten there, we hadn't really figured that out yet. We were semi-lost and looking for something to help us figure out what was going on, when we saw these two girls across the street. They were definitely in our age bracket, and one of them had a Hufflepuff backpack, and they were kind of looking at us...and we were easily identifiable by the bright-ass sunglasses propped on our heads. They were there for the same reasons we were. I tried to make some dramatic "oh, okay! :D" hand gestures across at them and then we crossed the street and joined them.
Me and Trisha were like, "Oh hey! What's up! StarKid! Fuck yeah!" (well, attitude-wise, anyway. This is most likely not what we actually said.)
And these two chicks were like, "Hey. Yeah. We've been here forever. /pokerface"
Annnd that was basically all they said to us. Okay, look, we appeared noticeably lost, and were also obviously trying to find a place to eat, and get excited about the show. And these chicks were just...LAME about it. Fortunately for us there was this like "hey find stuff!" directory post RIGHT next to where they were, and we could just consult that instead. When an inanimate post/sign is more personable and helpful than an actual human being? You are doing it wrong, bitches. And you are not in Hufflepuff. Because jesus christ, we needed to FIND something. :/ that fucking girl. (First stop: the only two girls who are stupidly in line yet, who were awkwardrude & very unhelpful. Second stop: IHOP. STARVING. #starship)
The IHOP was like a block and a half from where we were and wasn't very crowded when we got there - I guess it was still right around 5 when we got there, but that meant it was 6 Norfolk time and that is an hour later than I usually eat dinner. Considering the two of us had had a yogurt parfait apiece to eat that day, we were ready to srsly eat. I got Nutella crepes and some hash browns (which I ate ALL OF, srs IHOP food baby). Our waitress was like, cute and bubbly to the point of us kind of wanting to punch her in the face after a while. (Slightly-overenthusiastic-to-the-point-of-being-annoying waitress just told us Darren & a bunch of other dikrats were in this IHOP recently. To which naderegen responds LICK THE FLOOR MAYBE YOU CAN TASTE THEM ahahahaha I love this fandom)
But seriously, she was so like...into us. Chatting and wanting to know EVERYTHING about what we were doing and we were just like "...." Her nametag said Ly. Like, okay, that is the name of the fairy in Ray-Man. And that's about how annoying she was. When she finally got it out of us that we were doing the StarKid thing, she was like "Oh...is that those guys - from YouTube? :D" and we were like "yes..." and she was like "You know, a bunch of them were all in here the other day! :D That one guy and then a bunch of the rest of them! :D" and we were like "...what one guy?" and she was like "Darren Criss. :D" It was like every time she said something really vague like she didn't know a whole lot about what she was talking about, all we had to do was follow it up with a question or another little bit of info we had and SUDDENLY SHE KNEW EVERYTHING. I couldn't tell if she was being deliberately fake to like, try to cover up how much she actually knew or if she was just super-weird. She asked us some questions about Starship which we answered, and said "I only know what they told me lolol," but then was like "So have you been following them since they were at Michigan?" and we were like "Yes..." YOU ONLY KNOW WHAT THEY TOLD YOU. BUT YOU KNOW THEY CAME FROM UMICH. asldkjfahksd we were just so disoriented by this crazy waitress girl. She was nice but MAN. (We figured they were probably in there for/shortly after Darren's birthday. Drunk/hungover people like breakfast food, right? lolol)
She wasn't even the craziest thing that happened during IHOP, though. The craziest thing that happened during IHOP was when Jaime Lyn, Corey, and Amalea walked by out the window.
FIRST CONTACT.
Oh god we both kind of noticed them at the same time, Jaime was wearing this super-awesome teal coat and they were just kinda bustling along toward the theater space and Trisha and I literally eye-followed them like when you run a toy slowly in front of a cat. FUCKING HYPNOTIZED. I will forever remember this moment as the first time I saw a member of Team StarKid in real life. The fact that it was probably two of my favorite people from the group (and Amalea too I love her don't get me wrong ♥) made it that much more insane. I think this was when it kind of hit us that THIS WAS ACTUALLY HAPPENING OH MY GOD. and from then on out we were just crazy.
We escaped Ly the IHOP Fairy and walked back in the direction we had come from until we got to that guidey post again. We were really baffled as to the actual location of the theater though because nothing had the actual name OF the theater on it...yet eventually I remembered "oh, wait, it's in this LGBT center." We found the center on the directory, and used Trisha's iPhone to figure out how to get to it. And then realized it was seriously right there and we were just retarded. Whomp whomp. Once we got inside, however, there were nice idiot-proof signs that were like "Starship is on the third floor!" We took the stairs up to the second floor but then the stairs we were on kind of...stopped so we got in the elevator. These tweets happened.
:: lol so forgot this was an lgbt center...sup black drag queens #starship
:: Also Nick Lang just got on the elevator we just got off...I was like PLAY IT COOL OH JEEZ
(He totally did that creeper!elevator thing people do sometimes where they like slink around the corner to the door rather than just walking straight in. Also he is just as little as he always looks, kind of around my size, crazy.) THE BLACK DRAG QUEENS THO. we were in the elevator with a queen and then just another regular black dude and they were laughing the whole time and I couldn't help but feel like they were laughing at us, because we were so obviously Not From Around Here and going to the stupid nerd thing on the third floor. WELL WHATEVER FOLKS. /dealwithit
There were a good number of people up there when we got there but we were definitely in the first wave. We stopped to regroup, take off our jackets and stuff, scope the place out. FREAK OUT BECAUSE WE WERE ACTUALLY THERE. I spotted Corey almost immediately, hovering at the front-of-house table looking dapper as fuck (srsly, red button-down and a vest and just stylin' on errbody). I was slightly creep-status, ngl, I really wanted to go take a picture with him but I didn't want to be That Guy and by the time Trisha had psyched me up to do it he was bustling off somewhere down the hall with a srs bizness On A Mission face so we just decided to check out the merch table instead. (We also saw Julia walk by! ugh she is pretty, it's not fair.)
The merch was all pretty cool but was only available before the show, which I think was kind of a mistake, eve though I realize it had to do with their time constraints. I think people would have been way more likely to by Starship-related stuff after watching it, still high from how awesome it was, rather than getting it before they even knew what they were getting into! It also didn't help that two of the things I most would have wanted to buy, the kickass belt and the limited-edition hoodie, didn't look like they really came in sizes that weren't for skinny sixteen-year-olds. (It didn't help that 80% of the people there were skinny sixteen-year-olds.) The best part about the merch table, to be honest, was the big blankety thing they had running around the bottom of it, that anyone who came to see the show could write all over and sign. I definitely did that because I am a goober.
(I know I know I cannot come up with anything profound on the spot like that ugh I am stupid.)
The FUNNIEST part about the merch table, meanwhile, was the sign advertising the hand puppets. The sign said that they were signed by "Joey Richter." Like, it had the quotes on it. fffff. Trisha and I were just kind of making faces at each other like "...'Joey Richter'? Airquotes? That is super-dubious...." We think what they were getting at was that it's got his signature on it but he didn't individually sign every single one. I studied on it and it could be authentic but it could also just be mass-produced. Who knows. (I bought one.)
stuff, y0.
While we were hovering around the merch table this girl in a Gryffindor scarf goes, "Hey, I love your earrings :D" And I was like, "FUNNY YOU SHOULD MENTION THAT!" Because singingblonde16 sent along with me a bunch of extra pair to try and sell. This girl was so excited about it, and it was SO cute, because she was like "I don't even have my ears pierced...but I will get them pierced to wear these earrings." ADORABLE. Her awesomeness made up for the fact that I didn't sell any of the other ones.
One of their staffy housey people jumped up on a chair and got us all to quiet down and listen and was like, "Get in this line to pick your tickets/programs up and the order of that will be the order you can go in the theater!" So we scurried to definitely do that. But while Trisha was holding our spot in line I did buy the buggy hand puppet (which really looks NOTHING like ANY of the bugs in the show idgi) and a few buttons for myself, singingblonde16, neonrainbow913, and nwkd. We made it through the line very quickly and ended up being numbers 54 and 55. Corey was RIGHT THERE and I finally just had to say something to him ahahahahaaaa I was like "lol I've been tweeting at you for like half an hour." Which was kind of true because I tweeted ABOUT him from the IHOP and also at him from the airport but really just made me sound creepier than I actually was.
Although maybe I am really that creepy because as soon as we were out of the line and sitting back down to regroup again I went @CoreyLubo no, seriously. :) And I swear to you I saw him check his phone, scan the room for me, spot me and smile a little. GUYS I CAN'T ♥♥♥
So then we had time to kill for a while because they weren't seating till like 6:40. We checked out our programs!
Adorable.
The programs are really funny, everyone's bios are so sweet (Darren's is forever long and half about Blaine though, I was like OVERACHIEVER) and like...just looking at the names of characters was enough to get me more excited about the show. Like Jim Povolo playing a part called "The Overqueen." RIGHT? RIGHT.
When that stopped holding our attention I decided it would be a smart idea to take this stupid 47-second video. There were a lot more people there than there had been when we got there and I was hoping to get kind of a "WHOOHOO WE'RE ALL GOING TO SEE STARSHIP!!" screaming room reaction. Sadly that did not happen. To be honest, I was expecting the whole thing to be way more like an anime convention-type atmosphere than it was. Instead, people there seemed really new to this whole "large fandom gathering" thing and were kind of boring - or else just really socially awkward or something idk. That girl with the Gryffindor scarf who bought Jessi's earrings was really cute and nice though (at the very beginning), and the girl with the curly hair and the green Keep Calm shirt (:16). That Girl with the Hufflepuff backpack who was unhelpfulrude is also in this video. askjdf.
So since that got me absolutely nowhere, and since I really, really wanted to make some new friends here you guys :(, I decided to try to jump into the game of Ninja that three girls from about :21 in that video were playing. I sucked pretty badly because I've never actually played before, just watched other people play some, but it was a fun way to kind of start a conversation with them. They were all probably younger than me, and were from the area, so they were really impressed that we came from Virginia. We all introduced ourselves but I literally remember no names except for possibly...Ellen. That was the girl that kind of looked like blonde Panda I think. While we were chatting another girl jumped in, and she was there all the way from Florida, so that made us feel less weird for being from Virginia. It was cool to just kind of pal around with some people. WAY COOLER THAN THAT OTHER GIRL WHO CLEARLY WANTED NOTHING TO DO WITH US ugh.
While we were talking to these chicks is I guess when people figured out Brian, Lily and Nick were there...whomp whomp. I told them, I was like "Oh yeah I got this message from Stephanie from Side B and she totally said they were gonna be here, that's exciting." They were over hugging on Corey and Amalea and the rest of them but they were quickly drawing a hovering crowdcircle and I was like "really people? way to be tacky." We were at least going to wait until it looked like they were actively acknowledging fans rather than trying to bro around with the people they actually knew. Jeez.
(Does that mean I didn't creep?
ch, no. what do you take me for.)
AROUND THIS TIME I finally managed to make myself actually talk to Corey and get a picture with him. The other three (and Gordon Granger!! seriously!!!) had ducked back into the theater I think to maybe see some other people so the crowd was thinner and I was able to get up to him. He was really nice and cute and just everything I expected asdjfaskdjf
Amalea was nice enough to take one with both of us yaaayy
And so when I'm talking to him he's like "yeah sorry I guess I wasn't getting @replies. Oh guess what. They're filming tonight."
FILMING. THE NIGHT I'M THERE. I JUST. THEY ARE FILMING TONIGHT. cue my obnoxious laugh all over youtube. #starship Seriously, I know Friday night cannot possibly be the ONLY night they filmed - and they probably did it because they knew Nick, Brian and Lily were going to be there - but when this hits the internet? it is seriously going to be a game of CAN WE HEAR EMILY LAUGHING OR CLAPPING. ;alsdh;fakjsdf I was so not prepared for that to be happening. Like, I had kind of wistfully DREAMED of that being the case but never thought it would be real and oh my god.
So as a result of broing around with Lubo, we ended up just...right at the front of the pack by the doors! Imagine that! :D Brian and Nick came back out again, don't remember if Lily was with them, and in the process of trying to tweet something or text Nicole about meeting Corey or something I just...managed to creep some.
Nick was so fine all night ugh.
They finally started letting people in!! The same girly from before was calling out by the numbers on our programs in groups of like 10 or 15. We got KILLER seats kind of far stage right in the third row. The stage-right camera was off behind our left shoulders. Legit. I sat next to this adorable little boy who couldn't have been older than 11 or 12 (about :08 in that stupid video). He looked like he was probably there because his older sister was into it, but he turned out to be totally into it too, and seamlessly nailed in this 'totally awesome' joke at the first opportunity, good for you kid. On Trisha's other side was the girl at about :30 in the short video, in the corner with the grey sweatshirt on. She becomes kind of relevant later. Lily, Gordon, Nick and Brian were in the row behind us - Lily was on the stage-left aisle, and Brian was the one who ended up sitting next to a fan. It was that cute girl with the curly hair in the green Keep Calm shirt! Oh my god she was ADORABLE the whole time. She was super-nice and super-normal on the outside, but you could tell on her face that she was doing this silent OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG I AM SITTING NEXT TO BRIAN FUCKING ROSENTHAL on the inside. (I found her on Twitter afterward. so cute.) That Girl & her friend got fairly centered seats in the front row and we could see her stupid haircut the whole time. Bitch.
People started figuring out they were there and passing stuff through the audience for them to sign.
Creepstatus.
They were really chill and nice about it, with the possible exception of Lily. I'm starting to get the feeling that the fandom kind of frightens Lily - not that she's a bitch about it, but that she'd rather just stay out of it because it's big and weird. ESPECIALLY Friday night, when she was not there as a part of the show but just to see the show like anyone else, I felt like she really didn't want to get into the fandom stuff. But I can't say I blame her!! She was at least nice enough to sign, along with Nick and Brian, my rocketship. (Also: Lily Marks/Jack Stratton brohug!! #starship She went over to where the band was against the stage-left wall and it was one of the cutest moments I witnessed all night. aahhhh)
They actually still had the rocketship, Brian I think, while a bunch of people from the back section of the audience were coming up to get signatures, and someone goes "whoa that is so cool whose is that???" And I look up, and it's the girls I played Ninja with, so I'm like "That's mine!!" and they were like "OH IT'S YOURS???" Haaa they were so awesome I want to find you guys omg
I was just sending down my scrapbook for signatures too when the lights started dimming. Brian sent it back and was like "intermission!!" so I took it and stuck it back with the rest of my stuff (which I still had all of with me...because we never found a hotel before the show...whomp whomp we looked so dumb) under my seat and turned to face front and like GET THE FUCK EXCITED.
Oh yeah that happened. When I saw the released image of this part of the set, that was basically what sealed the deal on my NEEDING to bring the rocketship with me for signatures. Yeah, it was big and clumsy and breakable. But it was right.
Nick Lang comes on a voiceover to do an house-opening speech with all the standard welcome/don't film this you dicks/turn your phones off/here's the emergency exits kind of stuff. Except you know what he opens with? "Ladies...and gentlemen...and Gordon Granger..." Nick Strauss &co. fucking lost it laughing, and yeah, so did I. I was the only person in the fan!audience laughing with them. Because no one else knew who Gordon was. Because I am a stalker. DEAL WITH IT.
And then the tweet about that was the last tweet because from here on out, it was just...STARSHIP. STARSHIP YOU GUYS!!!!! GUYS I CANNOT. OH MY GOD. There was that video segment we all heard about on Twitter right at the very beginning (I cheered when Pomme appeared, and so did no one else in the theater god make me stop already), and then from the moment I first saw Joey onstage I was just totally enraptured. From the moment the music and the singing oh my god first started I was just fucking...GONE. It was a StarKid production through and through, you guys. Let me just make sure that point gets driven home to you, before I start talking about all the stupid jokey stuff: the emotional part. You think you know what StarKid's like watching it on YouTube but you will never, NEVER be able to synthesize that feeling of watching it unfold right before your eyes. It's the most beautiful thing that's ever happened to me.
...But that didn't mean I wasn't laughing my ass off. WHAHAHA. Seriously, all that stuff about being able to hear me laughing in the video version? That's not exaggeration. There were parts where there were literally only three people laughing noticeably: me, the girl on the other side of Trisha, and Nick Strauss. I felt bad for Trisha because she really got stuck between the two most loud and obnoxious fans in the whole audience. HOW DID THAT HAPPEN HAHA. (The thing about the other girl was though that she would laugh like...not when you were suppose to laugh sometimes. It was kind of awkward. At least I was normal about my obnoxiousness.) And Nick laughing was probably funnier than the show itself at some parts. It was so fucking heartwarming to hear their IRL friends getting excited and loving everything and laughing at all the jokes just as much as the fans were. God, everything was just so awesome. There aren't enough superlatives in the world.
Okay, so remember when Alex Carpenter saw AVPS and he made that funny segment about "here's a list of stuff that will be funny and make more sense to you when you come back and watch this over after you see the show?" Here's the Emily and Trisha Starship version. We broke it down into acts. :D
ACT 1:
- schience officer
- THE OVERQUEEN
- nourishment
- mammal wranglers
- everything Meredith Stepien says, ever
- Farm Planet
- calculus
- Joe Walker's mustache
- dead god
- KICK IT UP A NOTCH
Julia Albain is wearing the same wig she wore as Percy, and Joey is fucking gorgeous the whole time, and Lauren does this hilarious laughing/crying thing, and Jaime Lyn does this depraved thing with her tongue. There was an Outlaw Star reference from the moment Denise Donovan walked onstage. There was the reappearance of the classic headband (and really, how could they leave it out?) that they worked into the realistic plot of the show in a clever, cheeky way. THERE WAS THIS ONE JOKE, OKAY, they planted the seed of this joke at the very beginning of the show, all right? And if you're paying even a dust speck's worth of attention to it, you should get it the moment they introduce it even though they do it in a very oblique way - like me and Trisha did. So then you can hear me laughing at it (when no one else is, as usual) nearly every time they bring it up again for a good chunk of the show. It's not till act 2 that Walker's character finally comes out and says what the joke is, making it obvious for everyone, and that? THAT was when everyone else in the theater got it. And by that time, it was almost not funny, it was almost facepalm-worthy that really, no one else got that yet??? AUGH. XD
But seriously, I'm not kidding when I say Joey is gorgeous the whole time, both voice-wise and character-wise and just beautiful Joey-wise. He especially was a huge part of this being like "IT IS SO NOT THE SAME ON YOUTUBE OMG HOW HAVE I LIVED WITHOUT THIS FOR SO LONG." However...for every one good thing I have to say about Joey?
I have two or three good things to say about Dylan Motherfucking Saunders.
Seriously, folks, this shit is so far from Dumbledore it's ridiculous. I always knew he had it in him but it's another thing entirely to actually see it happening. Congratulations to some of you out there if you have been Team Dylan from the very very start: Starship is your excuse to say I TOLD YOU SO for about a thousand years and go change your panties. seriously. Like, if you ever entertained a pipe dream notion of seeing Dylan as Audrey II in Little Shop, Starship will satisfy your fantasies. JUST SAYIN'.
After the magical Lauren/Walker Bromance and Joey And Dylan Are Fucking Flawless Hour, it was intermission! I saw I'd gotten a text from my mom I'd missed, because I'd forgotten to let her know I made it to Chicago safely, whoops. I texted her back and made sure she knew I was all right. I was then like, "I'm going to make an LJ phonecall post!" Except that turned out to be a fucking awful idea. I wish Tumblr's phone-post feature was fucking working because it would have turned out so much better, but instead what happened was that I don't think my current phone number and current LJ account are synched to one another correctly, and then I accidentally hung up when I was done instead of pressing pound, so what I think I just did was drop in a private post to orenji_shadowix. And since I don't remember the password to that account AT ALL I basically lost my entire shit. Which was just fucking stupid.
So then we kind of went on a mission to find Nick, Brian and Lily to sign my scrapbook! Nick we found no problem, he was standing in the big horizontal break-aisle between the back section and the front section, but when we got up to him he was on the phone. (He does that whole bro-wandering phone thing, it's hilarious, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.) It was apparently an on-air dial-in to Steph from Side B! He was just giving some of his opinions on how it was going so far, and he said the exact words "Dylan is killing it," WHICH WAS EXACTLY WHAT I HAD JUST SAID LIKE EIGHT TIMES INTO MY FAILED LJ THING. We were so all on the same page. Like, you could see it/hear it, coming from them, when Dylan just annihilated it so amazingly. Nick was so fun to have in the audience with us. :3 When he was done with his phonecall he totally signed my scrapbook, and I showed him the Me & My Dick page from when they were in Billboard, and he was really stoked about it. We also tried to get Trisha's shirt signed but we discovered quickly that her shirt and the silver Sharpie Jessi sent with us were just...not friends. This was kind of lame because it meant she had not anything to get signed really for the rest of the night :(. But ugh Nick was kind of the COOLEST guy to hang out with. I love him so much. He is the broest bro to ever bro.
We ducked out into the lobby area trying to find Brian and Lily but they weren't really there, so then I just looked for a water fountain but there wasn't really one of those either. So we just went back in and waited nicely for the show to start again, and it did like REALLY QUICKLY!! Such a short intermission. But I didn't even care because MORE SHOW.
ACT 2!:
- I'm a tough bitch!
- Joe Walker's testicles (I am not even kidding oh my god)
- Junior's bag of weed
- bug muff (trisha will never recover from this oh jesus)
- lifting weights
- Dia de los Muertos!
- do you like shish kebab?
- KILL THEM WITH YOUR HEART
Dude, if act 1 was the Lauren/Walker Bromance Hour, act 2 was the Walker/Joey Bromance Hour. There is just...this monologue speech Walker's character has, and everything about it is just OH MY GOD-inducing. The physical staging when he gives it. The millions of external references he makes in it. The actual plot-related contents OF the speech. I just. I CANNOT. There was also a pretty funny Glee/Darren joke; a moment where Brant Cox really looked like he had just lost the words he was supposed to be singing and had to fumble through to the end of the line and I felt sorry for him; a moment where Brian Holden was wearing the pink sunglasses but then they kind of fell around his face and he spent two lines talking with them sitting on his mouth; a moment where Holden was pretend-shooting the audience and I swear to you he looked me straight in the eye and shot me specifically (and then turned and shot Nick Strauss ahahaha); then the sunglasses were thrown to the stage and Joey was trying to kick them and just...failing and then later Brant tried to kick them off the stage and also failed and just got them in Moses's way; a moment where Holden had a balloon that was supposed to pop and it just totally didn't so he released it and it flew around the stage instead ffff; and okay, the Lauren/Walker bromance was still out in full force and totally adorable. And the culmination of THAT JOKE from act 1 was so hysterical because everyone else in the audience finally GETTING IT was just like...ahahahaha whut. That may be the best most intense joke in the show. Oh god it was so great. XD
But basically by act 2 I was so caught up in the plot and like !!! WHERE ARE YOU GOING WITH THIS that I feel like I missed some more of the aesthetic details I really wanted to soak in, especially with the music. This is DEFINITELY one I need to watch again and again to get everything out of it, and it is SO HARD knowing I can't do that until fucking March!! I swear if this comes out over spring break and we are not all there to watch it together - me, Jessi, Trisha, Cheri, Christine - I will be so fucking upset. They'll just have to pretend I'm there with them by LISTENING TO MY OBNOXIOUS LAUGHTER AND CLAPPING IN THE BACKGROUND ahahaha why do they let me out in public.
To make a short story incredibly long, Starship was fucking glorious and I can't wait until I can share it with everyone. These guys have outdone themselves and put together something amazing. Puppets! DCriss music! The crazy awesome SET oh my god Lubo. just. I feel like I should have more to say here but I don't. I want to keep talking about this forever but I can't. It happened in such a hard-hitting whirlwind and only one other person I know was there to experience it with me and we were just not enough to ground each other into sanity. We came, we saw, we Starship'd. The end.
SO AFTER THE SHOW WAS OVER WE WERE LIKE "FUCK YES LET'S GET OUR MEET & GREET ON." No one was out there yet in the lobby, obviously, they had wigs and puppet harnesses and makeup and costumes to take off, but it was very clear that no one in the audience was leaving until we got us some fucking Joey Richter so we all just kind of...hoverloitered in the lobby area. I saw Lily and Brosenthal trying to sneak out to where fewer people were, ugh I just felt so bad for them getting mobbed like they were. Nick Strauss had like zero problem with it though because he is a bro. :D Trisha and I did our best to regroup and get out all the stuff we had to get signed, Jessi's shirt and Cheri's shirt and stuff.
Joey was out first and it was literally like...the parting of the red seas but in reverse as girls converged on him.
they all have the same color HAIR, what even.
Meanwhile, though, we spotted a relatively accessible Julia, and we were like "HEY!!!" I think we might have actually been the first fans to get to her, she was the only person we ever approached where we weren't waiting for someone else to be done talking to her first. She was SO amazingly lovely in person you guys you just don't even know, like photos cannot convey how beautiful and awesome she is. She was very nice about signing a bunch of things for us (with XOXO J. Albain so cute) and just friendly and SO AWESOME ugh juliaaaaa
one of the pictures I don't look stupid in. sigh.
From Julia we were able to hop pretty easily to Jaime Lyn a couple feet away, although while we were waiting for the girls ahead of us to be done with her I was kind of accidentally in the background of a photo these girls had managed to coerce out of Lily and Brosenthal. And like, it's not even like there was ~CROWD LOL~ behind them and I just happened to be the closest; we were seriously in kind of a dead corner and basically the only people in the background were me...
and Corey.
I had been like "ahh don't want to be in the bg of this pic" and Corey goes "Oh no, actually I like to totally do it on purpose." And I was like, "You know what, you're right, let's do it" and he was like "yess" AND I TOTALLY PHOTOBOMBED THIS PICTURE WITH COREY LUBOWICH, YOU GUYS. WE HAD SUCH AN EPIC ~MOMENT~ AHAHAHAA the greatest. someone find that on facebook for me I am not kidding.
Jaime Lyn tho! She is so beautiful but so skinny omg, I was kind of like eat-a-sandwich status. But she was really friendly, and I wordvomited a little about FYD! and stuff, and then because Jessi said I could if I didn't make many sales, I gave her a pair of the Squirt bottlecap earrings. She was REALLY stoked about them and kind of reached out and touched the ones I was wearing, too, to get a look at them, and was like "you MADE these?" and I was like "my friend did, yeah" and she just seemed to think they were awesome. I hope that was real and not just fan-tolerance-gameface. I hope she actually wears them. XD She signed all my stuff too.
probably the best picture of me, maybe other than the Corey ones.
We could see Jim and Moses from where we were but the next closest person was Dylan, and after how amazing he was I REALLY needed to talk to him. There were other girls with him when we got there but he got to us soon enough, and he was SO nice. (He is ALSO way more gorgeous IRL than in pictures. Seriously, I think all of them are. No photo does these people justice. UGH.) Like, he was RIDICULOUSLY nice though. He signed everything we asked him to sign no problem with "Love, Dylan Saunders," chatted to us about the show, accepted our ridic glowing praise very awesomely... but ugh okay with Dylan there was this moment. I handed him my rocketship for a signature, and he did the whole "oh this is so neat!!" thing that everyone else did when they signed it, but while he was looking at it and checking it out, he kind of...stopped, on the old Darren signature, and just sort of...touched it. And he goes "Oh, wow," with this sort of sadsoft expression on his face, and signs right next to Darren.
GUYS. THEY MISS HIM SO MUCH, GUYS. MY HEART KIND OF BROKE IN THIS MOMENT I CANNOT EVEN EXPLAIN BECAUSE IT WAS SO...OH MY GOD T_____T
In hindsight I really wish we had gotten a picture with Dylan but there were a lot of other girls waiting around, and I knew we needed to be fast to catch 'em all, so we moved on. We had a really nice clear path to Joey for a second but then suddenly shoutygirly from before is on her chair again being like "PEOPLE THE THEATER IS GONNA CLOSE OKAY THEY WANT US TO LEAVE" and some guy in the crowd like a dick started chanting "we're not gonna leave!!" and it was really stupid. And by the time that was over our Joeychances were ruined.
ummm I forget when I snapped this but it was so fucking cute.
JOEY/NICK/GORDON BROMANCE HUG FOREVER. asjkdfalksdf
But like no one was leaving right at first so we plugged on over to Lauren instead, and stood kind of hovering behind her waiting patiently not being rude about it for a LONG time but other people who were less nice than us kept jumping the gun and not letting us in. By that point they WERE getting serious about moving us outside so we got kind of swept up in the current of everything and by the time we were outside we had totally TOTALLY lost Lauren. There is no physical evidence that I was close enough to touch Lauren Lopez. sigh. :( one of the cockblock gun-jumping people? THAT GIRL. THAT FUCKING GIRL.
Once we were outside, however, (which by the way I did not even have my hoodie on and I was still barely even cold because ADRENALINE!!!), Joey's clusterfuck was dissolving A LOT and we could tell that the moment was ~soon. In the meantime literally NO ONE seemed to be talking to Jim, so we went to him instead. SO TALL OMG. And actually despite the fact that he seemed relatively alone, I still kept accidentally encroaching on the chicks before us trying to take pictures. They were not very upfront about it haha they were so quiet and weird. Eventually I stopped being super-awkward and we chatted with him and got stuff signed and I mentioned how I sicced Jose on him at NYCC. He was like "yeah, not a lot of people recognized me there because I was wearing weird clothes..." and I was like "It's a comic convention, that's where you wear weird clothes!" Whatever. Jim was nice.
And then. JOEY!!!!!
He was so cute okay, I don't think you guys fully understand how ADORABLE PUPPYFACE Joey Richter actually is. It was so cute that in hindsight I actually HATE how I interacted with him because I feel like I was just the awkwardest stupidest uncultured jerk and didn't manage to speak to him normally because my brain was going weird, and I probably came off as kind of rude and socially uncool. I really, really need to meet him again in a better setting to erase this past encounter with him and start my track record afresh. CLEAN SLATE STATUS. But I talked to him about the rocketship and how he had already signed it, and I got him to sign my scrapbook on the Me & My Dick page rather than where everyone else was signing, and Trisha made him sign her iPhone because she had basically nothing else, and then we took pictures!!!
There was the one where everyone looked cute that was totally stupid because my flash didn't go.
And then there was the one where it came in clear but JOEY AND I LOOK LIKE IDIOTS. WHAT ARE WE DOING. Trisha is annoyingly adorable in EVERY photo sjkdfahlksd. She was like "Facebook profile picture. Forever. Even when I get married this will be my profile picture."
From Joey we were able to hop easily to Nick Lang and we talked to him for like, two seconds. He was really nice but kind of guarded - I feel like a lot of people were like this, especially him, Jim, Joey and what I managed to see of Lauren. The night was seriously winding down by this point, and I feel like they were all just kind of like GAMEFACE - not "oh ew fangirls let me be fake nice but I really don't want to be here right now" but "oh, I am exhausted from doing a show, all my friends are here and we're going to go hang out soon, I love you all but let's not get too chatty and personal because there's other stuff happening." All of the niceness was genuine, it was obvious, but they just seemed to be running kind of on fangirl autopilot until everyone cleared out rather than putting a whole lot of energy into making serious connections with people they may never see again. Which I think is totally acceptable because there were so many brownblonde sixteen-year-olds. ahahaha. So yeah, I would have liked to spend a longer time really talking to Joey and not just projecting my pre-existing parasocial relationship onto him, but I basically got "HE TOUCHED ME!!!" and then had to leave. And for now I am okay with that.
After we talked to Nick we were like "Lauren's gone, Moses is gone, who is it ABSOLUTELY IMPORTANT we not miss omg omg" and the obvious answer was: duh, fucking Joe Walker!! Fortunately, after we drifted away from Nick Lang, he was literally RIGHT THERE. The coolest thing about Joe (who is also hotter in person, holy shit) was that he WASN'T doing the autopilot gameface thing. A bunch of girls were all talking to him and yeah, some of them you could kind of tell were annoying him a little by not just going away (like THAT GIRL, the biggest cockblock of all, omg srsly just get out of our way), but he was so super-real and chill to everyone and it was cool that he was the last person we got to see of the night. I chatted to him a lot, and he signed my rocketship (the only person to sign in the top pointy green part! lol I was running out of space on it by the time he got it) and then while we were talking more Trisha saved my ass and remembered I wanted him on the MAMD page in my scrapbook and not the other page and she flipped through to find it because my hands were full. TEAMWORK. lol. \o/
This was so the best part omg okay. He signs it, and then realizes it is pretty illegible so he puts "(JW)" underneath it, and then kind of...hovers with the pen. And I am sitting there thinking yes. yes. do it. oh my god. But he goes "...mmm, nah. I won't do it." and I was like "WHAT" and he was like "I can't draw a dick in your book." But we were like "NO WAIT YES DO IT" and a bunch of the other fangirls standing around him were like "YES DO IT!!!" because I could so tell that that's what he was about to do and I was just...WAITING for it and finally I was like "I'm in college, dude, it's okay" and so he goes "...Okay. :D" and then he was like "I drew a dick and a smily face." (And he did.)
And then this happened!
Not as stupid as the Joey one but still nootttt that cute on my part ahaha. I love that he still has his scar and his old-dude eyebrows going. lol no but we were such bitches because we asked if someone would take the picture and this girl was like "I will if you take mine!" so we gave her the camera but then...we got caught up in what was happening and totally left before we actually repaid the favor. WHOOPS.
But Joe was the last person we saw and then we were like okay, fuck, let's regroup. We stopped and finally PUT OUR COATS ON OMG it was cold, and I was like "man I can't believe we missed Lauren and Moses, and I really wanted to see Meredith :(" and Trisha was like "yeah, out of all the girls I really wanted to see Lauren, remember that dream I had" and I was like OH YEAH because lol one time Trisha had this dream that she fell in love with Draco Malfoy but only the Lauren version. whomp whomp. But anyway we're seriously standing there talking about everyone else and we're finally about to leave because Trisha found an in-walking-distance Days Inn for us to stay at on her phone and then I...realized that Meredith was kind of standing behind us the whole time. DAMMIT.
(We also had this great conversation about Joey signing Trisha's phone. She was like "yeah I kind of wanted to dig in my bag and maybe find something else, but I seriously have nothing in there and I'd probably end up like pulling out my underwear or something." And I was like TRISHA I WOULD HAVE PAID YOU SO MUCH MONEY TO ASK JOEY RICHTER TO SIGN YOUR UNDERWEAR YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND. OH MY GOD TRISHA. good times.)
But then I remembered! Before we left! I was like "oh shit I wanted to ask about that Outlaw Star thing!!" because like...yeah, it was an Outlaw Star thing, but it was a pretty obscure one, and it could just as easily have been an accident or a coincidence. Nick was long-gone and I'd never seen Matt or Holden, but I remembered suddenly that Walker had a book-writing credit on the show too, and he was still there with the last few girls, so I ran back over to him, and I was like "I HAVE A QUESTION!!"
And so I asked about it and he was like "Um. ...Yes. It was. Oh wow. I'm gonna have to pass that along to Matt, that someone said something about it." and I was like "Yeah okay Outlaw Star is like my favorite anime of all time" and he was like "Yeah! I like, I told Matt that no one would get that, I was like 'just make something up, it's not important' but he was like 'no....' Wow. Yeah that's one of those jokes, all those jokes that are like...me, and Matt, get them, and that's it." And I talked about how much I loved his monologue with all the references in it, and he nodded and was like "yeah that's so just for the 1% that get them" and laughed some, and I mentioned a joke they'd done on Darren and he was like "I don't even think Darren has gotten that joke yet." WAHAHAHA. Oh mannnnn I just felt so fucking cooooooll I hope someone says something about it, like, really.
So FINALLY, after our long-ass crazy COLD night, we were leaving the theater. We started walking to this Days Inn. In the wrong direction. UGH. We ended up passing that IHOP again and again lol. There were a ton of post-Starship people in there, we were like "bitches we ate at the IHOP before it was cool~" On our cold, slightly-scary walk we realized just how gay the part of Chicago we were in was.
yep. There was also a ~toy store that seriously just had dildoes and shit sitting out on shelves where anyone walking by the storefront window could see them, and a guy inside giving a sales pitch for one of them to some people. And more black drag queens. HELLO WE ARE IN A BIG-ASS LIBERAL CITY AND NOT HAMPTON ROADS. ahahaha. Also at this point I had like, phantom sunglasses-on-head feeling from wearing them propped on my head pretty much ALL DAY (including the duration of the show because I am a fangirl like that). I kept thinking they were still there when they weren't. I can still kind of feel them if I like, think about it.
the walk was very very cold tho. our thighs legit went numb. But finally we got there and this happened in the lobby:
whut.
There was this very nice concierge named Keith who joked with us about the cow though, helped us check in and gave us two room keys even though I said we only needed one (and therefore I could steal one for my scrapbook SUCCESS). And 21 Guns started playing while we were there so we decided it was a sign! The hotel was kind of a fucking MAZE and it took us a good weird while to find our room and then we got there and it was...FUCKING WEIRD as evidenced in the first video that you couldn't actually see so let me try to somehow describe. We were given a room, we were told, with two double beds (he apologized for this being "all they had," apologized, and I was like "...do you think we're dating or"). But we walk in and there is really only one double bed to be seen...?? so we are like WAT but then surprise! there is this creepy back room off the main room that has the other bed in it! AND THAT ROOM HAS NO DOOR TO IT IT IS JUST A DOORFRAME, WHAT. Likewise, there is a weird little like...external lobby chamber to the bathroom, and THAT has a door, but between that room and the actual toilet/bathing area? no door. I have literally never stayed in a weirder hotel room, and I have been to about 15 anime conventions. seriously what. but yea I had to pee bad and when I went and peed my thighs were BRIGHT FUCKING PINK from thawing from the cold, oh god. I love big cities but I might need one that is warmer than Chicago. (BUT AT LEAST IT WAS NOT 7.)
So yeah we rolled around stupid for a little while, took that video that I can't post, decided to go to bed but then couldn't, got up and WATCHED the video, and finally forced ourselves to sleep. But it was really hard to sleep after motherfucking Starship. Like guys. I cannot. I CANNOT. STARSHIP. I TOUCHED JOEY RICHTER AND JAIME LYN LIKED MY/JESSI'S EARRINGS AND JULIA AND DYLAN AND GLKJHEAKFAKSDFBA. okay.
(also I discovered that my rocketship was a little broken :( I fixed it when I got home but that made me sadddd.)
Woke up way earlier than we wanted to, because we were allowing for a) getting breakfast in the hotel and smoothies at the adjacent Jamba Juice and b) taxi time, because after Friday getting to the theater we were not taking any fucking chances. But oh god it was early, dying. Breakfast was aight, smoothies were delicious, and then we were retarded and not from the city and couldn't get a taxi. BUT NO OKAY we were standing there by the side of the road looking dumb and there was literally not a taxi in sight, and then this guy from the hotel was like "do you need help with something?" like we were stupid and I was like "we just need a taxi" and SUDDENLY ONE MAGICALLY APPEARED FOR HIM TO FLAG DOWN. so it wasn't like we were totally incompetent it was just this stupid coincidence. ugh we were so lame.
This cab ride was a) less annoying and creepy and b) really only took like a third of the time of the one on Friday, ugh, so we get to the airport really early. Whatever. We just kind of check in and go to our gate and we're sitting there with a bunch of dressed-up Navy folks, this one funny blonde woman and a couple of dudes, and as we're sitting there we see our flight...get delayed. So not only were we REGULAR-early but now we're EXTRA-early because of the stupid delay, and we are like "we could have sleeeppppppt D:" We occupied ourselves in the airport talking about things we liked from the show, and funny moments that happened, and the weird and/or cool other people there - cruising around on Twitter I found the girl that sat next to Brian Rosenthal and I follow her now. So cute. Then our flight gets delayed even more. UGH. And then like, they move it to another gate? AND NO ONE TELLS US. if the funny blonde Navy woman hadn't gone and asked about it and then come back to tell other people we wouldn't have known at all. I kept saying if it got delayed past 3 (it was supposed to leave around 11:30) that we should just say fuck it and stay another night and go see the show again. lol.
On our way to the other gate we stopped and got pretzels and lemonade because we were hungry. It was a very good idea. Then over at the other gate we just kind of...spaced out stupid because there was seriously nothing to do and kind of people-watched, or -listened mostly, there were these two tiny little boys that were speaking ...not English right behind us and then this woman from Canada chatting to this woman from Richmond about TV shows and part of that conversation was about Glee and me and Trisha were totally creeperlistening to it bahahaha. Finally FINALLY they call us to board the plane and what happens? We stand there in the fucking bridgeway thing between the plane and the gate just...standing there for like another half an hour. The Navy people were SO ANNOYED ahahaha. I watched the girl in front of us play Yahtzee on her phone. When they FINALLY let us on the plane we had to sit there even more before we took off to "burn some fuel so our takeoff weight is in the right place to make our landing weight correct" or something idk idk airplanes. I had the plane song by Jason Mraz stuck in my head the whole time. On the way back, we fell asleep a little more, got hassled by an overenthusiastic stewardess (we really do not want drinks omg omg), browsed through the exact same in-flight stuff as on our way there trying to kill the boredom, and talked more about the show, remembering little pieces of it here and there to try to put it back together. It was so great. *______*
Back in Norfolk, Emily German was stupid and weird in picking us up and wouldn't just pull into a space normally. We had to run like all the way down the pickup drive to get to her, what even. Then it was really bright and I put my sunglasses on again. PHANTOM SUNGLASSES-ON-HEAD FEELING FOR DAYS AND DAYS I AM TELLING YOU. Then back on campus I went to dinner with Cheri and brought her T-shirt to her and spent all night with Cheri and Trisha trying to get all the details for this post together! Jessi was there for a few minutes too, to get her shirt and the button I bought her.
Yeah. So. STARSHIP. That happened. :D