Four year old bumpage? Wow... But I do have a reason. This seemed the best place to post my little story.
So, some of you know this already, but some of you may not know that I volunteer at a minimum security men's prison as a Religious Services volunteer. Thursday nights I show movies for the inmates, and I have always shown either Christian movies or movies with a positive message. (This is a voluntary program, the inmates that come are those who want to be there.)
I've been thinking lately that perhaps there was room for just good clean fun too. So I asked the Chaplain his opinion and he agreed with me, so I'll be including movies once a month that are just for entertainment, not necessarily for any deep message.
So I was trying to find some good clean fun for tonight. What's more gooder, cleaner or funner than a Weird Al concert? Nothing, that's what!!
So I took WAYlive and the videos out with me. I'd have to say Al was about an 85 - 90% hit. There were about five guys who left before the medley. One guy, probably in his 60s left after DTBS, mumbling "I guess that song says it all..." I guess you can't please everyone.
But the vast majority of the guys loved it and had a blast. Many of them thanked me for bringing out the video, one guy said to me "When it started I felt like it was a big waste of my time. But I don't think that anymore. I realized that I was wrong and I needed to have a good laugh."
Prison can be a pretty bleak experience. I think Al would be proud that he brought a little breath of joy out there tonight.
And of course there's the "first listen" factor. One of the things I love about the concert experience is seeing the reaction of people who aren't familiar with Al beyond "Eat It" as they hear the other songs and see the performance. It's the next best thing to a "first listen" of new Alness. There were a lot of first listen reactions as well as those who remembered the videos from back in the day. Very gratifying to my geeky fangirl heart.
Oh, and we had it set up on a projector so the screen was probably 8 feet or so across. Nearly life size, and with surround sound (I know it's Prison, but we have a pretty sweet sound system out there) it was cool getting to see it in that format. Germs on the large screen? The Mighty Silver Suit?
One thing for me that was different, was that I haven't seen WAY live since before I started playing guitar. Just generally now, I find myself watching the guitar players in any music video to see what they're doing with their hands. Very frustrating to me was that not only didn't they show Jim as much as I'd like, they hardly ever showed his hands. But what I did get to see, I can appreciate much more than I used to. He's an amazing guitarist. And he plays a sweet Gretsch guitar in the DTBS vid. My favorite guitar ever. I wonder if he still has it?