This may be long...
First off, let me say, it's been such an exhilarating thing (as silly as it may sound)to rediscover "Weird Al"!....and to catch up on pretty much the last 15yrs of his/their career; I find myself gaining more respect for Weird Al than I thought I ever could, even after years of giving him nothing but praise.
When I was a kid, I remember my brother playing his Weird Al cassette tapes. There's a videotape from 1989 of my brother and I rocking out to Addicted to Spuds and I Think I'm a Clone Now, and that tape is my most treasured hunk of plastic. I believe the Even Worse record came out the same year. My brother sang on his playschool microphone and I shredded on my plastic baseball bat guitar; I was just a month shy of turning 5. His obsession with the Weird one started to subside around the release of Off The Deep End, which is right around when I became a true fan. My daughter and I have been snatching up albums as we find them, since winning the sweepstakes, and we came across OTDE a few days ago. I instantly got chills when I Was Only Kidding started to play, and I was transported back in time (of course ,you realize I'm speaking figuratively). OTDE, Alapalooza, and Bad Hair Day are the three albums that were released during a time when weird al was about all I was listening to. I preformed One More Minute and Amish Paradise with a friend of mine for talent shows in middle school. I believe Weird Al played a significant role in helping me cope with my parents divorce when I had very few friends to help with that, and he was funny to boot!
Before winning the sweepstakes, Bad Hair Day would've been the last full-length album that I purchased (or that my parents purchased for me) upon its release. High School happened, and over the next 15 yrs I would marry, have three beautiful little girls, and go through a divorce myself. Throughout that time, I would pick up the dvd's and compilations, but for whatever reason, new "Weird Al" music just seemed like a foreign concept to me; little did I know he was still releasing quality material, and for that matter, some of the best songs he'd ever written. I picked up the Video Collection about two years ago and I think my daughter has about worn that disc out, she fell in love with it. I know most parents say this but, I really do have the best kids in the world! they deserve so much more than I can give them sometimes, and it's hard as a single parent, soooooo....
THANK YOU WEIRD AL AND COMPANY!
I heard from a random source that Weird Al would be in Denver this August. It was March 6th, my sister's wedding day, and I was creating a new email account via my mom's wifi connection, which I always fully take advantage of when I'm there...
Anyway, I was sick of all the spam I was receiving, so I thought I'd start fresh. I started searching for tickets, thinking they probably weren't even on sale yet. I was right, they weren't on sale, but unfortunately it was because they sold out!! The very first thing I ended up punching my new email into was the Weird Al website. Two weeks later, my kids and I just pulled into the grocery store parking lot and I received an email notification from my new gmail account. I thought...what the bloody hell is this?!?!?!...I just opened this account!...forgetting that I used it for that purpose and nothing else two weeks earlier....and that's when my mood changed faster than you've ever seen anyone's mood change...I couldn't believe it!! This was the very first email I received after opening a new account...
Congratulations on winning Weird Al's Mandatory Sweepstakes!
You and a guest have been selected to be flown to Las Vegas, Nevada to attend “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Mandatory World Tour performance at Planet Hollywood on Saturday, May 16th.
Holy Crap!!
Transportation, food credit, two nights at planet Hollywood, autographed poster, mandatory lounge prior to the show, and two tickets to the observation wheel (whatever the hell that is), ya know...in case that's not enough. When I told my oldest daughter she was going with me, the look in her eyes was priceless. I am extremely grateful to those that made it all happen; I never would've been able to afford to do something like this with my daughter, and she is one amazing little girl.
That same day, maybe just an hour later, we picked up Mandatory Fun! I was, up until this point, unaware with the release of this album; I think in my head the "Mandatory Tour" was a way of saying, we better do another tour before we're all too old to do so. I've heard Al say in several interviews that even if the listener isn't familiar with the original source material, the parody should still be funny, and that was the case for me on this album.
To be continued...
