World of Weird Al Yankovic

Sailor-Polka-Moon wrote: You're "not that into him" for a while, then suddenly it hits you.
You're thinking a lot about him, you keep looking him up when you're passing time on the interwebz, you keep being drawn back to his Twitter or Instagram. You think- "ah, he's just really cool! I like (re/)discovering new things, I'm all into him at the moment."

And then that changes, right under your nose. You're paying attention not just to the music and its cool beats, but his voice. Its smoothness, its roughness, its highs, and all the way down to its almost sensuous lows.
You still hear his voice, maybe even saying your name or something encouraging even in the form of song lyrics that might resonate with you somehow on a certain day, or might just be stuck in your head.

If this doesn't happen first, his appearance will get to you soon enough. All of a sudden he isn't just that silly guy, or that boy with the Weird 'Fro and the glasses and mustache you remember.
You really, really like what you see, and you just want to look at him more and more often. His smile starts getting to you, and even the "I am a crazy person" stare is one you find yourself staring back at in photos.

You start noticing his eyes (beyond, or without, the glasses), his hair and the way it moves, his body. You pay attention to his hands, wonder what it feels like to have them holding yours, and then his arms, and in come the Al-hug daydreams.

It's a bit before you catch yourself doing all this, but when you do, you just sit back in amazement at just WHO you fell in love with! And then you feel sort of proud, for some reason or another, that your heart chose him.

THATS EXACTLY HOW I FEEL! I noticed that whenever me and my sister watch videos of him together and he does something cute, we both scream something like "LOOK WHAT HE DID WITH HIS EYEBROWS, GO BACK, LETS WATCH IT AGAIN!" and that happens alot with us. I always look into his beautiful bright brown eyes, yet I notice the small things as well, and it makes me freak out each time he does something adorable. However, whenever someone asks me a question about my favorite musician (or when I tell them I went to a concert, and they ask who I went to see) I shyly say weird al, and let out a small giggle and look down and blush. The reaction is either "Wow really?? thats amazing!" and we continue to talk about him, or they ask who the heck weird al is, and I have to tell them why hes my favorite artist, and blah blah blah. Once I fell in love with him, I just thought I was crazy. The first few days I was denying it, and im like: no! that can't be. why would I be attracted to Weird Al? Heck, weird is in his name! I probably just think that we would have a nice friendly relationship if we ever met. But after a few days, you just learn to accept it, because just.. LOOK HOW CUTE HE IS! how could you not love him? Hes just... perfect I don't think I've ever loved anyone more than I've loved him, which im wayyy to shy to mention to anyone, except for you guys and my sister. I don't know how to explain these feelings.. hes just so attractive, and its something about him.. I want to hug him so badly, and feel his soft hair, and just feel the warm embrace of his hugs <3 though id probably be crying on his shoulder because of how happy I am. I have such a clear image in my head of this happening... but its never happened But hopefully, it will happen someday.

" And then you feel sort of proud, for some reason or another, that your heart chose him." sailor-polka-moon

That's how I feel. I don't know why, but I feel lucky that my heart chose this man who is soooo special!
I also feel SO LUCKY that I found this wonderful group of people who get it!

Some people posted some really nice pictures, so here's a nice wee throwback one that was posted here before:

chickadee wrote:Have you seen this one??? The Boom Boom at the end kills me. I can't watch it enough.


Youtube

Hey, that's from Al Fest 2009!! That feels like aaaaaages ago. It's a little odd hearing it without the laughter in the room.


Youtube


(The Jeopardy section starts around 3:18, and Al does the song around 4:08.)


For me, my Weird Al journey began back in 1999 or 2000 ish when my dad bought Running With Scissors and some other CDs for a road trip to my grandma's cabin. One of my earliest memories is my dad skipping Jerry Springer. For whatever reason, the songs I was able to hear stuck with my 5 or 6 year old brain, and when we moved to Albuquerque from Phoenix in 2005, I was reminded of a vague memory of a song about Albuquerque and asked my parents if we still had the CD that had the song. If we had sold our copy of Running With Scissors in the garage sale before we moved, my life probably would have turned out completely differently. Thankfully, I was able to rediscover Al as my 11 or 12 year old self and I went completely bananas for him. I rediscovered him around the time Straight Outta Lynwood was coming out (around my birthday, actually, so it was definitely fate ) and I was starting middle school, which seems to be the age of Weird Al discovery for just about everyone. He had done some sort of podcast interview thing with Walmart before podcasts really existed, and along with that they had a bunch of his songs for sale online as mp3s so I was allowed to choose a selection of songs that my mom bought for me and we made a CD out of them. Looking back on it, it was kind of an odd selection - I remember having Yoda, One More Minute, Angry White Boy Polka, and Happy Birthday on there the most. For my 13th birthday, I got the rest of the CDs I hadn't yet begged my parents for (before this gift, I think I had RWS, SOL, and Off the Deep End because I was allowed to choose one CD to buy online at that point and I chose that one. I may or may not have also had Poodle Hat.) and some Weird Al merch, and I think maybe this is when I got The Weird Al Show and UHF on DVD as well, just so my parents weren't constantly berated by me asking for everything forever anymore and because they were happy I finally liked something, and this is when my love really exploded. I listened to all the CDs constantly on a portable CD player in my room and in my backyard, then eventually figured out how to rip the songs off the CDs onto the computer and put them on my cheap knockoff mp3 player thing from Kmart, and I tried to have the CDs playing in the car whenever my parents let me. I joined and lurked on WOWAY as "WAKKA WAKKA DOO DOO YEAH!!!" because I'm super annoying and if you count every character including the spaces and exclamation points it's 27 characters, also because Albuquerque. When I found out that Al was gonna be touring, I told everyone and anyone who would listen. I wouldn't shut up about it, so my parents saw a tour date in Ohio and decided we should go to that show since my dad has family there. That was my first ever Weird Al concert, so I didn't really know anything about how to get the best tickets or much of anything about waiting by the buses other than stories I'd heard on WOWAY at that point. It was an outdoor venue, and we were pretty far back, but it was still pretty amazing. That was one of the only times my whole family was there for the show, and I made sure we were all in Hawaiian shirts because I'm a dork. When the show was over, everyone seemed to be going in the same direction so we followed them, and we found the buses pretty much right behind the stage, not really locked off or anything. Times were different then. Everyone got in a long line and Ruben came out to entertain everyone for a while, and eventually we made our way up to the bus to see Al, and I was completely terrified. I was wearing a shirt with a badly photoshopped picture of me giving the bunny ears to Al in a picture of him at Mount Rushmore that I made in my 7th grade computer class, which he ended up signing so I still have it somewhere unfortunately but it's so embarrassing. I was too afraid to even speak to him so my mom pretty much did all the talking and was talking about my shirt to him but she couldn't think of what the place was called soooOOOoOoO long story short, the first words I ever said to Al were "Mount Rushmore." As soon as we walked away I cried and I cried in the hotel bathroom that night and I probably cried more than that idk. When we flew back home to ABQ, I realized I left my tote bag of Weird Al stuff on the plane, so my dad had to rush back and get it (he works for SWA thankfully enough so he was able to retrieve the bag).
But I WAS NOT SATISFIED!
I told everyone I knew at school about the concert and Weird Al and everything and anything I knew about him. I carried the booklets from his CDs to school with me and I remember trying to memorize the tracklist order and lyrics on Poodle Hat during P.E. once. P.E. sucks. Some of my other favorites to carry with me were Alapalooza and Bad Hair Day. What I would actually do sometimes, which is pretty embarrassing now, is basically shove the booklets into peoples' faces and say "HOW DO YOU SAY THIS NAME" and if they said "Yankovich" I would go to the next person in disgust. When I had my friends over to my house, I would make them watch The Weird Al Show (and Whose Line Is It Anyway?) with me, and one time we watched the episode where Al makes a snack and says "First, you take a raw potato-- DON'T WASH IT!!", which became a quote within our friend group for years after. In English class we would have free write in our journals, so I would write the lyrics from Weird Al songs usually. My 7th grade English teacher was very attractive to 13 year old me and he was bald down the middle of his head and his voice sounded like Patrick Warburton. He had a stuffed Beaker from The Muppets in the room that I would play with sometimes. One time he called on me to read out my journal entry, and all I had written was the lyrics to I'm So Sick Of You and I hadn't even finished because I think I was talking to someone so that could have been why he called on me to read. I got a lot of anxiety about that and sweated a lot and I'm feeling all the feelings I felt then now as my 21 year old self. So, I recited the lyrics to I'm So Sick of You to my 7th grade English class, or at least half of them. The "You don't have an ounce of class, you're just one big pain in the neck" line was especially hard for me to read, because I knew they knew what it was supposed to rhyme with and I was afraid they would think that's what I would say, and you can't say "ass" to your 7th grade English class. I was a sweaty giggling wreck through the whole thing and that's always been a big reason why I'm afraid of public speaking. It didn't go over that badly, but it wasn't beautiful. I do remember seeing my teacher laugh at some of the lines, but there was a lot of tension during the "neck could have been ass" thing. Other than that, pretty much everything I did in my computer class was Weird Al related too. We were making animations in Powerpoint (probably the worst way to animate), and I was making an animation for Another One Rides the Bus. I was able to find the song online at school so I could download it there (I don't remember where or how I found it, but there was some sort of webpage with a few songs to download and that happened to be one of them). I had the bus coming into frame on the street, then a sort of stick-figure-but-not-really of Al (it was like, a stick figure with his head wearing his clothes with like Mickey Mouse gloves) walk up to the bus, and also my friend Ryan was in it because he said he liked Weird Al too. I never finished it, and it was actually very very similar to this:


Youtube


That whole thing with Ben in that episode of Parks and Recreation hits a little close to home, especially that. But it's also hilarious, because it's true.
Someone in town must have heard that there was some little girl obsessed with Weird Al and making all the kids talk about him so they should have him come around here on tour, to little hodunk Rio Rancho, New Mexico. They booked him to come out to the Santa Ana Star Center, which at the time was (and still is) pretty much out in the middle of nowhere, but closer to my house than an Albuquerque venue would have been, so idk what that says about Rio Rancho. It's really crazy to think that I sang with my choir and graduated high school it the same venue where I saw my second ever Weird Al concert. We camped out for tickets outside the venue the morning they were supposed to go on sale, because I still wasn't aware that they saved the best tickets for people who buy through weirdal.com at that time, so we got second row tickets on the aisle on the waaayyy left.
My principal happened to be visiting the computer class one day, and I got to show her what I was working on. I talked to her about Weird Al and Ryan said some things too and I talked about how he's touring and I went to a show in Ohio and now I was gonna go to the show he would be playing in town and my principal got the idea that the school should have a contest/raffle for some concert tickets, which is one of the coolest Weird Al things I've made happen on accident.
That Rio Rancho concert is still one of the best shows I've ever seen, and I still feel so bad because it had to be only half the venue because not enough people bought tickets and even half the venue was almost too much. People really should have come out for it, because the 45 minute encore was to die for. I wish iPhones had been more prominent at that time because I don't think anyone got any footage of Al and the band doing Last Train to Clarksville and China Grove and Sweet Home Albuquerque and Rio Rancho and then finally Albuquerque and ugh I'm gonna cry that concert was so good. That 2007 concert spoiled me for any other hometown concert Al does here, since the last one he did here innnnn 2012?? was in Albuquerque and all he did was a little teaser of the song then continued on as normal. Last Train to Clarksville was especially amazing, and it's still in my head the clearest. The Monkees don't do that song justice after hearing Al perform the song for the first time of me ever even hearing of that song. I hope I can convince Santa Ana Star Center to bring him back here for next year, because in my experience that was way better than at the Kiva in ABQ, but I will take what I can get.
After the show, there was a group of maybe 20 of us who waited out in the October cold to see if Al would come out. the buses were kind of in a gated area, but the gates weren't closed or anything, but we were told to stay on top of the hill because Al was meeting with VIP people. Al eventually did come out of the building and waved to us as he was getting on the bus, but some guy shouted something like "Just one autograph??" and Al was like oh OKAY and ran up the hill in the cold in his short sleeved t-shirt to meet with us for a few minutes because he is the nicest man in the world. I still remember his breath coming out of his mouth as he was running up to us, up to me. I don't remember my interaction with Al, or if I was even able to get one of my own, but I remember that my mom got a hug from Al and ever since that night, I really really wanted one of my own. Thankfully, this story has a happy ending because years later, in 2013, I got my first Al hug, and I've gotten a few more since then. It feels like my love for Al has grown stronger and deeper every day since I've been six years old, in a way where we're kind of in a "long-term relationship" type of thing in my head in that I don't even have to think about him constantly to know my love for him is still there.

I guess the whole point I'm trying to make here is, no matter how in love you might be with Al right now, it's gonna get a million times better, if you could even imagine that. I'm super glad that we have a place like Yankochick Central where everyone can share their feelings for Al and end up being friends because of it, since we didn't really have anything like this on WOWAY back when I was first using it. My own mom was actually one of the main people in the Drool Topic way back when, because she knew I liked Al so she was gonna like Al. That was aroundabout the time I was going through puberty and Al was becoming the first man I was ever in love with, so I really didn't have anyone to tell about those feelings and I wish I had. That's why I'm so glad Yankochick Central can do that for all of you. (Also, I've since stopped telling my mom who I'm in love with so she stops stealing them from me.)

I think I'm just about done with my novel now. All these videos and musings put me back in my 13 year old brain again, and I just thought I would share some of my story too, because I'm not sure if any of you knew before. Now you do! Sorry!

Yankochick38.....
I got so much out of your story. Thanks so much for sharing!

I've been watching Weird Al Yankovic receives his first #1 on billboard Tom Green Live on 0.25 speed and pausing as he puts his hand to his heart. The movement of his hair, the sparkle in his eyes as he tears up, really touches me. I can't post it, but you can look it up. It's so wonderful in slow motion because you can really capture the true feelings he experiencing.
He's such an inspiration to me. He sets an example of being truly grateful for our blessings.

"That Rio Rancho concert is still one of the best shows I've ever seen, and I still feel so bad because it had to be only half the venue because not enough people bought tickets and even half the venue was almost too much."

"Just one autograph??" and Al was like oh OKAY and ran up the hill in the cold in his short sleeved t-shirt to meet with us for a few minutes because he is the nicest man in the world."

These are the things that inspire me.
He could have blown everyone off because the place was more than half empty, but that's not what counts to him. He proved that by responding, even if only one person showed.

You guys are the most wonderful community I've ever been a part of.

There really aren't many other places where I can share what's honestly and truthfully on my mind. You guys are so supportive of each other, and this topic seems to radiate with a certain warmth matched by nothing else.

I love you guys.

I guess you could say that

Capybara wrote:You guys are the most wonderful community I've ever been a part of.

There really aren't many other places where I can share what's honestly and truthfully on my mind. You guys are so supportive of each other, and this topic seems to radiate with a certain warmth matched by nothing else.

I love you guys.

Love you back

you guys are awesome. You're so kind and understanding and you never judge anyone. I think of you guys as my friends and I hope you think the same of me.