Getting There is Half the Fun?!?

LazyDay and I spent a *delightful* ten hours traveling from San Francisco to Indianapolis.  Well, it was bearable, anyway.  How ironic is it that we had to connect through Charlotte?  We finally arrived at our hotel at 11:30 p.m.  Our room was on the 13th floor - a portent?  Then we stayed up until 2 a.m. trying to catch up at TWoP!  Just so ya know...there's no ding-dang way to read spoilers on WebTV!  Grrrr!

A few pictures here, but more later!

Concert Day

After a nice buffet breakfast, we set out for LazyDay's favorite activity - shopping at the mall!  Indianapolis has a wonderful downtown area and a large shopping mall was attached to our hotel.  More portents: the Mall is owned by the Simon Property Group, with offices in the Claypool Court!   While having a smoothie at the mall Cinnabon, we kept hearing "Ruben!" this and "Ruben!" that.  Finally I heard one of the employees say, "I'll take my cell phone!  I just wanna go see Ruben for a few minutes!"  So I walked up to the counter and asked where one might see Ruben.  Turned out he was one floor below us signing autographs at the Parisian department store,  WHYYYYY couldn't it have been CLAAAAAYYY??? 

Anyway, we went down to take a peek, and there he was sitting at a table in the men's department surrounded by t-shirts printed with "205" and "Velvet Teddy Bear".  It looked like some kind of merchandising ploy!  And Ruben looked so miserable, bored, completely uninterested in his fans.  I imagine he wanted to be in bed. 

Resisting the urge to go up and ask Ruben where we might find Clay (I didn't want to die), we wandered around some more and finally walked over to Conseco, the concert venue, to scope it out.  (We'd stopped in Sam Goody's and adopted a couple of Clingles, just in case anything needed to be signed.)  We chatted up a security guard and learned that the Idol buses would be arriving soon (around 2:30),  but when they arrived they were heavily curtained and whisked immediately underground into the bowels of the arena.  Oh, we did get one more glimpse of Ruuuuuben - the back of his head was plastered up against an uncurtained bus window. 

The Indy PRoC Gathers

sapphire42 found us a restaurant, Pezcat collected libelous personal information for blackmail purposes, and Brandilyne the smut quee-,er, the LOVELY and CHARMING mile-a-minute storyteller kept us constantly entertained.  Kittycatlover brought her infinitely patient and brand-new husband (Congratulations!), who added a faint and welcome whiff of Y-chromosome to the proceedings.  The party was rounded out with Pitypat2 and friends, TongueInCheek, publicradiogirl, Chandra, allingoodfun, Controversy, LazyDay, spotlightlover, and mrsloki (shouldn't that be mrslucky?)  There was much discussion of PANTS and packages and hiding cameras in feminine hygiene products.  TMI?  Sorry.

Part of the fun was watching each successive newcomer get that are-you-the-clay-fans?? look, and then the flash of recognition: "Oh, you must be [insert screen name here]!"  Interestingly, we ended up with three separate groups of fans in this same restaurant!

The Venue

We gathered outside Conseco and scoped out security, which didn't seem very tight.  So we boldly went where many fans had gone before and all cameras got in.  Brandilyne has documented this part of adventure well.  sapphire smuggled in my "contraband" - her claims that I assaulted her are totally false, the girl has SUCH an imagination!  We shelled out our $20 for a program and wandered off to our respective seats.

Foreplay, or The Fans Meet

LazyDay and I had spectacular fifth-row seats on the right-hand side.  I didn’t envy mrsloki her front row, because the stage is over eight feet high!  We met great people all around us, all Clay fans. A middle-aged couple from Chicago sat down next to me and the wife said, "Thank God! You're not a teenager!"  LazyDay chatted up a lady behind me and we discovered that I had met this woman in email and sent her Clack!  She had her two sons, 9 and 11, both big Clay fans.

The Awful Truth About Close Seats

While close floor seats are great for seeing, they are lousy for hearing.  Yes, there's screaming, but the really bad news is at the edges of the stage: bass woofers the size of Mt. Everest sitting right on the floor POINTING RIGHT AT YOU.  For the first few performances - Charles, Julia, etc. - I just thought their voices were weak, but by the end of the act I realized that this concert would be largely a visual experience for me.  The bass was overwhelming in most of the numbers, and the speakers for the singers' mics must have been aimed completely away from us and toward the back of the room.  I heard very little of most of the singers' voices and I couldn't understand a word that Clay spoke when not singing.  So be warned, folks; you may not see as well from the far seats, but you will HEAR much better.

Act I

What I like to call "The Also-Rans" appeared one by one.  I noted them mostly as "five more until Clay...four more until Clay...three more until Clay."  Particularly since I couldn't really understand a word they were singing.  The backup dancers were really pretty awful, and the song selections for Act I were fairly boring.  Kim Caldwell looked amazing to me, I think she is quite beautiful and has a powerful stage presence, but unfortunately not the voice to go with it.  I don't know why people don't like her clothes, I think they work for her.  Hell, if I had it, I'd show it off!  Carmen was surprisingly good in her song, prancing around in pink high-heeled sneakers.  I didn't take any pictures of Kim or Carmen because I was saving them for Clay, but I wish I had; these girls were really very pretty. 

We get up to Trenyce, and she roars through Proud Mary.  The girl has a powerhouse voice which actually cut thru the roar of the woofers, but somehow she just doesn't have much charisma onstage.  I think if you could combine Trenyce’s voice with Kim C’s presence you’d really have something!

Kim Locke is next and I perk up to her impressive "Band of Gold", which I can hear fairly well. 

Finally CLAY!

The moment is here.  Kimmel finishes her song and says, "This next person..." and bedlam ensues.  I guess she finished her introduction, her lips were moving, but who could tell.  Everyone was on their feet shrieking. The music started, fog rose from the stage, and 12,000 bodies jumping up and down shook the building as Clay rose out of the stage.  I didn't see him at first because he was on the opposite side of the stage from us (he spent much of the night there), so I missed his reaction on seeing the crowd.  But I knew when he had appeared because the volume of screaming rose even higher (I didn't think it was possible).  Finally I spotted him and he started to sing, I think.

I didn't enjoy TITN very much, partly because I just couldn't hear it and it was hard to see him on the other side of the stage.  I think this song is a bad programming choice for Clay's first appearance, because the crowd is going wild and he needs an up-beat, move-around-the-stage song so he can connect with the audience.  Instead, he was anchored to a microphone stand for the first part, not even at center stage, and forced to wave and acknowledge the crowd while trying to sing a very introspective song.  Oh, well, I took lots of pictures.  The crowd never sat down while he sang and I was shooting pictures over lots of heads and through wildly waving arms.

Watching TITN, suddenly I totally understood the whole "Broadway" accusation.  In person, Clay has such a huuuuuge (now stop that!) PRESENCE that everything he does seems magnified.  On this night, his performance of TITN really reminded me of a Vegas act because of the way he was working the crowd, broad gestures, lots of winks and waves.  But of course, this is only one of the ways he can perform and I think it was a result of putting the wrong song in the wrong place in the show.  He SHOULD have been strutting all over the stage doing BMUB or "Grease"!   He looked amazing, and I’ll say more about that later. 

I think Clay talked a little after TITN but between the screaming and the speaker positioning and his accent, I couldn't understand him.  He introduced Rooooben, who got a huge cheer from the crowd.  Then Roob started StuporStar and everyone sat down.  I watch Ruben for a little while and took a couple of pictures, but then I just listened to him sing while I checked my digital camera and culled bad pictures from the memory card.  He sounded smooth and good, I could hear him pretty well and again I could see why they thought HE was the recording artist.  He was a lot easier to hear because there was no screaming.  After SS, he talked about Luther and sang his other song.  Then, mercifully, the rather boring first act was over.