I took the day off work, with plans to hit the Woodstock Fair early, do Fair Stuff (play with livestock, eat some fried dough, etc) before staking a claim to whatever line would form for the 2 shows. My usual posse (Dave, Adrian and Ann) were not coming this time around, but I had managed to convince a group of model horse folks to come along. Skye and her SO Steve were going to meet me at noon in the cattle barn. Everyone else (Ann, Rob, Nancy and Jen) were coming later.
I'd never been to the Woodstock Fair, but Nancy said the place was HUGE. I'm used to Fairs like the NY State Fair in Syracuse. Compared to the NY State Fair, Woodstock is not really that big. Skye, Steve and I pretty much "did" the place in an hour or so...and that included wandering down to the horse show area to meet up with the woman who is training Skye's colt Breeze. We also got to watch some 4-beat canters on Western Pleasure horses. I will not get started on those.
We found the stage, and discovered that it was seperated from the only formal seating by a large grassy area. There were some folks already staked out in the front of the stage, but we decided to spend some time in the bleachers looking at photos and gabbing. People kept coming up to us and asking us if we knew where the fiddlers were playing (apparently the Hawaiian shirts made us look like obvious fans of fiddlin') One of the brighter points was when a 17 year old or so kid came RUNNING up to us, then stopped short and blurted at me "Oh, I thought you were Weird Al."
Um, no. Not tall enough, not curley enough, still bespectacled, and hello, WRONG GENDER.
We pointed him in the direction of the tour buses and suggested he look there.
Shortly afterwards we went and found a nice spot on the grass to sit and wait. We were about 20 feet from the stage, which was close enough to give us a good view and still be geek fan close. We also ended up sitting smack dab on what became an aisleway parting the crowd. We whiled away the hours with MP3 players, and fending off some guy who kept jumping in on our conversation. As the show grew closer, we had to defend our little spot more vigorously, but finally everyone else arrived and yeah, we had enough room! Ann annouced that she could remember way back when Al parodied "My Sharona" Everyone else owned up to "Eat it" We discussed the State of the Model Horse Hobby in New England, and suddenly Fun Zone was on the speakers and I shut up mid sentence.
I was anticipating a shortened show, since there were 2 scheduled, but I had no idea what would make the cut and what would get dropped. My gang giggled in all the right places during the songs and video clips, and seemed to be having a generally good time. Skye and I were busy with our cameras, and I swear a few times Al looked at me down the barrel of my camera.
The 4th song of the set was WBUL. Into the second verse, Al hopped down into the audience and began sleezing his way up the aisle. He stopped before our little group and wondered aloud to Skye about the amount of noise her outfit made in the drier. Skye was thrilled. He gave the next line to someone behind me--I thought it might be Ann or Jen, and then he moved on up. I turned around on the ground to watch the floorshow while everyone else snickered over Skye. Al reached the end of the aisle with the "subtle innuendo" line and turned around to head back for the stage. He found me almost immediately and strode right over. I spun back around to face the aisle, and he stopped, bent down, and got about a foot away from my face and sang "Hope I'm not being forward, but do you mind if I chew on your butt? You can tell me truthfully, am I a steaming hunk of love now or what?" All I REALLY recall of the moment was grinning like an idiot while being locked eyeball to eyeball with him. I didn't even sing along--and everyone I was with was stunned as well. No one thought to use a camera, but that is OK as this particular image in engraved on my goofy brain for all time :)
Woo.
The rest of the show was high energy, and the crowd was good and responsive--but THAT was definitely the high point of my night.
Did I mention, this was my 27th Weird Al show? :D