Roots & Rock 'n' Roll Tour: Los Angeles

One of my favorite parts of this trip had zero to do with Hanson and everything to do with my inner child visiting Disneyland covered in green body paint. With the LA show a day after Halloween and so close to Disneyland, we couldn't NOT come in a day early to do Mickey's Halloween Party. After much deliberation about an appropriate group costume for 3 girls, we finally settled on Wizard of Oz characters. Just not Dorothy and her usual companions.

We had a lot of fun and enjoyed several little girls including a miniature Dorothy stopping us for photos. I'm not normally a fan of repeating Halloween costumes when there are so many options out there, but I would totally do this one again. Halloween MOE 2016, anyone?

Beyond having a favorite band, I'm normally pretty terrible at assigning the term "favorite" to anything else involving Hanson. I can never pick a favorite song, brother, city, or show because my opinions always change and there's always something amazing about each individual option. I can say with a decent amount of confidence though that the LA shows were my favorite of the four cities I did this tour. The crowd energy was great, I loved the setlists (Oh Darling and Underneath the first night were both great surprises), and the second show in particular just felt right, even if a tall girl with hair to rival Andrew's stood in front of us about five minutes before the show started.

I've been loving Isaac's rambled intro to Hand in Hand at every city. I thought it was particularly great in Atlanta when he told us it's kind of an inside joke in the band to see how long Isaac talks when they leave him alone on stage (hate to break it to you, Isaac, but it's not just the band that jokes about this). After that it was obvious he was intentionally rambling just to see how much time he could kill, and he did a superb job with on-the-spot made up teen angst love songs. He took this a step further in Los Angeles and somehow wound up tying in an unexpected solo version of Rain in the middle of this speech. Dear Isaac, please always sneak in extra songs to mess with your brothers.

Before and after the shows there was a random guy on the street selling cheap bootleg t-shirts I can only describe as hideously great and necessary. He told us he had had them since Hanson played LA in 1998, and based on the state of the shirts, I believe it.