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.

Epcot Food & Wine Festival 2012

Sometimes life feels a little more like "If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to want a flock of sheep." Which explains how I wound up renting a car, driving to Orlando, and then flying one way to California and back home again.

All complicated details aside, I ended up at the Epcot Food & Wine Festival to see Hanson for the 3rd year in a row, and I'm really running out of things to say about it. Once you've done it in a banana suit, you've pretty much got all of your bases covered.

We got park hopper passes and spent both days running around taking in as much as possible before the shows. We were lucky enough to get into a special preview of Fantasyland which was both unexpected and awesome.

I met Gaston there.



Despite his stance against books in the movie, he is at least literate based on the fact that he read my shirt out loud. When I told him that Hanson is my favorite band, he made an annoyed face and informed me that HE should be my favorite band and then had nothing more to do with me. Typical Gaston behavior, I suppose.

The Hanson shows were great as always, and it was fun getting to sing happy birthday to Zac at the end of the last show on the 22nd. My favorite part was definitely "In the City" as the final song the 2nd day. It's just the best way to end a show. Pictures will probably do more than any repetitive description I could give.







And then I flew across the country and hit the other Disney where we went to Mickey's Halloween Party and came home with 8.6 lbs of candy each, because who doesn't want to say they hit all of the Disney parks in the country in one week?

Eat to the Beat: Epcot Food & Wine Festival 2011

10/31/11

If you consult Urban Dictionary, you'll find this entry about "bananas":

1. a slang word derived from the old saying "bananas" used to describe someone that was crazy. Used now to describe anything in style or cool.


Turns out it also means a half-price, one-size-fits-all costume acquired in mass quantities from K-Mart just hours before Halloween. All definitions seem to fit this situation.

We wanted to dress up for Halloween, but we didn't have the room to pack costumes or the time and money to stop and find new ones. Just as we were about to give up and resign ourselves to the predictable Mickey ears, opportunity presented itself in the form of a $12 polyester banana suit. I picked up one and joked that one of us should wear it. Then we saw the second one lying a few feet away, and the light bulbs went off. Bananas come in bunches.

I have to say I'm a little irked that our costumes were such a hit this year after we spent weeks planning and designing what turned out to be an epic fail last year. Turns out people appreciate the simplicity of a banana more than the complexity of a Hare Band, and that's all there is to it. So we got lots of smiles and cheesy banana jokes thrown our way, and more than a few pictures snapped from a distance. Then there were the people that enjoyed it so much that they asked for pictures with us (most of whom were also enjoying the wine aspect of the food & wine festival). I'd love to see their faces the next day as they looked back at their pictures and went "Wait...I met bananas?" or better yet "Wait...I saw Hanson?" I hope both were a pleasant surprise.

We had a blast dancing around and, well, going bananas (did you really think I'd let it go that easily?). Another highlight of the day? An impromptu M&G with the main event themselves, complete with a kiss on the cheek and a picture to prove it. That's right, I finally met Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Sorry, Hanson. You got trumped.

Hanson went as Storm Troopers:

11/1/11

We spent the second day trying to do everything we didn't get to on day one, which boils down to the Tower of Terror, the Rock 'n' Rollercoaster, and a whole lot of eating.

I ate my way around the world in about three hours.
Coq Au Vin in France

Goulash in Germany

California Rolls in Japan

Strawberry Tart in France

Gelato in Italy

Perogies in Poland (my personal favorite)

Ravioli in Italy

By the end of the night, there was certainly no empty space left deep down inside to mourn the loss of Hanson at the end of another tour.

Make it Out Alive (a Hare raising event)

As soon as I heard that Hanson was going to have a member event in October, I secretly wished it would be on Halloween and I could somehow go to it. As soon as I found out it was true, I started plotting. When I realized tour started the next day, things got dangerous.

Long story short--my desire to go to this one show somehow spawned into me hitting 9 shows and being on the road for over 2 weeks. I'm not sure how it happened, but I'm glad it did.

For this show, I ended up going with 6 other awesome girls, and we came up with what I still hold as the best group costume idea ever. And okay, so nobody else seems to get it, but I still think it's genius. Are you ready for this? 80s Hare Band. Basically we were an 80s Hair Band, only we substituted "Hare" for "Hair" and added bunny ears and tails to the ridiculous 80s attire. If you want to add another complicated layer, you might call us a "hare band air band" because we also carried inflatable instruments, but we left that part off of the contest card. We'd like to think that we didn't win (or even rank, sadly enough) based on the fact that 1) whoever did the judging didn't get the genius idea, or 2) nobody wanted to shell out 7 prizes if we won. The truth is it probably just wasn't as awesome as we all thought, but like I said, I still think it was an amazing idea.

Anyway, it was a blast. How often do you get to scout out ridiculous clothes at thrift stores and glue glitter and sequins to anything they'll stick to? Maybe once a year for Halloween enthusiasts, but my Halloween experience as an adult started and ended with my tiny Alice in Wonderland costume from freshman year of college. Lesson learned. This was a lot like prom--most of the fun was in buying and wearing the dress. There's just some kind of inner joy that only a girl can comprehend in walking into a thrift store, finding the perfect pair of $1.50 80s heels, and then bedazzling the heck out of them with multi-colored glitter. Try it some time.

We didn't line up until 6, but of course there were already a bunch of people in line. We got a big kick out of the poor tour manager soldering locks off of the trailer hitched to the tour bus. I'll never know what went wrong, but it was entertaining to watch. The costumes were really interesting, and I was impressed that I didn't see a single person in line not wearing a costume. I was also impressed with the obvious lack of 1) slutty outfits, and 2) people dressed as Hanson. I guess I should have a little more faith.

As we walked in the venue, I stepped on a knife, and it just didn't quite register in my mind that it was fake at first. I stopped and had a bit of a "Did I just step on a knife?" moment, and then a random guy carrying a box of merch inside stooped down, picked it up, handed it to me, and said "Here, this is for you!" then walked away smiling. So of course I did what any 80s clad girl with bunny ears would do; I gave him a WTF look, tucked the knife into the waistband of my skirt, and kept walking to scout out a good spot. The whole thing was weird and I'm still not sure what exactly happened or why. What I do know is there's a rubber knife somewhere in the trunk of my car and some person out there without one.

We ended up with a good spot on Taylor's side, technically front row just behind a speaker. It ended up being the best spot possible for us. Earlier I debated whether to take an inflatable keyboard or an inflatable guitar. The piano player in me wanted to take the keyboard, but the practical part of me (is there such a thing anymore?) knew it would be easier to fake rock out on a guitar than on a keyboard in the middle of the crowd. The pianist in me won out, so I took the keyboard and hoped for the best. With the speaker directly in front of us, we were able to stack the keyboards on top of it and create our own mock piano right in front of the real one. We were ridiculous rocking out on the keyboards and guitars the whole show, and one of us even had an inflatable microphone to sing into. The show wouldn't have been nearly as good without the amazing girls I was with.

Of course Hanson was awesome too. They managed to play both songs that have been at the top of my "must hear live" list for the past three years: Dancing in the Wind and In the City. It was also really neat getting to hear the Ghostbusters theme song, and I had never heard Hand in Hand either, so overall the setlist was pretty killer. We were slightly disappointed that they didn't play Evening at the Big Top, but I decided that they probably didn't even remember that it existed, and I'd rather hear Ghostbusters anyway. Their costumes were cute and clever with Zac as the 3 musketeers candy bar, and the expected sword jokes just kept coming.

It was a blast, we took awesome pictures, we rocked out on inflatable instruments, we ate great mexican food and pizza, and we left the crown plaza (and the back seat of my car) with about a pound of glitter.