We’re baaaack! Hello San Diego. But first, our last week of tour was great. We were in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont. We stayed with our friend Laura in her beautiful house in the woods and hung out on Thayer Street again. We had some great screenings at Providence College and Bennington and we got to participate in the Hometown Shakedown! Sean and I met with the staff member from New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg’s office and all 30 meetings across America resulted in John Kerry co-sponsoring the bill! Such a huge deal because he’s the majority leader of the Foreign Relations committee in the Senate. Yea!
Now we’re back in San Diego after 3 straight days of driving and a pit stop in Gallup, Mew Mexico when Deep South’s van died. Yea. We gutted the van in 15 minutes and drove 12 people, 12 peoples stuff, and 3 teams merch in two vans. What a trip. We pulled off at a Walmart parking lot in Yuma to sleep our last night. So funny.
So today for Thanksgiving 50 of us are going to a house in Point Loma for a family meal. Reunited and it feels so good.
Our screening at the University of Connecticut was one I was looking forward to more than most. I had about 6 screening requests come in from there while we were in the office and we'd never been there before. So this story actually begins 10 days before the screening when my contact there emails me and says she can't get a room so she's canceling. Super disappointed but still determined to get this screening I email a couple girls who sent in requests after tour started. One of those girls immediately calls me back promising me a great screening and free dinner, what more could a roadie want?
After dinner we get to the room and start to get everything in and set up. The room was big enough to seat about 50, good enough seeing as how we had a week to promote. 6:45 comes and the sound is practically at a whisper while the room starts to fill up and we have no idea how to fix any of it. But it's ok, that's why we have our own sound equipment. So after Amy parks the van and walks back in the cold I tell her she must trek the icy weather again to bring back our huge sound suitcase.
When she gets back it's about 7:15 and I'm stalling in front of a crowd of about a hundred in this tiny room. People were all over on the floor, standing up, I had to move our merch outside the room to make more room for people. So there are 100 people staring at me while I try to hook up speakers and I standup and project my head directly into the bar that is weighing down their projection screen. The room goes silent and all you can hear are worried "ooohhh's" and "uhhhh?'s" And right after we figure out that the cable we need is in the van we hook up the mic to the speakers and in walks the tech guy at 7:30 and goes into this secret room and turns the volume up like it was that easy the entire time.
When we finally start the movie and maneuver our way out of the room through the sea of people I feel my head and ask Amy to look at it. Amy's eyes widen as I reveal the horn that has begun to grow out of my forehead in the place where I hit it. Obviously in a situation like this our first impulse isn't to get ice, figure out how we're going to get a table for our merch, where we would even put a merch table, or how I'm going to get up in front of people with this bump and be taken seriously, but to update our twitters of course. And while I'm complaining about my head giving birth, Amy's laughing so hard she pees her pants, seriously. So her next instinct isn't to go change her pants but she walks round UConn in her pee pants looking for ice for my head.
Fast-forward, Amy changes her clothes, parts my hair over the tumor, I call the office and tell Jenna all about it, Amy calls Nathan Canning and tells him all about it, we wrap up a screening selling $500 of merch and 8 TRIs with no credit card machine or TRI cards (yes about 20 people actually let us write down their credit card information on ripped sheets of notebook paper) and Amy pees her pants again while I try to get book boxes out of the van and debate with myself if it's worth it as I consistently fall into the van, and eventually fail all together.
University of Connecticut was easily our shadiest, best promoted, most ridiculous, and one of our most fruitful screenings of tour. And the swelling on my head did go down if anyone wanted to know.
So Yesterday was the first day of my part of tour and the Invisible Children: From Darkness to Sight exhibit opening. Such a good day!
We started the day at Sanford Calhoun, last year's Schools For Schools winners. I was expecting it to not be a very good screening because we were only showing to 60 students in a classroom and it was always so hard to get a hold of anyone there. So we screen The Rescue and sell some merch and then everyone talks about fund raising ideas for S4S. Jason and Kate, the teachers, talk about sending a student to northern Uganda and the students ask if they'd started fundraising yet. To everyone's surprise Jason says "don't worry, we've got about 5 digits right now." Luckily, Sean was able to catch my face when I heard this news.
My excitement couldn't be killed the entire day because once we left Calhoun we headed back to Manhattan for the opening of IC's exhibit on Bleecker St. It was so good to see Ben Keesey, Jason, Laren, Marcus Price, and every friend we met in NYC for the past two weeks was there. It was like our friends were coming to visit us for a straight 3 hours. Then we went out for some delicious Pizza and cookies afterwards before staying with our friend Lindsay.
Such a great day and end to an awesome stay in the big apple. I would love to return in the next 6 months and actually do some touristy things though. Vacation!!!