I Am A Roadie

Last night was the last night of Schools For Schools and our goodbye dinner. This is just a taste of how much our staff loves us.



I will miss them all greatly.

Oh. Snap. So we've been in the office for a week, making S4S calls, booking for Spring tour, freaking out about how much money we need to raise for S4S, and freaking out about how awesome Spring tour is going to be. See a pattern? Amidst all this we wanted to even the playing field between our schools and the Roadies so we made hundreds of cookies, brownies, rice krispie treats, and cupcakes, tied ribbon around 300 roses, pulled out some wrapping paper, and warmed up our singing voices to get that money just like students we've been pestering for 11 weeks to do.

The result? This weekend we collectively made over $3,000. Yea, there are three zeros behind that 3. Let's be honest here, when we started on Friday night at December Nights in Balboa Park I didn't really think we'd hit $1000 but with a ton of hard work we made $1400 just that night. The next night we spilt up between Balboa and Ocean Beach and that's when we killed it. I was at Balboa both nights and let me just give you a taste of what we experienced Saturday night (my favorite part comes about 1:30 into it:



Yea, that's basically what being a roadies is all about. Sweet moves and pop songs covered acoustically. These next two weeks are going to be the hardest ever as we work to raise $640,000 more in 10 days. Want to help? Donate here to help our efforts and help Taylor stop dancing before his legs give out.

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!!!

So we’ve been in New York City for the past week and I absolutely love it. So all we’ve seen is Times Square but we’ve met some absolutely great people. We're off to the Halloween Parade tonight and I'm super excited. Next up is my part of tour, here's to hoping I can pull it off as well as the rest of my team has.

We're sitting in a coffee shop in New Haven, CT now. Everything bagels are my new favorite, I haven't put in my contacts for 3 days, and I've discovered my blessing from God: That I can sleep any time, anywhere, under any conditions. I love this weather. I love this life. I saw snow Friday in upstate New York, spent the weekend in Hackensack, NJ, met some sweet girls in Danbury, CT, and by next Saturday I'll be in New York City for the 2009 GuluWalk. And it's 53 degrees outside. Beautiful.

Since I last wrote we hit a streak of luck with our screenings and were able to make over $1,000 two screenings in a row! We had a really good time at some private schools and a university club gave us a box of goodies that included popcorn, pudding, and cereal. And I went to New York City for the first time in my life, I didn't get to see much, but hey, it's NYC none the less.

The biggest shock for us is that tour is halfway over. We've been doing this for five weeks! And we have to do it for 5 more weeks... wamp wamp. Everyone says it's going to go by so quickly and I feel like every time I blink it's Friday already. My part of tour starts Nov. 4th and once it's over we go home. I'm excited to meet the people I've been talking to since August but at the same time I'll be sad to leave tour because that means "real life" is just around the corner. But for now I'm soaking in ever floor I sleep on, every time I hear The Rescue, and everytime my teammate asks me "where are we going?"

So until next time, Here's a video that truly expresses what my life is like and what the words "deeper yes" mean to me.