Friendly Folk-Pop for the Kids: Hey Marseilles at Vera This Saturday
Seattlest Pix 09Nov21
Excavator Rampage in Stanwood
Can't Miss It: Weekend Edition Nov 20-22
Little Big Band Talks Respect, Honor, and Action
We had the strangest dream last night that we were in Key Arena watching High School Musical: The Ice Show (of course it wasn't a dream at all). Seated next to us on the left was a Loudologist who claimed to have watched the show 500 times. This would explain his adept memorization of all the choreography and song lyrics. (He treated us to some chair dancing and singing in falsetto at various intervals, when he wasn't measuring the atmosphere on his loud-o-meter.)
On the right, we had a mother-and-daughter team who were less than enthusiastic. Apparently the woman's younger daughter is a huge HSM fan, but got very sick at the last minute, so her embarrassed older sister had to come along in her stead and turn beet red every time mom shot her hands in the air and sang along. We think mom was just doing this to embarrass her daughter. Still, it was constant entertainment.
Between our row-mates, honestly, we had a difficult time paying attention to the show. First of all, there was the hour-long (actually about 10 minutes) trailer for High School Musical 3: Senior Year, during which we were taught quite complicated choreography and encouraged to sing along with the theme song. "High School Musical," the song, will now be stuck in our heads for the rest of all space and time.
When the ice part actually started it was underwhelming, although we can't really put our finger on why. After all, neato lighting decorated the ice in rainbows and pink swirling stars. Talented ice dancers engaged in moderate acrobatics that, more than once, surprised us into applause. There was a cool trick with a basketball moving in slow motion. People who looked very, very vaguely like Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron lip synced to all the hit songs from the movie, while two people that looked even more vaguely like Ashley Tisdale and Lucas Grabeel got as close to stealing the show as possible, considering.
Mostly, it was much more fun to watch the antics in the stands. Little girls all around us screamed their heads off every time "Ryan" and "Sharpay" hit the ice. Big, awkward dads humored their daughters by dancing along. Everyone either had a giant tub of popcorn or a sno-cone, but there was no beer on tap for those of us childless 30-somethings who just wanted to gay out and be entertained. We resigned to wait for the streamers and fireworks which were, unfortunately, too little too late.
We also couldn't stop wondering the whole time where they find these people. Is there a colony of lip syncing, dancing, twirling, ice dancing pop stars somewhere? Who knew there were so many young, attractive people who could not only dance but also twirl in the air on ice skates...and who also looked very vaguely, remotely (even if it was a bit of a stretch) like someone in a Disney movie!? That is an endless source of fascination for us. All that said, should you brave the elements this weekend to catch the show, your seven-year-old will probably have a ball.
photos courtesy of Field Entertainment
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Wow. Kim, you are far braver than I.
This seems like the kind of thing for which you'd be better off really, really stoned for the duration.
Oh, *that's* why it took me over an hour and a half to get from Redmond to Queen Anne last night.
and you sat through this with NO BEER??