We had a great day with a relaxed and professional team. You know it's a good day when I received the will call envelopes from the tour managers before 2:30pm! Ronnie Dunn and Steel Magnolia definitely have the groove going with their road crews. We were set on the stage and ready to go in plenty of time to open doors for 7:00PM We knew the crowd was going to be light with ticket sales but I never assumed we'd have the crowd we did.
**Funny story of the day--Steel Magnolia rolls up and they start piling off the bus. This tiny little, adorable puppy jets off. Of course I had to bet him!! He was sticking just close enough to his owner..which I thought was a band member. He comes up and we're talking about the puppy. He introduces himself as Josh with a cute little grin. We part ways. Later in the evening someone is referring to the lead singers of Steel Magnolia...oh yes, of course the male was Josh....guess I need to start paying attention to who the artists really are. =)
**Not so funny story of the day-- We get SM on stage and they start cranking out the tunes. There was some impeding weather that we were hoping would just stay as rain. Mother Nature, as always, had a different plan. It's dumping buckets from time to time and then the rain stops completely, wind and all. Followed shortly by some lightning far off in the distance. Trying to work with the tour manager to coordinate a plan the lightning gets closer. And then it's RIGHT ON TOP OF US. We were seriously hoping we weren't going to have to put that plan of evacuation we just reviewed two days ago, in to action. We ended up evacuating the track area given those folks were sitting on metal bleachers. You'd think they'd move with an encouraging announcement right...yeah not so much. They soon figured out what they were sitting on and that it lightning struck they weren't going to be sticking around for My Maria. After about an hour of some tough decisions as to hold off, go on, wait, wait some more...we knew we couldn't take any chances. We held Ronnie's show for an hour. Unbelievably, his die hard fans (about 90%) in the crowd stuck around. He put on a great show! Most of it was Brooks and Dunn hits sprinkled with a little of his newest singles and album. I know I sure had a great time and it seemed like the folks that sat through the rain, lightning and wind did too.
Oh another note-- you may have heard or seen that yet another stage collapsed today. It was over in Belgium and by the photos I've seen the stage looked like it was constructed of toothpicks. More than likely the reason it was in our news was because of the Indiana State Fair tragedy. I cannot fathom why this is happen unless Mother Nature is just sick of hearing live music?? She's seriously upset with someone.
