Baking, Mars & BTR

We've had a busy couple of days here at Chevy Court!  Wednesday we were over the halfway hump.  You can tell because everyone is getting very tired...and grouchy :)  For the most part everyone is still playing friendly.  Wednesday we had a HUGE crowd all day long.  Buddy Valastro "The Cake Boss" came in on private jet and did a cake demonstration along with a book signing and meet and greet.  He was such a nice guy!  He brought some of his family including nephew and cousin that sold merchandise for 8 hours straight.  The stage demonstration wasn't as huge as I thought would have been.  He brought up several groups of people to decorate cupcakes.  Alec Baldwin and Jerry Springer were also on site doing meet and greets.

Cake Boss and Alec Baldwin lines

Buddy started at the back of the house before his show started

Buddy, Little Sophia and I

Bruno Mars was up next.  What a production, on stage and behind the scenes.  The crew was pretty good to work with.  Some were needy and the dressing room girl couldn't figure out what she needed.  She ended up sending the runners to the same place three times...including making returns.  CRAZY 

We had a HUGE crowd.  They definitely set a record crowd with 35,000 people!  It was packed side to side.  Bruno is a teeny tiny guy!  His fans decided to stick around until about midnight.  He and the band in turn decided to tease them.  That was fun trying to keep all the little kiddies contained.  The show was so so and was really short.  However, I guess he doesn't have a ton of material to cover much more than an hour. 

Thursday morning led in to a great day with Steel Magnolia and Big Time Rush.  Given SM was staying at the same hotel as me I just brought them in with me.  The lead singers Josh and Meg were coming in for an early interview with Bridgestreet.  The show is shot from the Chevy Court stage every weekday morning.  They are a great bunch to work with.  Very organized, pleasant and talented.  They had a good crowd even though half of them were just there early to save seats for BTR.  Big Time Rush is a band of Nickoloden tv stars so it was a ton of screaming little girls.  They were very pleasant but again had a hired idiot on staff that made things amusing.  They also decided to tease the crowd.  Except this time we had about 200 little girls waiting around and screaming for them to come out and sign.  Instead they climbed on top of the bus and waved. 

Steel Magnolia

Boot, Scootin', Boogie on outta hur...

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.