Wayne: So do you come to Milwaukee often?

Alice Cooper: Well, I'm a regular visitor here, but Milwaukee has certainly had its share of visitors. The French missionaries and explorers began visiting here in the late 16th century.
Pete: Hey, isn't Milwaukee an Indian name?
Alice Cooper: Yes, Pete, it is. In fact, it was originally an Algonquin term meaning the good land.
Wayne: I was not aware of that.
Alice Cooper: I think one of the most interesting things about Milwaukee is that it's the only American city to elect three Socialist mayors.
Wayne to the camera: Does this guy know how to party or what?

(continued from the previous post)

So we stumbled into Alexis's house shortly after 2 A.M... Our ride (also known as Peggy, Lisa, and Ashley) to the Megabus , which would be carrying us to Milwaukee, was going to be arriving at 5:30. The big question was: do we try to sleep for a couple of hours? Or do we power through it?

I put a pizza in the oven (that whole "forgetting to eat dinner" thing happened again that night), plugged in all of my equipment that needed charging, and changed into the clothes that I would be wearing on the bus. Alexis was flitting about the house, throwing things into her bag. After eating one piece of pizza, I decided that I needed to sleep for a little bit. I laid down on the sofa in the living room, and the next thing I knew my alarm was going off. Unnnngggghhhhhhh. TOO SOON!

I got Alexis out of bed, and we scrambled to get the rest of our crap together. Luckily for us, our ride was running a few minutes late :)

We made it to the Megabus station just after 6. The rest of our crew (12 of us!) was either there or arrived shortly afterwards. Truth be told, most of that morning is a blur. Alexis got some sleep on the bus, but I mostly just sat in my seat with my iPod in, feathered eye mask on, and desperately wishing I could fall asleep.

We stopped at the world's most bizarre truck stop again, where we noticed that one of the trailers in the lot for the discount adult gifts / erotic bakery / naughty novelties store proclaimed in large, hand-painted, letters that it was the "home of the beer lube." We ran out of time to investigate on the way there, but the group decided that on our way back SOMEBODY had to find out what that was all about.

We got into Milwaukee around 1 P.M. We parted ways from the rest of the group, who were staying at the Hyatt, and went to the Best Western, were able to check in early. Again, we debated whether to sleep or power through, but in the end we decided that Team Afternoon Nap sounded like a good team to be on. As happened earlier, Alexis slept and I laid wide awake. I think I have insomnia.

Anyways, after a couple of hours of lying there, the alarm went off again. We both showered up (*this is important later*) and got ready to go, and realized that maybe - since we'd already made the giant leap of taking naps - we should do something really crazy and EAT DINNER.

We walked over to Rock Bottom and encountered something very, very strange.

Ashtrays at the tables!!! We've been living in a Smoking Ban city for so long that this was really shocking for us.

After dinner, we called our friends who were staying at the Hyatt to see what they were up to. It was still about an hour 'til showtime. We thought we'd play tourists this time around and actually sit through both of the opening acts. Novel idea, huh? We stopped into their hotel "suite" and hung out for a few minutes.

Once the troops were rallied, we headed over to the arena. I was suffering from Track Jacket Envy by that point, so I pointed myself in the direction of the merch table. They had ONE jacket left, and it was a small! My size! Holla! It was a sign.

We found our seats (8th row center!) and found our friends. Holla at the TC Blockhead crew!!! We only took a few photos.





(yeah, we did wear the shirts two nights in a row... we figured it would help them recognize us?)

Since we were so close, with such a central view, but mostly because our cameras were pissing us off, we didn't take many photos during the show. We just enjoyed it. Here are a few though.





















I think this was my favorite show so far. Apparently the arena wasn't full, and the crowd allegedly sucked, but we were so close up (and ahem, sober for a change - for real. dinner helped) that we really didn't notice what was going on around us. When they were making their final bows, Joe pointed at Alexis and me, and we both individually did the pointing-at-self-mouthing-the-word-"ME???," to which he laughed, nodded, and gave us the thumbs up and a wave. Wearing the shirts two days in a row was a good thing!

So after the show, we thought we'd give the "face time" mission another shot. It was way too cold outside to be standing in short sleeves though, so we went back to our hotel room to change into warmer clothes.

We went up to our room, and our key didn't work. We figured it had been demagnetized from being in Alexis's purse with all of the magnets. We went to the front desk, where the clerk made us two new keys. We went back up to our room, and again the keys didn't work. We were kind of annoyed by that point, so we headed back down to the lobby. This time the clerk made new keys and accompanied us back up to our room. He tried one of the newest keys, and it worked.

Alexis headed to the bathroom and let out a shriek and an "OH MY GOD."



That was on the floor in the bathroom.

A closer view:



THOSE DISGUSTING, STAINED BOXER SHORTS DO NOT BELONG TO US!!!!

Each of us had used the toilet at least twice since we had checked into our room, and we had both taken showers. ONE of us would have seen that on the floor.

We were thoroughly grossed out, but nothing else in the room seemed to have been disturbed and we were kind of in a hurry to get back over to the arena, so we tried as hard as we could to convince ourselves that we just must not have seen them earlier... RIGHT?

Dressed in several layers of long sleeves, we walked back over to the arena. There was a crowd of people lined up along some barricades in the back by the buses.


I don't even know how long we stood there. It was very cold and windy. It might have been half an hour, it might have been two hours. Finally, Danny came out, escorted by Zach and Robo


He was very good about making sure to go down the entire row of people. He signed autographs and took photos. I think we may have pissed Robo off a little bit because we squeezed through the barricade for our photo.

(curse you, red eye setting!!!)

When he was done, we waited around for a little bit to see if anybody else would come out. No dice. Not on foot anyway...

The busses starting rolling out. If I remember correctly, Donnie and Joe were together in a bus, and Jordan was in another one. They came up the front of the bus and waved at the assembled crowds. Some crazy girl threw herself under Donnie & Joe's bus. She may have tripped running after it, but it sure looked like she literally threw herself under the bus. WTF.

That scene was kind of crazy, and weird. What must they be thinking in there? Dozens (hundreds?) of screaming girls running after their bus... As much as I adore the New Kids on the Block, I guess I'm just not the type to go running and screaming. Alexis, on the other hand... ;)

We walked back to our hotel and noticed that one of the buses was parked in front of the Hyatt. Tons of girls were jumping up and down outside of the door. Robo was taking items to be autographed and passing them inside.


A couple of guys ran out of the hotel and got on the bus, and then the bus rolled away into the sunset. More accurately, it rolled away into the frigid downtown Milwaukee night.

We finally made it back to our hotel, and searched every nook and cranny in the room to look for evidence of creepy underpants person, but we didn't find anything.

When we checked out in the morning, I mentioned it to the desk clerk (who had actually helped us with our keys the night before). He looked puzzled and said "that should never happen." Um, really? He took $20 off of our room, which I guess was a good thing. I really just don't like thinking about the possibilities. HOW and WHEN did the stained boxers end up on our bathroom floor???

We grabbed coffee (me) and apple cider (Alexis), and walked back to the Megabus stop to meet up with the rest of the crew.


The ride back was long, and mostly uneventful. At the weird truckstop (yes, we stopped there AGAIN - seriously - is there no other truck stop between Minneapolis and Madison??? I think there IS), Alexis and Tiffany ran over to the adult novelties store to investigate the beer lube situation.


This is my interpretation of their conversation:

Alexis/Tiffany: So, what's the deal with the beer lube?
Employee: Well, it's what the name implies
Alexis/Tiffany: Does it taste like beer?
Employee: It's supposed to. It comes in a beer bottle
Alexis/Tiffany: OH.... So can we buy some?
Employee: We don't have any ready right now
Alexis/Tiffany: You don't have any... ready ?
Employee: You see, we're manufacturing it in those trailers out there
Alexis/Tiffany: [Backing slowly away...] Right. See ya!
Employee: Don't forget to take these 10% off coupons for your next visit!

Seriously, what kind of license does one need to manufacture that? Does the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture know about this???

And in a few hours we were home and cooking up plans for our next trip. We feel like we can't wait until November, but our grown-up brains (welcome back, brains!) are telling us we really shouldn't add another show. You never know though. Stranger things have happened!

"Saint Paul, Minneapolis, Wherever We Are"

Those were the words spoken by a very disgruntled truck driver as she stomped out of the Xcel center, talking on her cell phone to somebody who clearly was NOT in Saint Paul.

To Recap:

Wow. The whole day went by so fast I hope I can remember it all!

We began the day at Alexis's house where we met up with Kim T and Becky. From there, we headed downtown to engage in a little stalker action. There was a very small crowd gathered on the north side of the building, near the loading docks:


It was cold. DAMN cold. After a couple of hours, we were afraid that Baby Barbie was going to be mistaken for one of Michael Jackson's kids:


So, we went to The Liffey for lunch and a little warmup.

After lunch, we walked down to the Eagle Street entrance, where one of the security guards from the other side of the building had told us to wait. Who knows if he was telling the truth or not, but we didn't really have an option other than to believe him.

We waited.


And waited


And waited


Aaaand... waited








Baby Barbie wants to know where Her Donnie is


Eh, Close but no cigar... That's Donnie Lane, head of the Truck Drivers


So the end of this portion of the story is that we waited all day and nothing happened. There were quite a few disappointed women in Saint Paul that afternoon. Oh well. We knew there was no guarantee! An adventure is an adventure, right?

Alexis and I were supposed to be at Shamrock's around 3 pm to get the party started and greet the WCCO folks, so we hauled it back to her house and changed clothes. We weren't gross by that point, but we weren't exactly feeling fresh after standing outside in the cold wind all day. No time for showers though!

We still managed to look alright though, right? RIGHT?




There, we met up with our party proxy, Amber Preston

(Thanks again, Amber - for being so awesome!)


After a very short time, we had to leave to make it to our 5* festivities on time. As we were getting ready to leave, WCCO showed up to get some pre-party footage. Liz Collin had been in contact with us throughout the day to try to set up an interview time, but we weren't having much luck given our weird schedule.



Here's the thing. You people are AMAZING. We were expecting between 70-100 people to show up. We made 100 VIP Shamrocks/NKOTB lanyards. We ran out!!! Like, before a LOT of you showed up! The turnout was phenomenal... I don't think that anybody was expecting such a crowd - including the bar! Thank you, thank you, thank you for coming to our little shindig and making it a success! I'll post a few photos here, but there are dozens of them in our Flickr set.



















Jason arrived just in the nick of time and drove us down to the X-Cel to meet up with our friends Peggy, Katie and Lisa for the 5* festivities.

Once we were all checked in and were given our ILAA gift bags of a smelly fleece blanket, mug and some other stuff, we enjoyed our crowd free merchandise shopping. Alexis enjoyed it to the tune of one NKOTB track jacket and a program/tour book. I just got the program/tour book.

We were then led downstairs in groups of 10 to the event floor-level bar to snack on wine and veggies. We cheated a little and only had nine in our group... After awhile, Robo came in and gave his famous "be good girls" speech and then they brought our guys in. They waved at us all as they were ushered into the small room off to the side of the bar where the photos would be taken.

We were in the third group (C). When we were let into the room our minds went blurry with excitement. Alexis ran straight to Joe and handed him a full set of magnets and told him that the... really nice imposter from Mohegan Sun was not her. He was like, "I know. She meant no harm. She just didn't have her mind right." I'm paraphrasing.

Meanwhile, I had beelined it for Donnie and chased him into a wall. Okay, maybe not - but I got my Donnie hug! There may have been a little improv acting to get it. When it came time for the picture Alexis was in a Joe-Danny sandwich and I was standing in the middle of the room by myself. It's a good thing my brain was working faster than it should have been, because I noticed that there was a spot on the other side of Joe. Whew. Awkward "solo chick crouching in the middle of the photo" crisis averted.

After the photo we had about 30 more seconds with the guys before Robo started yelling at us to get the hell out. Alexis went up to Jon to apologize for telling him that he looked tired at the MOA and felt stupid for it the rest of the night. She might need to apologize for apologizing the next time she sees him. Happily, he liked our shirts.

After our group was done we went back out into the bar area. Liz Collin called us to see if we could come up yet for our interview, but Xcel and ILAA wouldn't let us leave! After a few minutes Liz waved her magic wand and suddenly a security guard and an Xcel event staffer were leading us up the stairs into the lobby. We must have asked them a hundred times if we were going to be able to come BACK if we followed them. They assured us that, yes, we could come back (although they may have been wishing otherwise... I think we might have been kind of obnoxious).

And then, without more than a minute's warning, we were on TV. Mix a tiny bit of wine with a whole lot of New Kids hugs and the result is this. . It was like we were 13 again but with less screaming. I guess at 31 you just Holla a bunch.

After the interview, we were escorted back to the ILAA party. The photos were done by then, so the guys had already left. They didn't stay to mingle like they had in some other locations. As much as that's a bummer, I'm kind of glad because we would have missed it!

By this point, we figured we should probably go try to find the guys. Drew and Jason had taken Aiden to the show. Apparently the three of them in their matching t-shirts were quite the hit. Jason said he had his picture taken at least fifty times. We found the trio at the Iron Range Grill.

In case you can't read their shirts...
Drew: "I can't pay my mortgage because my wife bought 5* tickets to see NKOTB"
Jason: "My wife loves me more than NKOTB, but she still made me come to this show and wear this shirt"
Aiden: "My mommy paid these two guys to take me to my first NKOTB concert"

We got our cameras from the guys (they were banned at the pre-party - cameras, not guys), and went on our merry ways to find our seats. In a move that would later prove to be kind of dumb, we left our goodie bags from ILAA on our seats and went to go find our friends.

We located our friends Becky, Liz, Kaela, and Mindy in their seats, and bumped into Jason's sister Azure along the way. I think she might have been embarrassed by her sister-in-law's hot pink tights... oh well :)

When we got back to our seats, Alexis's bag was missing. Uh. Hmm... WTF? Yes, maybe we shouldn't have left them unattended, but who would be so bold as to steal one? Luckily for us, our seat neighbors had eagle eyes and knew exactly who the perpetrator was. They even knew where she was sitting! We grabbed a security guard and told him our sad little tale. Double luckily for us, the ILAA bags were labeled with the name of the person who bought the tickets. I gave my ID to the security guard, pointed out the thief, and told him that the bag she had would have my name on it. Triple luckily for us, the security guard investigated and she actually did have Alexis's bag. I would have felt pretty stupid if we were wrong.

So we would like to give a huge shout-out to our seat neighbors. THANK YOU!!!


And a huge bonehead to the person who stole the bag:

(image slightly distorted to protect any dignity she may have left)

The show was fantastic. It was LOUD though. I don't know if it was where we were sitting (5th row!), or if it was just that much louder than the other shows, but OUCH. We could feel our arm hair move with the bass.

Since not enough of you voted on whether or not I should buy a new camera, I haven't yet. Here are a few sub-par photos of this show. Again, you can find more in our Flickr set.









Who, me?






I'm the King of the World!!!








Donnie made Aiden cry




And then, again, it was over.

We had some technical difficulties hooking back up with Drew and Jason... but eventually we all made it back to Shamrock's on the shuttle afterwards.


A few dozen folks decided to stay at Shamrocks for the post-show dance party. Chris the drummer even showed up!




I was so exhausted that I was convinced if I stopped moving, I would fall over. So I just kept moving. Seriously. I don't think I stopped dancing the entire time I was there. Whenever I stood still my feet would start to hurt too much.

Thanks to Goody for cranking the NKOTB tunes for us and letting us dance on the booths!




The clock struck 2, and Alexis and I hobbled back to her house to try to sleep for an hour or two. Our feet were KILLING us. And I even had comfy shoes (boots) on!

Stay tuned for Milwaukee.... the trip that began just two short hours after this events of this post ended!