American Idol

So... sometimes my friends and I do funny things.  This... was one of those times.  :)

On July 27th (yes, I know... I never post anything until it's been over for 2 or 3 weeks) American Idol held auditions in Salt Lake City.  Did we go?  Of course we did.  :)  Please know that I- BY NO MEANS- was trying to actually make it onto the show.  I just wanted to see how all of the auditions worked and everything.  It was I.N.S.A.N.E.

It all started off the Sunday before auditions.  Whitney, Kyle (a friend in Pickleville with us) and I drove to the Delta Center to get our wristbands.  Yes.  Yes, I do know that it is no longer called the Delta Center.  I refuse to call it by any other name.  All we had to do was walk inside, show them our IDs and they slapped a wristband onto our arms.  Easy.  They told us that if we took the wristbands off, we would be immediately disqualified.  Oh, and we weren't allowed to get them wet either.  Yikes.  2 days without getting them wet.  Fun.

The actual auditions were on Tuesday.  Monday night we had a show up in Garden City, but we had to be to the Delta Center at 5:00 AM on Tuesday morning.  Yuck!  So we finished our show, slept for 2 hours, and headed to Salt Lake.  Of course we ended up leaving later than we had planned, so we didn't have time to eat breakfast.  We were super hungry, though, so we improvised.  We ran into the theatre on our way out, and scooped out the leftover, stale popcorn from our show the night before and grabbed candy and soda.  The breakfast of champions.  :)

When they got everyone inside the Delta Center, we all sang a couple of songs (over and over for the sake of filming) and cheered for forever (again- for the cameras).  Ryan Seacrest came and got a few shots (he was there for a total of about 15 minutes).

The actual auditions were so fun to watch.  They set up 10 tables across the center of the floor and sectioned them out with curtains.  Two producers sat behind each table.  They lined us up in groups of four to sing for the producers.  After each of the four had sung, the producers would talk for a second and then usually tell all four of you "No."  :)  So there were lots of people singing at the same time, and tons of people in line to go next and... it was crazy.  There were thousands of people there, and very, very few people even made it through the first round.  

It was fun to walk around the outside of the stadium- where all the concessions stands were.  Everywhere you looked, people were singing to each other, to walls, to anyone around- all practicing or warming-up or... whatever.  It was loud and crazy.  I saw soooo many people that I knew there.  It was fun because I saw people from almost every phase of my life.  I saw people I knew from middle school, from high school, from college, from choirs, from plays, I saw old mission companions, etc... It was so much fun!

We were there for a majority of the day.  It took FOREVER.  Then, of course, we had a show at Pickleville that night, so we jumped in the car the second we were done, and drove straight back to Bear Lake.  We were 30 minutes late for our make-up call.

It was suuuuuch a tiring day, but well worth the experience.  :)