David Archuleta - Archey Report - Hartford, CT - 08/08/08
(Here's an Archey Report from Meagan from Hartford, CT! Thanks!)
So it's been officially 15 minutes (it's 11:30 at the moment) since I got home from the concert, & I'm assuming the idols are doing some more signing right now. Anyway, to start at the beginning...
My cousin came to pick me up at 8:45. After some mad dashes around the house to make sure I had everything ready, we left. But before we drove off, we took pictures of each other with the signs we made for Archie this past Saturday (the 2nd).
We arrived in Hartford at 10:30. After about a half hour of walking around & doing some guesswork & asking people where they'd be coming out to meet us, we waited at the loading dock for an hour. Then we heard rumors that they'd be signing inside, so my cousin left to check it out while I held our spots outside. She paged to say that the rumor was true & to get my butt inside as fast as possible. So we hung around, thinking they'd come out at 1:30 since that was what security & all the other XL Center staff told us, but they only FINALLY started setting up everything AT 1:30. Go figure. But they DID come out an hour later, & we got to meet Kristy Lee Cook, Ramiele Malubay, David Cook, Michael Johns, Brooke White, & Archie. I didn't say much to anyone except to Cook & that was because my cousin wanted some autographs & a picture as well. (She ended up getting 2; the 2nd one was ADORABLE!) I did the interpreting for her... He loved her poster & asked what the sign for beautiful was. After I showed it to him, he mimicked it PERFECTLY! He moved on to the other people, but I heard him say that he'd taken classes in school, but all he remembers now is the alphabet. He also recognized her in the audience during his set & waved to her.
We grabbed lunch at a nearby Burger King & while there, it POURED. We had to wait a good 15 minutes after we'd finished eating for it to let up so we wouldn't be soaked the second we stepped out the door.
As soon as we walked in the door, we got our picture taken by some official American Idol staff, who apparently are going to put our pictures on the jumbo screens in future concerts. We had to sign a waiver for that & it basically said we signed our images away to the AI brand for them to use as they saw fit & we had no legal recourse if we decide in the future to have them stop using our images.
We hung around and waited for the doors to open at 6, and instantly got drowned in the crush of people trying to get in the doors as soon as possible, & barely managed to escape with our cameras unscathed in the process of them inspecting our bags. I just gotta say this: Thank God for huge purses & my cousin! :D
We found our seats & they happened to be on the right side of the arena on the aisle between the floor & upper sections, & they happened to be sucky. (We were in section 4, row F.) We had thought that the sections would be rearranged according to Ticketmaster. (We thought our seats would be the inside aisle, close to the center so we could see more action.) So we decided to ask one of the security people if we could move up during intermission if there happened to be any empty seats. She said we could & gave us a signal to watch for. We both got some AWESOME shots of the first 6 performers from our seats though!
We double-checked with the security lady & she told us that there were no empty seats close up, but we could, once the show started up again, blend in with the crowd & follow them to the stage! So once Jason Castro walked up onstage, we did exactly that, & we stayed there for the next hour.
The crowd went NUTS once Archie came on. He really is perfection personified, both vocally & as a performer. "Angels" was heaven, & it brought new meaning to me when he performed it. TV didn't do him nearly enough justice. Then came "Apologize" by One Republic, which he knocked out of the park, & his set was half over. (My camera's batteries died halfway through the song, to my IMMENSE heartbreak. My cousin took over the photo-taking duties after that.) He then sang "Stand By Me" by Ben E. King with some "Beautiful Girls" lyrics by Sean Kingston thrown into the middle of it. He did some dancing, which was really fun (& cute) to watch. The audience just went crazy over that. Then, sadly, came "When You Say You Love Me" by Josh Groban. Let me just say this as a Grobanite: His version is LEAGUES over Josh's right now. He OWNS that song, & I will no longer listen to Josh's because it now sounds stilted & studied to my own ears. The depth of emotion & purity & THOUGHT he poured into this song... Chills. Absolutely awe-inspiring & tear-inducing. If I had 1,000 hands to do the thumbs-up sign with, he'd have them all with that song.
Then, after Archie's cute intro, it was Cook's turn. He sang his haunting version of "Hello" by Lionel Richie as his opener (I LOVE it), & then it was "Time of My Life", his American Idol single when he was crowned the winner. He taped a bit of the audience so he could "look back on this experience when it's over", & then he did "Billie Jean", "My Hero", which he dedicated to his brother, Adam, who has cancer, & one last song that I can't think of right now.
Then it was their final group number, "Please Don't Stop the Music" by Rihanna. & BOOM! it was over. Some of us stayed down by the stage in the hopes the idols would wander out & sign autographs, but they didn't. We headed out to find our parking garage & found this huge barricade near the ticket windows with literally about 500 people in front of it. After hanging around for about 15 minutes, we found out they would come out at 11, but we were happy with our autographs, so we left. (There wasn't much point in staying with that many people around & we didn't want to hog their precious time.)