Great Big Sea

Great Big Sea at the Moore in Seattle, 3/12/2011 (Part 1 of 3)

This was, hands down, the biggest GBS fan outing I’d arranged in some time. I was juggling communication about it across four different channels–Facebook, Twitter, email, and the OKP–and five, really, if you count anything off-net. (This did, I am embarrassed to admit, make me a little crazy; apologies to those to whom I got more crazy than was warranted, and much gratitude to all as I kept a whole bunch of balls in the air to get the whole shebang going!) It wound up going in three, count ’em, three different waves all across Saturday afternoon and evening.


The first of these was a gathering at Pike Place Market of myself, userinfomaellenkleth who I of course know from LJ/DW and face-to-face, and my three fellow OKP fangirls Sara, Kate, and Jaime, who I hadn’t met before. It was pretty nifty to get to hang out with fellow OKP fangirls before the show–and much approval was expressed of the plan to raid Pike Place. Especially when I mentioned wanting to stop by my boys at Frank’s, ’cause let’s face it, if there are any boys I love as much as THE B’ys, it’s those guys!

Nor did Chaz of the Market disappoint. He was very gracious to those I brought with me, and much approval was uttered over the berries and the mango he sold us. Also, I had to go “aww” as he told the others that I’m not just a “customer”, I am, quote, “one of their own”, unquote. Chaz really is a sweetheart. <3

Doesn’t this look like a tasty market?

Tasty Fruit is Tasty

Tasty Fruit is Tasty

After we left my marketboys’ stand, we wandered more or less at random up and down the length of the market. We popped briefly into Market Spice (mmm tea), the comics/collectables store down on the second level, and into a store called Tenzing Momo at Jaime’s request. All in all it was a nice little ramble–and it was followed in fairly awesome short order by Jaime being struck by the BEST IDEA IN THE HISTORY OF THERE BEING IDEAS.

We’d already seen The Doyle talking on Twitter about how this year is Great Big Sea’s 18th anniversary as a band. So it wasn’t any great shakes at all for Jaime to turn to us and be all “OH HEY we should get the band a CAKE!”

This proposal was met with unilateral acclaim, and I pointed us forthwith over to the grocery store on Third. There we picked out a chocolate sheet cake with white frosting on it and red roses, and hung out for a little while waiting to see if one of the store staff could put the words “HAPPY 18TH BANDIVERSARY” on it. We had a bit of a debate as to how to properly spell “BANDIVERSARY”, but Kate and I both voted for the spelling I’m quoting here, on the grounds of it being closest to “anniversary”. Turned out though that the store staffer was convinced that she couldn’t fit the word onto the cake, and we had to do it ourselves. They gave us a different cake, one with pink trim, and we got hold of two different squeeze tubes of frosting–one in pink sort of gel-like stuff to do “HAPPY” and “BANDIVERSARY”, and one in red more frosting-y-like stuff to do “18TH”.

Mad props to Jaime for doing the actual lettering! It came out looking pretty nifty, if I do say so myself:

The Cake is Not a Lie

The Cake is Not a Lie

Phase 1 of Operation Cake Surprise thus complete, all that remained was Phase 2: i.e., get the cake to the band. We were cutting it close by that point, pretty sure that the guys would probably be heading into the Moore around 5ish for sound check–but we made it back to the tour bus in time to catch GBS’ drummer, Mr. Kris MacFarlane, at the door of the bus. Mustering shaky and nervous smiles, we pecked on the door and got him to poke his head out and offered him the cake!

I did NOT get a picture of that, on the grounds that I was doing pretty well hanging out behind the others at the handoff–and I was too close to really whip out my iPhone casually, anyway, without looking TOO DAMNED OBVIOUS. Kris very graciously accepted the cake, nonetheless. And thus was our mission accomplished.

(One does actually hope that the B’ys enjoyed the sugary cake-y goodness, as opposed to chucking it in the bin as soon as Kris got it in there, which for all I know is a distinct possibility. Nonetheless, in the Universe According to Anna, they shared it amongst themselves and found it Tasty, which is really all we wanted.)

Anyway, after that we boinged squeefully around the sidewalk for a little bit going OH MY GOD WE GAVE GREAT BIG SEA A CAKE, as you’d absolutely expect five fangirls to do, no matter what our ages (and we had a good range between us all). We weren’t even deterred much once I got a surprise text message from userinfotechnoshaman warning me that the Night Kitchen had shut down for emergency repairs. Um, yikes?

So we split up briefly, with Elane and myself retreating to Caffe d’Arte across the street from the Moore so I could have some hot cocoa, and the others running off to regroup briefly with their own peeps before dinnertime. I started posting to various places and sending out various alerts going “PLAN B NEEDED FOR DINNER”, and got the excellent suggestion from userinfomamishka to meet at the Blarney Stone Pub around the corner from Night Kitchen. We hung out a bit at the door of the restaurant anyway so I could direct people around the corner–and so that userinfosolarbird could find me, since she was going to join us for dinner even if she couldn’t come to the show. Another fan found us there, too; shout out to Kevin from the OKP, who tried to message me on Facebook but who couldn’t, I suspect, thanks to Facebook eating it! Anyway, it was pretty cool to have another new face show up.

Props to Lindsey of Night Kitchen as well, who poked her head out the door to say hi and to very apologetically explain that their dishwasher had broken, which pretty much scuttled their ability to open for business. She even offered everybody in my party coupons! We thanked her very kindly, assured her it wasn’t a problem, and eventually all rendezvoused at the pub around the corner for dinner.

We wound up having quite the herd–too many to fit us all at one table, in fact. The pub was packed and the one on-duty waitress was horribly overworked. (An Irish pub packed to the gills on the weekend before St. Paddy’s Day? The deuce you say!) But userinfosolarbird and userinfomaellenkleth and userinfotechnoshaman and userinfomamishka and I were joined by userinfosutures1 and userinfojennygriffee, along with the aforementioned Kevin and more OKPers, including Julie and her husband, and a couple other folks whose names I have sadly forgotten. (Apologies, folks! See previous commentary re: me getting a little crazy. Also, there was a raspberry kamikaze. I’m just sayin’!)

Lively conversation was had all around, though. The only downside was that due to the overworked pub staff, Jenny didn’t get her dinner on time–but we did, at least, all make it over to the Moore to get in for the show!

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