Shortly before we moved last summer Michael surprised me with a ticket to a second row seat for Celine Dion! He knew how much I would love love love to go and worked with our ticket guru buddy JT to find an awesome discounted ticket in a sweet sweet spot. Thank you!!
It was a single ticket so I drove the 4 hours from Sioux Falls, SD to Minneapolis, MN on December 18th to go by myself. Singing along with my Celine CDs all the way, of course. Woot!
I was curious what flavor of Celine super-fans would be sitting next to me. In my family, we call the strangers you sit next to in a close situation like a plane or a concert, José. Who would be my Celine Dion super-fan José?
Well, José turned out to be a 7th grade boy and his mom from White Bear Lake. He was a sweet kid and clearly wanted me to know he had a much wider musical taste beyond just Celine Dion. He talked up his recent concert experiences at Kanye West and Rihanna, and then went on to dazzle me with his Celine music trivia. It was pretty cute.
The concert was beyond awesome. In the weeks leading up to the blessed event, I joked with my friends about being among the crying fans. And then when she rose out of that space-age stage, walked over to me and sang the song my college roommate Alexis and I jumped up and down on our dorm room beds at 4am in our bras the night before finals and sang at the top of our lungs… I have to admit I kind of lost it. There she was, my musical hero. She was only about 15 feet away, so close I was filled with the warmth of her spotlight. A camera man was on the other side of her, shooting in my direction. It was beautiful. It was magical. I was filled with that special emotion that can only be characterized as face explosion. And then it hit me. I am the crying girl on the jumbotron. Nooo!! I was so embarrassed, I didn’t even look. But I knew I was there. What AV techie could resist putting the ridiculous crying girl in the perfect shot on the jumbotron?
Celine’s stage was in-the-round and ridiculously awesome. It moved. Her band rose up on stage to join her and then descended back into a pit. She had crazy-awesome acrobatic dancers that popped up and slid down, and there were moving walkways! At one point she rose up a good 20 extra feet on a sparkly wedding cake type pedestal. Candles descended from the ceiling for the 2nd encore when she sang the Titanic song, “My Heart Will Go On.” And she had no less than six costume changes under the stage.
Cameras of all types were banned from the concert. I felt like a traitor for smuggling one in, and being so close to the stage I was surrounded by at least 4 security guards on all sides. I did manage to take a few sneak shots. I got braver as the concert went on and no one seemed to notice. Most of them are pretty shakey because I was so excited that it was Celine Dion!
