Oh what a night!

Ok, I have to say this up front... Ian (in case you weren't chaperoning me tonight), you HAVE to go to Fed Square tomorrow night or Saturday night coz it's the last two days this festival thingy is on. Tomorrow night is Elvis night and Saturday night is Latin night.

Would you believe we both turned up half an hour early? LOL I'm not sure why he did, but I did because I wasn't sure how long it'd take me to get to the city, so I left extra time just in case, plus I needed to get money. But when I got there, he sent me a message to say he was already there.

First impressions, he's not much taller than me and sorta looks like Tom Cruise with freckles. Well he has that 'look' happening. He kept looking at me like he wasn't sure what to think (haha happens to me all the time), but assured me later it was a good thing. Anyway, since we both arrived so early, we ditched the idea of not talking till the entertainment started.

Have you heard about those laughter clubs? That's what I got caught unawares in. The first part of the evening was laughter yoga, where basically they show you different types of laughs and actions to go with them and you completely and utterly embarrass yourself in front of hundreds of other people by going up to them and touching them and laughing in their face, pulling faces and generally behaving like a three year old. This was good, because you couldn't tell the line between people laughing out of embarrassment, fun, or because they had to. To do all this on a first date immediately after meeting was a little unsettling, but more fun than I expected it to be.

The second part of the night was group karaoke, which meant the entire few hundred people got to sing as badly and loudly as they liked. Hey, we'd all just laughed ourselves stupid and already looked like dorks, so nobody cared how they sounded by then. Well, the boy couldn't have picked a better night, for two reasons. The first being that the first karaoke song was I Am Woman by Helen Reddy and this is my all time favourite karaoke song, so guess who belted that baby out good and proper! hehe Next was A Long Way to the Shop by ACDC, which went down well with the men in the crowd. The best bit was that because the crowd had to learn the songs, we got to sing them over and over again.

The second reason he got his timing right was that it was also Country night and I can't help it, I love country music. So we got to do a couple of country songs karaoke style too.

Then there was a country band, who were great. Ian do you know Jon Stevens or the Scared Weird Little Guys? Well, they were in this band. And they were fantastic.

But the best part of the night was watching the crowd. It was amazing! There were hundreds of people there. At 6pm the mix was mainly people just out of work or families with little kids and just general passers by. After a while, from I don't know where, it looked as though a bus load of special needs people had been dropped off to see the show. They all went down the front near the stage. Was amazing to see these people with no inhibitions (moreso than the rest of the crowd) just dancing around and having fun and mixing it up with whoever was standing around them.

As the night wore on, the freaks started to appear and the families started to go home. There was the old man in the baseball cap who danced so fast I swore his legs were gonna come out from underneath him and he'd land on his face. There was an old Chinese man with white gloves on (no kidding LOL) who did a mixture of tai chi, the nutbush, line dancing and whatever else he could think of. A girl in a big red rain jacket who danced like she had been electrocuted (dance like nobody's watching!). An aboriginal woman who had some pretty cool moves (till she started a small fight with another woman who turned out to be her friend and they danced together later on). The 'normal' people in the crowd who did their own boogey thing by themselves. Then later on appeared the drunken 20-something guys who joined forces with the rain jacket girl, two other girls who looked like the nerdy chicks who never leave the library, the Chinese guy and the old hat guy. At that point, a circle of weirdness had formed and they did this whole crazy country/nutbush thing, like a crazed hip hop dance off.

Oh, I forgot to mention the drunken skin head chick and her friends, but she gets the nutcase award for flashing her breasts at the guys on stage, then dropping her track pants as well - all this while having one arm in plaster and not being able to walk at all and hardly being coherent. To think that she might have gone further than this, is too scary to ponder. Thankfully, her drunken friends turned up to distract her.

We had the most excellent time dudes!! (Spoken like Keanu Reeves or a Ninja Turtle).

By the time the show was over, it wasn't yet 9pm, but we were starving, so we walked across to Southbank and finally got to have a relatively normal conversation. Afterwards, we walked back to where my car was parked and we talked until we had to rush coz both our cars were going to be locked into our respective carparks if we didn't get them out by midnight. So we pulled out of the parking lots and parked on the street and talked in my car for about another hour.

Um what else can I say? Just had a really good, fun time, and he seems a genuine and nice guy. Am not gonna count chickens or put eggs in baskets, but I had a much better time than I anticipated. So we'll see... he's a scorpio, so me has to do some reading. Have not met a scorpio boy in a few years. :-p

I'm home safe and well now, and fairly content (but super tired!), so you can stop fretting about me. :-)