My Audition for "The Voice"

The decision to audition for the show was the easy part. The hard part was working out the logistics of how I was going to get all the way down to L.A. (fly or drive? Hotel or stay with family?). I decided early on that I would go to the later 2pm call time vs. the 7am call time. I knew that there would be people camping out overnight just to be the first spot for the morning and I had no interest in doing that. I WAS, however, willing to get there around 7am to line up for the 2pm so I could be one of the first in line that way. In the interest of getting the most sleep possible we booked a room at the LAX airport Radison for two nights. The idea was that I would only have to travel about 20 min to get to the venue vs. the 1 hour it would take if we stayed with family.

If anyone from the Sacramento area has ever driven down to L.A. they know it is a tedious, long, boring drive. Stopping for gas, food, and the rush hour traffic got us to the hotel around 8pm. We left before noon.

Arriving at the hotel was a fiasco in and of itself. First of all there were no clear signs to show you where to self-park. We circled three times before we finally asked someone where the hell we need to go. We were directed to a PRIVATE parking lot about a block away. When we parked the car (which was totally cluster f*cked by the way) we were informed that the parking is NOT included in the hotel stay and that if we wanted in/out privileges it costs extra. By this point we just wanted to get the hell out of the car and into our room so we could have some dinner. We hiked it over to the hotel to find out that priceline made an error and our King size bed was now two doubles. Ummmm WHAT??

"Fine, that's not the hotel's fault, just re-book our room, we'll pay the difference"

"I'm sorry sir, we're full for the night"

Great.

So we head up to the eighth floor to our room. Down the hallway a bit, ok, far from the elevator, that's good....Here's the door to our room aaaaaaand there's the door to the stairs. Well, we're 8 floors up, nobody takes the stairs to the eighth floor, right?

WRONG.

All night long from about 11pm until 3 AM IN THE MORNING people would not only SLAM that door so it shook the entire room, but LINGER in the hallway talking or TALK IN THE STAIRWELL, which we could hear from about three floor up/down.

We called the night manager who offered us anything but a solution to the problem: money off our dinner, free breakfast. My husband explained that those were very nice gestures but none of those options GAVE US SLEEP RIGHT NOW. They said they would send a security guard to stand at the doorway and monitor the noise level.

Security never came.

How do I know this? Because the door slamming/parading/3 ring circus continued for 45 minutes after the mythical security guard was posted.

Yeah right.

OK SO, here's Irma waking up at 6am, operating on THREE HOURS or so of sleep, trying to look like a SUPERMODEL at this ungodly hour of the morning. Jim was kind enough to order room service and coffee, which helped. I'm finally ready and we pack up all our stuff and check out. Among the useless shit they offered us was credit toward the b.s. parking we paid for. Guess what was NOT credited on the bill? yeah. So if anyone is looking for a place to stay near LAX please listen up, b/c I'm only gonna say it once:

DO NOT STAY AT THE RADISON AT LAX. THEY ARE ASSHOLES. They are gonna ask me to go back under my bridge I'm gonna TROLL THEIR ASSES SO BADLY ON THE INTERWEBZ.

Ok, so most of you really care about the actual "audition" part of this blog. Here it is (thank you for your patience)

I arrived at the venue around 8am, which turns out to be PERFECT timing. There is already a line of, I would guess, a thousand or so people. I get dropped off at the back of the line and ask the ladies around me which time slot they are lined up for. They say "7am", in my head I say "SWEEEEEEET". I'm only in line maybe 20 minutes when the line starts moving forward. It's drizzling, but not really "raining" per se. I make friends in the line (as I always do) and it passes the time pretty well. It's about 10 ish or so when I get to what would be perceived as the "front" of the line (not to actually go inside, but where they allow you to start lining up)

A security person asks if anyone is in line for the 2pm slot and I raise my hand.

I am the first person in the line to do so. SCORE!!

They tell us to line up against another wall and I am at the front of the new line. Another guy in the line tells us that they are gonna start letting us in as soon as the 7am people are done. FWHAAAAAAAAAAAT? THAT'S AWESOME!!!!!!

So I wanna say we wait maybe a total of another hour and they inform us we are going to start moving inside. It's about 11am.

The line finally moves in and we are herded like organized cattle into the building, up some stairs and toward a security search station. I beeped several times (thanks belt grommets and zipper) so I lose my place as first in line.

The next room we hit looks almost like where you would sign in at a convention. Tables all the way across the room, dividers showing multiple lanes and behind those people are rows and rows of chairs, 10 in each row. I give the table person my artist pass and ID, they direct me to another table where I will get a wristband. They inform us we are to sit in one of the rows of chairs and wait. I might have been slightly choosier about where I sat if I had known that your "row" was also the group you would ultimately go and audition with.

We are then herded AGAIN to another room upstairs with MORE rows of chairs, but a front wall with two banners up depicting the show's logo. They lined people up by groups of 10 against the banners and asked us to wait. again.

After a few minutes we were asked to follow someone into an area filled with many hallways. In each hallway was three rooms on each side. Each room had 10 people lined up outside it. There must have been half a dozen hallways.

We are led to almost the last hallway and told to wait outside one of the rooms. A young man with a headset gave us the ground rules (be respectful to each other, sing one verse and one chorus of your song...etc) and informed us that we could not leave the room without getting the wristband removed. He collected our paperwork and instructed us that there were five chairs on each side of the room and a set of chairs in the back for legal guardians if the person auditioning was a minor.

Once we were seated and the door was closed the "producer" (I'm assuming that's who he was) told us all the same information headset guy did, but let us know when our name was called we had to stand on the x tape on the floor and sing.

I think I was called 3rd or 4th? I don't remember. But I sang my little heart out. Minimal nerves, hit every note. I kept singing until I was stopped (I almost got to the end!)

Some of the other voices were not that great, but two of the people in our group were asked to stay inside for a second. The "producer" informed us that this did NOT necessarily mean a call-back, they just wanted to either hear another song or ask some questions. As we left the room a woman was there to cut our writbands off and that was it.

The whole ordeal was over and done with just shy of 12:30.

SO, overall, considering how long I was willing to stand in line, it was pretty much about a 3 hour "line wait" and just over 4 hours for the whole process.

Seriously not bad.

I have to applaud the organization of the auditions. Those people had their stuff together and everyone was really nice to us. We were never treated badly or uninformed through the whole process. I really can only conclude that what they were looking for was not "the voice" but "a voice". The people that were asked to stay behind either had an unusual voice or an unusual look. I have neither of those.

Se la vie. See you all for another blog about "The X Factor" in April. Wish me luck!!!

What a weekend

On Friday Feb 3rd (which also happens to be my husband's birthday) my youngest was outside during preschool and got stung by a bee. We watched for the usual signs of an allergic reation (given this was his first sting) and saw nothing unusual. The following week he came home on Thursday telling me he complained to his teacher about the same finger. I took a look at it without noticing anything different.

My oldest son has been having "issues" with his attention span in school. It is due in part to the fact that he has had THREE teachers since the beginning of the year. His original teacher applied over the summer for a position closer to his home and the district offered him a different job 3 months into the school year. Given he lived close to Apple Hill and drove over an hour to get to work each day he said yes to the offer. This left my son with a long-term substitute and total lack of accountability in the classroom. Over the course of the intermediate months we were given an official diagnosis for ADHD for him. The new teacher has been VERY understanding and it has been a continuing effort of open communication to establish a system that works to manage his behavior in class. We had one REALLY bad day and I took almost every toy he owns out of his room to make him earn them back one at a time. He has been making positive strides toward impulse control and re-directing, but it's been a long process. The week after the beesting, in an effort to motivate him further, we tried offering a movie excursion as a trade-off to improved behavior. He worked very hard and last Friday afternoon I logged onto Fandago and bought 2 adult and 3 children's tickets to "The Phantom Menace" in 3D.

Friday afternoon when I returned home from working at the charter school my mom mentioned Jason's finger. She said that she watched him complain to the teacher about it and the teacher said something to the effect of "oh the same finger he's been complaining about for a few days? He's fine" (I'm paraphrasing of course). When I looked at his finger it was pretty far from "fine". His entire digit was swollen down to the knuckle. I immediately got on the phone and left a message for his Pediatrician. I was called back toward the end of the day and told "If this was my child I would be in the car on my way to the ER" o_O

SO, instead of spending Friday night at the movie theater shoving my piehole with popcorn, I was sitting in the ER waiting room for someone to check out this poor kid's finger. The wait was mercifully short, but the doctor made no qualms spelling out the severity of his finger. Apparently the bee sting was now infected and the entire finger had cellulitis. The danger of having it in the hand is if it travels up the tendon it could spread very quickly. My poor little guy had to have TWO shots, one in each leg. The nurse told me that they actually had to put lidocaine in the shots because they would be so painful to him. I think the most heartbreaking part of the whole ordeal was watching him do the "silent cry" for a full minute before actually screaming in pain from these shots. He was unable (or unwilling) to walk after the shots, so here's mom trying to comfort him, pull out her wallet to pay the co-pay and carry him to the car with my horrible back.

On a side note I'd like to mention that the Ped told me to go to a Kaiser office with NO emergency service, so I drove to a different one (I should say I drove AROUND a different one for 15 min trying to negotiate the labyrinth that is the parking areas).

After getting him back into the car and realizing that he had yet to EAT DINNER, I spent the entire car ride bribing him out of a tantrum that resulted from missing the damn movie.

Then end of this story is a happy one: Fandango refunded our money, I took Jason to see the movie the next morning and he is happily bounding around like nothing happened. Gotta love the short-term memory of a 4 year old.