Magical Green Bay Trip, Part 2

"Your Lambeau Field pictures were awfully neat-o, Rachel," I can hear you saying (you sound like The Beaver today, for some reason) "but why did you go to Green Bay?"

Only, gentle readers, for one of the best reasons EVER!

WEIRD AL!

Yes, that's right. My gentleman caller escorted me to the Oneida Casino in Green Bay so we could take in a concert of that excellent showman, "Weird Al" Yankovic.

(Side note: the casino gave us each a $5 gambling voucher. When we went up to the cash place [I'm not very casino-savvy], we discovered that this meant they just handed us a $5 bill. Neal and I each played $2 worth of slot machines, and I won $2, meaning that together we came out $8 ahead. That's a victory, baby!)

As usual, Weird Al put on a great show. Some of my personal favorite highlights were:

. . . the medley, which is always great. This time, there was only one song in there that was completely new to me (only because he hasn't released it at all, of course), but it was hilarious enough that I'm not complaining. You know that song "I'm N Luv (Wit a Stripper)"? No? Well, there is one. (Don't worry, it's as unintentionally humorous as you're hoping.) For the appropriately curious, Al's version starts at the 3:20 mark in this 10-minute long clip (which is only one glorious half of the medley).

(In Green Bay, the version of "Headline News" he follows with was about Paris Hilton, not Britney Spears.)

. . . "You're Pitiful." Not only is the song really funny to begin with, he performed a many-layered version of it. (I'm pretty sure I made a really, really weak pun right there.) The video clip below doesn't have the whole song, but it does catch the part that most catered to those of us who knew the backstory on the song.

(I hope you could read that first shirt [bizarrely, pirated concert footage on YouTube doesn't have the best picture quality]; if not, it's "Atlantic Records Sucks." It got a big crowd reaction, I tell you what.)

. . . the encore. Now, I got pretty scared about an hour and fifteen minutes into the concert. Why? Because Al's keyboardist, Ruben Valtierra, came out in his Emperor Palpatine robes. "Oh no!" I thought, "is Al sick? Does his voice hurt, so he's wrapping up the show early? Does he hate Green Bay? Why is this happening? Why, God, why?" Or something to that effect.

You see, at my previous four Weird Al concerts, his two Star Wars songs ("The Saga Begins" and "Yoda") served as his encore. They always closed the show for good. But then I realized that Al hadn't even sung "White and Nerdy" yet, and clearly, even if he was going to shorten the show for some apocalyptic reason, he would have kept in his latest, most successful song.

So then, after the Star Wars songs had been done and the concert continued on its merry way, the question in the back of my mind was, what would the encore be?

Now to set up the joke. (Man, this is really involved.) So, during Al's numerous costume changes, he shows clips from all kinds of stuff--his cameo in The Naked Gun, "educational" film strips from The Weird Al Show, etc.

One of the bits he showed started at about the one minute mark (and ends at about the two) of his AlTV "interview" with Michael Stipe:

I was fairly delighted at this, because that was the AlTV I watched over and over and over and over, and I really liked that song. Not two weeks ago was I singing it to myself in the shower, in fact. (He also showed the "truck backing up" part, which is irrelevant. But still funny.)

So, after he had fake-closed the show with "Fat" (as usual) he comes back out and does this shtick:

I had heard of this joke before; in the example I had heard of, Al had pretended he was going to sing a particular song the crowd really wanted to hear, but then he launched into his all-time so-awful-it-comes-back-around-to-kind-of-awesome non-hit "Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung," and I briefly thought (before he busted into "Cell Phones") that that's what he was going to play. I was excited at this prospect. However, I had only remembered the setup--buildup for a lame song--without remembering the payoff. You see, dear friends, the example I had read about of him doing this? Was at a concert he played in Albuquerque. So the song the crowd had wanted to hear? Was "Albuquerque."

Never had I truly believed I would ever be so lucky as to hear Weird Al play "Albuquerque" in concert. But I was! I totally was!

In conclusion, WEIRD AL RULES!