So this is what I've been doing for the past two days. Starting Monday at around 12am I woke up and took the 4 hour drive down to East Rutherford, New Jersey with my Sister, I swore and got pissed at the confusion of the areas past Manhattan and the Jersey turnpike, jumped on an offramp in the wrong direction so we could get get back on the right track, finally made it to the Izod Center, marveled at the new New York Giants Stadium, got the wrist band, ticket and realized we could drive back up to Mass since the process was fairly quick. Back up North, sleep, woke up and another 4 drive at 12am. Sat, squirmed and stood while rereading "A Game of Thrones" as we waited in line with the finest Asian girl I had the pleasure of seeing with her old mother, line finally moved to the front of the center were we proceeded to say "NEW JERSEY WOOOOOOOOOOO" for an hour in front of various cameras (supposedly the footage used there is going to be the opener for the 10th Season of American Idol (and the camera panned over me and my sister, so I think I'ma be up in that shit). Some dude from 92.5? Got called the fuck out for putting up a sign with the stations logo and slogan and got his sign taken away. He proceeded to feel immense embarrassment and to slinked through the crowed.
Finally got inside and got to our seats in the nosebleed seats. The turnout was huge, somewhere around 15,000 people showed up, I believe. I processed this information and was amazed... what I didn't realize is that were on the back end of this stadium full of jailbait (shit was Fistful's Eden). Before the tryouts we had to listen to this dude jibber jabber about various shit (some of it in regards to "not feeling bad" when you get rejected, you're not a loser just an non-winner!) and then he introduced the most awesome aspect of the tryouts the
"Fail Tunnel" and the
Winner's Tunnel. Now, he didn't call it the "Fail Tunnel" (just the Non-Winner's Tunnel) but thats what I referred to it the rest of the time there.
Past American Idol contestant Constantine Maroulis showed up and sing a bit of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody where he tried to include the crowd and to much amusement the crowd couldn't sing along too well (probably due to the low average age). He tried to sing it again and shit wasn't jiving so someone screamed out a Bon Jovi song and he sang a bit of "Livin' on a Prayer". Seacrest was there and his short pompous ass yelled into the mic for a while, trying to pump up the crowed then proceeded to do some cold shots of him saying "...AND THIS IS AMERICAN IDOL!" and everyone had to go "WOOOOOO" 'cause this is fucking New Jersey and Jersey Shore fucking sucks MOTHERFUCK. The crowd quickly tired of this and people started jeering, so awesome.
So a couple of thoughts
-I got an immense feeling of this being a slaughterhouse in that the way the stations were set up and the amount of time being devoted to each contestant was fairly short (on average 10 Seconds). It was a bit sickening considering the wait some people go through. Its obviously needed though due to the sheer amount of people trying out
-The mixture of being near New York and being such a high profile event was truly amazing in the amount of hottness contained in a single area. Everywhere I looked was a tremendously hot female. Shit was dizzying. Any lesser male would have totally voyeured up. There were a couple of creepy dudes outside doing the center leaning on the fence and just being creepy.
-Waiting for 13 hours in a stadium seat with armrests made for one person but being shared by two was hell on earth
-My sister didn't make it, tears were shed and even I got choked up. Now she can really sing, its not some shared delusion or anything else. Being on the back end worth of tryouts obviously strained the judges, to the point where they were letting people through which had no right and just chewing through contestants just to hasten the process. Now this could be just a brother defending his sister, sure but they literally turned the lights off to the upper levels and shut down the large center screen. It just screamed "time to hurry up and shut this shit down".
-When head hit pillow I was fucking out
Now here are some photos...
*click for larger
*That double chin says otherwise
*This is where the supposed opener for Season 10 was filmed
*The staging area where dreams died
*Some scope given here. This is the guy who talked about the Fail Tunnel
*This was about 1/8th? or maybe less of the total amount of contestants in that hell forsaken place
*The road to salvation, salvation being my bed
