Art is Life is Art: Susan Reep Photo Art

The glittery alien from the Planet Fierce

Maybe I could just write the name Adam Lambert Adam Lambert Adam Lambert over and over.  Would that explain it all? How does one begin talking about Adam Lambert? I’m going to try, so stick with me.  Because this story is about more than one man, one glittery alien from Planet Fierce.  It’s about bringing people together and making us play dress-up and go places we wouldn’t ordinarily go – not in our demographic.  Adam’s main demographic, or fan base, as of now at least, is women over 40.

Creative Every Day’s theme for March is telling stories – and this is a multi-faceted story. Besides Adam Lambert, it’s a story about Twitter and making friends from cyberspace to real life.  I went to Fantasy Springs with Nita Lambert, daxtonsnini on Twitter.  I drove from Bakersfield; she flew from Oklahoma.  We became best friends in 14 hours.  But let’s unravel this story from the beginning, which of course is American Idol.

Why Adam?

Adam captured us with his voice.  And his looks.  Which did we notice first?  Who could say? He’s the total entertainment package.  But that voice, which spans octaves, bass to tenor!  And that face and that body and the chameleon ability to morph into any decade, era or style!  I talked about this with dozens of women at Fantasy Springs – what is it that binds us to this 28-year-old gay man?  I think when we first saw him, it was nice to realize someone could still excite us.   Next, our jaws dropped – someone like Adam couldn’t really be possible, could he?  Then it was just fun.  But we saw something else.  As a 28-year-old gay man, Adam was comfortable in his skin.  He had nothing to prove; he wasn’t making excuses because there was nothing to make excuses for.  And he was nice – just a polite, nice Jewish boy.  So we did what Jewish mothers do best – we got protective.  Adam has thousands of mothers out here who will protect him like only a mother can.  That’s our demographic. Don’t mess with our kid.  Understand?

I become a fangirl and find daxtonsnini

We were captured and captivated and we began reading whatever we could find about Adam.  This newly-minted fangirl, who had previously only followed Don Drysdale (a Dodger pitching great of the 50s and 60s) with any passion, found herself joining fan communities.  And one day I must have done an Adam Lambert search on Twitter because I found someone named daxtonsnini.  I’ve written about Nini previously.  But her name attracted my attention – because who would be called Daxton except my 13-year-old granddaughter Daxton? Who surely was unique in the namebooks.  So I tweeted daxtonsnini, asking her, “What’s up with your name?”

She has a three-year-old grandson named Daxton – that’s what’s up.  And her name is Nita but he can’t say that so he calls her Nini.  Daxtonsnini.  We had Adam and Daxton in common.  And we were both equally star struck. We had stars in our eyes.  We were starry-eyed. The stars had come out for us.  I’m glad we have camera-phones, however poor, to capture stars.  This is Nita and me.

Let’s jump ahead (which I just did in the previous photo).  Adam was giving his first solo concert at Fantasy Springs Casino and Resort in Indio, near Palm Springs.  I wanted to go.  I wasn’t going to go.  I had to go.  I couldn’t afford to go.  But how could I miss it!?! I would miss it. I was at the cabin on the day tickets went on sale, and at 10:00 A.M. I was online buying two tickets.  I tweeted Nita.  I had two tickets and a reservation at the hotel.  She had to come.  No, she said, she couldn’t come.  Daxton had been ill, had surgery, and she’d taken too many days off work to care for him.

Did I mention she is a teacher, like me?  And a reading curriculum specialist, like my daughter Jennifer?  And that she’s been married 40 years?  And I’ve been married 41 years?

Blackmail – almost

I shamed her into it.  If I could go to Switzerland for four days, which I once did to visit someone, surely she could fly to Palm Springs from Oklahoma on a Saturday and return on Sunday?  Indeed she could.  I told her that she’d know me at the airport because I’d be the one wearing blinking antennas.  If she didn’t believe me, she didn’t know me.  (I have a friend, Tammie Stevens, who made a shirt for me once that said “Dignity is not in my future!”)  So here we are in the airport and I have my blinking antennae on.

Synchronicity

I’m jumping ahead again – Nita didn’t arrive until Saturday morning, and I arrived Friday.  I checked into the room and went to the box office to collect the tickets.  And I ran into lots of people doing the very same thing.  A few of us went into the Special Events Center where the concert would be held to check out the stage.  And play on the stage as it turned out, and stand in the very same place Adam would be standing.

People came from all over the United States – the world even!  Canada, Thailand, Australia – and Bakersfield, CA.  I went into the casino with these ladies, who were from New York, Canada, and I forget where else,  to have a drink in the steakhouse, suppressing my normal behavior which would have been to go to my room, relax, read, write, etc.  I was going to wring every once of experience out of this fangirl adventure.  And in the steakhouse we met Isabelle.  She is an 89-year-old woman from Wisconsin who is a huge Adam fan!  She recorded a happy birthday message to him on you tube, it came to the attention of fan groups who found out she couldn’t afford to go to the concert, so the fan groups started fundraising and bought plane tickets for Isabelle and her daughter; Fantasy Springs kicked in the hotel rooms, and Isabelle was even able to meet Adam.

That’s Isabelle in the middle.  What a sweet lady and what a wonderful story!

Now this starts to get bizarre – creepy – strangely wonderful – and the synchronicity kicks in.  I am in some fan groups but I can’t remember which ones exactly and my user names are all bollixed up, and Nita was my only Adam-related Twitter contact.  As the concert approached, she suggested I follow GlamUlli, LambertFan8, and Binahlinda.  So I did.  Right after we posed for this photo with Isabelle, another large group came in for dinner.  I recognized a photo from Twitter – it was GlamUlli – from North Carolina!  Out of the 3,500 people attending this concert, GlamUlli walked into the restaurant!

Pretty dang amazing.  Then a smaller group walked in and I sort of joined them at their table for dinner even though the waitress said there wasn’t enough room.  And of those four people I joined, two of them were LambertFan8 from Fairfield in Northern California and Binahlinda from Texas.  How amazing is that?  I had just met three of my four twitter contacts and would be picking the fourth up at the airport the next morning.

That’s LambertFan8 on the left and Binahlinda on the right.  So far, we all seem like pretty normal people.

Crisis

We had a great dinner – excellent food – and finally I headed to my room.  I got undressed and started setting out my clothes for the next day – I knew I had to pick up Nita at 9:58 so I had to be prepared – I am not a morning person as regular readers know by now.  I started organizing.  Where were the tickets for the concert and the Glamily Reunion?  They were not in my purse.  But I put them in my purse – carefully!  Stay calm, I told myself.  Check jeans pockets, remove everything from purse, check wastebasket.  They just weren’t there.  Call restaurant.

I got the security desk in the casino. I explained my predicament.  They said the restaurant was closed. I said, please go see if Dominic is there (the manager) and he’ll remember me.  Please look for my tickets.  They did, they called back, and said no tickets had been found.  I was approaching full-panic mode but I was stark naked.  I called the front desk.  All I could do was wait for the box office to open at 10 in the morning.  But Binahlinda might still be in the casino!  I called her cell number.  It was not her cell.  It was her home number.  Her husband answered and I explained and asked for her cell and he told me to hold on while he found it.  He must have had to go a very long way to find it but finally, I had it.

I texted Linda.  Are you still in casino? No, she wasn’t. She had returned to the Holiday Inn.

Saved

I got dressed.  I went to the restaurant.  The door was open – I told the bartender what had happened (she remembered me also as we’d had quite a chat about Cochise County, Arizona, where she’s from), she told me to go in the restaurant and look, and someone appeared to say they had found tickets.  I was saved.  Can you even imagine having to pick up this wonderful woman Nita whom I had almost browbeaten into coming with the news that the tickets were lost?

Tomorrow I’ll finish with Part Two, unless it drags on, in which case I’ll turn it into a three-parter.

Stay tuned….as I proceed to dress completely inappropriately for my age and body type.

Tags: Adam Lambert, CED2010, Creative Every Day, Fantasy Springs Casino and Resort, Glamily Reunion, twitter

This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 9:56 PM and is filed under General, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.